Digital Economy Bill may become law before election

A quick one: the Guardian reports that “senior media industry figures believe” that the Digital Economy Bill will become law before the forthcoming general election (expected in April/May 2010).
Interesting to speculate who these unnamed sources are, or why they think the Bill will be pushed through soonish.  To us, at the moment, there seems to be a healthy amount of opposition to the Bill in the House of Lords, and it hasn’t even got to the House of Commons yet – all of which suggests it may take longer than expected for the Bill to get through.  Still, the point is that the Bill genuinely could become law in the next few months.  Our thoughts on the Digital Economy Bill and its implications for games are here.  Since we wrote that post, matters have moved on somewhat, since the controversial clause 17 has been voted down.  This has led to fresh controversy however over whether its replacement is even worse!
We’ll report more on the Bill and games as and when there is a further, more ‘final’ version of the Bill (and once it becomes clearer if the Bill is actually like to become law before the next election).

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[image author: Andrew Dunn, obtained via Wikipedia]

2 thoughts on “Digital Economy Bill may become law before election”

  1. To me, "senior media figures believe" could easily be the equivalent as say, ELSPA expressing the wish that this gets through or along the same lines as comments Keith Ramsdale made recently to the government telling them to "hurry up and make PEGI law".

    That entities with vested interests in the legislation are making comments and putting pressure on the Government to get it through doesn't really make it more or less likely that it actually will. I found it to be a bit of a lazy piece personally.

  2. Hope you mean the lazy piece was Guardian's, not mine! If so, I agree with you – clearly there is a lot of pressure to make DEB law, but there is increasing pressure the other way as well so, as I said in the post, it may take longer than expected for the Bill to get through (if it does at all).

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