Networking technology is such that it would be trivial to create unfiltering means of filesharing, piggybacking over the HTTP and SSL protocols essential and intrinsic to the Web and e-commerce, for example.

This genie is out of its bottle. There is little point in trying to use ineffective and imprecise technological measures in vain attempts to put it back; they simply don’t — and can’t — work.

Removing or restricting someone’s access to the Internet over misuse of part of that acess is deeply excessive a punishment, especially when Internet access is usually shared between several people, not all of whom will generally have misused that access.

Equally, when there are quite so many ISPs in the EU, it would be very difficult to prevent someone simply moving to another ISP or using a friend’s name to register with an ISP.

Finally, ISPs are generally regarded as “dumb conduits of data”, legally speaking, not to be held responsible for data passing through their networks any more than a mail distributor is responsible for hate-mail or than a telecoms provider is responsible for nuisance calls. It is not in the interest of ISPs to threaten, bully, cajole or disconnect their customers, particularly without seeing any financial benefit for doing so.

Acess ot t he Internet is increasingly an essential part of social and civic discourse. Removing such access over an accusation that someone has misused a part of that access would be both disproportionate and draconian.

In the absence of large-scale copyright reform, explicit licences, included gratis, enabling consumers with hard-copy purchases to make use of the “rights” perceived as being part of the fair dealing exceptions (perceived “rights” such as format-shifting and parody, for example) might be a good way for content producers and distributors to regain some consumer goodwill, especially from the multinationals most heavily involved in consumer litigation and bad press over the last half-decade.

From a legislative point of view, the implementation of wide-scale copyright reform — in the vein of the recommendations from the UK Treasury’s Gowers Review of Intellectual Property law — is massively overdue.

When copyright restrictions are both unpopular and unrealistic, when they fail to chime with the public’s expectations, it is unsurprising that these laws are treated with contempt by consumers.

Of course, any levelling of the playing-field could only be beneficial to SME content producers and distributors across Europe. That said, most content producers and distributors are multinationals based outside the EU and also trading outside the EU. Any change in European regulations would be of minimal benefit to such companies unless it were agreed at the WIPO level.

It is important to note that any standardisation towards US norms would be particularly consumer-unfriendly.

Encouraging SMEs to use DRM — as opposed to encouraging greater invention and more consumer-friendly business practices — is more likely to hinder SMEs than to help them.