Having won the long battle to get the UKs ticket touts to clean up their act, Conservative MP Mike Weatherley is now taking on the online music and video pirates. Weatherley is co-leader of the All Party Parliamentary Group that won what amounted to the technical knockout that beat his own Tory governments opposition to regulating the secondary market. The main thrust of an 18-page report hes just published is that internet service providers have a moral obligation to do more against online piracy. He believes the ISPs should be more proactive in searching for and filtering any content that infringes copyright. As well as taking down any content that copyright holders have flagged for removal, Weatherly reckons the ISPs should police systems on the lookout for any similar content. Weatherly would be as hard with the pirates as hes previously been with the touts. Hes already suggested that search engines should blacklist pirate sites and serial file-sharers should be thrown in jail. Hes now saying that the least the UK government should do is to look at how it can smooth cooperation between ISPs and copyright holders. There should be an urgent review of the various applications and processes that could deliver a robust automated checking process regarding illegal activity being transmitted, he explains. The report had input from the British Phonographic Industry, the Motion Picture Association of America and the Music Publishers Association.
