Plans to suspend the Internet accounts of people who download music illegally are unfair, according to BT’s chief executive, Ian Livingston. Livingston says illegal file-sharers should be fined rather than have their Internet accounts cut off. He and other industry figures have written to the Financial Times urging changes to the Digital Economy Bill. Livingston […]

The UK government has been defeated in the upper parliamentary chamber the House of Lords over measures to tackle Internet piracy. Ministers had been seeking powers to amend copyright law and impose conditions or fees where infringements were taking place. But opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats succeeded in removing the measures from the Digital Economy […]

Ed Richards, chief executive of Ofcom, has said that net neutrality will come under regulatory scrutiny this year. He said the scale of deployment of next-generation broadband networks would depend on greater clarity on this issue. The battle lines have already been drawn: The BBC and BT clashed last year over the bandwidth consumed by […]

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government has approved lower advertising ceilings for pay TV that News Corp's Italian unit says will curtail its growth and that of other networks on Rupert Murdoch's satellite platform. New regulations will gradually limit the maximum amount of advertising per hour of pay television programming, to 12 per cent in […]

Studios have lodged an appeal against the controversial Australian Federal Court verdict that ISP iiNet was not responsible for its subscribers illegal downloading. Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) representing the 34 studios said: “The court found large scale copyright infringements, that iiNet knew they were occurring, that iiNet had the contractual and technical capacity […]

Three out of four (73 per cent) of UK consumers don't know what they are allowed to copy or record, according to research from Consumer Focus, who is calling on the Government to reform the UK's outdated copyright law before the laws lose all credibility. Most copyright law was written at a time when digital […]

YouTube owner Google says an Italian court's sentencing of three of its execs to suspended jail terms is “astonishing” and “outrageous”. The three, Google's chief legal officer, former CFO, and a senior product marketing manager, have been given suspended prison sentences. The case concerned a video that showed a schoolchild being bullied for having Down's […]

China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) has called a halt to IPTV services provided by Guangxi Telecom, a subsidiary of China Telecom. SARFT said that the Guangxi Telecom launched IPTV operations earlier this month without permission. IPTV transmissions and operations in 14 cities in Guangxi have now been halted. Under Chinese regulations, […]

Taiwan’s National Communications Commission (NCC), in line with its policy to stop analogue terrestrial TV broadcasts in 2012, is drawing up a plan to subsidise the purchase of STBs. The NCC has come out with two proposals: one calls for giving every household a free STB at a total budget of NT$10.5 billion ($328 million) […]

A government proposal to charge people with fixed phone lines 50p (E0.57) per month to help fund ultra-fast broadband has been condemned as “unfair” by MPs. The cross-party Business Innovation and Skills Committee said most of those who would pay the tax would not benefit from the faster broadband service. The focus should be on […]