Digital Economy Act

The digital economy act was first a bill proposed in 2010 just before the elections. The bill elected that people who were illegally downloading would have the possibility to have their internet taken from them. The piece of legislation stated that if you have illegally downloaded you could be sent a warning letter from your internet provider.If you persist you will be sent another letter reminding you of your illegal actions. If again you have not complied with the halting of illegal downloading you will be sent one final letter warning you that if you continue you will be slowed down, at worst cut off from the internet. You could also be sued from the people you are stealing from. Your internet provider will inform the person who holds copyright of what you have stolen and they can then appeal to receive your IP address and home address and sue you for stealing their work. the bill is still not in place fully but is said to be completely operational by the end of this year. There are many people still in debate about the bill, those that are for and those that are against.
FOR:
The people that are for the bill are those that are creating the products, in most cases music, and those that have published them with their labels. People are losing out on revenue and the ones who believe that if you created it you are entitled to pay. Metalica are one of the people that are for the bill. Their argument is that, 'If you were a plumber I wouldn't ask you to come to my house and do my plumbing for free, so why should you have my music for free?'
AGAINST:
The people against the bill are the ones that have been made famous from file sharing and those who consider themselves realists when it comes to the in internet. Kate Nash is one of the opposition saying that if it wasn't for file sharing the the social networking site myspace then she wouldn't have been approached by a record company. Another argument is that if you take away somebody's access to the internet you are compromising your audience. This would be costly for the music industry in particular as they will be losing fans.