Could ransomware be legal if it’s used to enforce copyright infringements?

That’s a question that will soon need to be answered with a proposal floated by U.K. copyright enforcement group Rightscorp Ltd. that would see browser access denied to users accused of illegally downloading copyrighted material until such time they paid a fine to regain access.

The news of the proposal comes via TorrentFreak who quotes from the Rightscorp proposal known as “Scaleable copyright” which will see existing warnings and settlement demands move away from emails and instead be delivered through the browser of people accused with the assistance of an internet service provider (ISP).

“In the Scalable Copyright system, subscribers receive each [settlement] notice directly in their browser,” the company report states.

“Single notices can be read and bypassed similar to the way a software license agreement works [but] once the internet account receives a certain number of notices over a certain time period, the screen cannot be bypassed until the settlement payment is received.”

“Its implementation will require the agreement of the ISPs. We have had discussions with multiple ISPs about implementing Scalable Copyright, and intend to intensify those efforts. ISPs have the technology to display our notices in subscribers’ browsers in this manner,” the company adds.

Ransom

Why ISP’s would agree to co-operate with Rightscorp and hold their customers to ransom isn’t clear, after all it wouldn’t be hard for that customer to simply change ISP’s, or more likely in the case of those with even a small amount of technical savvy: connect to the internet using a public DNS service such as that provided by Google.

There is support for “three-strikes” copyright warning system and variations on it in various jurisdictions worldwide, but the problem with those schemes, as it would be with this proposal, is that the demands are made without a court order, meaning that often innocent parties are accused of wrongdoing.

The other problem is that the new proposal ostensibly legitimizes ransomware based on an accusation alone; is it sound legally to be literally holding people to ransom to gain access to the internet, let alone the fact that it appears to be morally repugnant as well?

It’s a slippery slope of repression where a private company is able to hold a user to ransom on an unproven accusation based only on the provision of an IP address, but then again with Government’s worldwide leading the way in promoting Orwellian internet surveillance and restrictions, it’s hardly surprising the private sector would want in as well.

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