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Good luck sorting this one out, short-sighted lawmakers. An upcoming piece of major legislation in the UK, called the Digital Economy Bill, would essentially force all public wi-fi points offline by requiring impossibly high levels of copyright protection. The bill, which bears some similarity to the controversial DMCA here in the US, is ostensibly aimed at providing copyright holders the means of controlling their content online.

But while an ISP may detect a violation by one of its subscribers and send a nastygram to the appropriate party, it’s difficult to do that when your “subscriber” is a pub or café that offers free wi-fi to customers. If someone buys a cup of coffee, downloads a few songs, and then leaves and never returns, who is at fault? According to the Digital Economy Bill, the café.

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