Journalists and broadcasters have added their voices to the anti-piracy lobby, ahead of an approaching government deadline for comments as part of its illegal filesharing consultation.
The National Union of Journalists and broadcasting union Bectu tabled a motion at the TUC conference yesterday condemning filesharing and demanding more action from internet service providers. They attacked ISPs' stance in the filesharing debate as "misleading".
"Congress notes the growing problem of internet piracy and illegal online filesharing and believes this represents a significant threat to jobs in the creative industries, including the audiovisual, music and publishing sectors," the motion said.
The unions stated that the creative industries contribute an estimated 8% to UK GDP and provide an estimated 1.8m jobs.
"Congress believes that internet service providers should now be required to take stronger action against the illegal distribution of content over their networks. That ISPs should therefore be required to send warning notices to offenders and to take additional graduated technical measures to prevent illegal downloading by individuals who ignore multiple warnings," they said.
The unions also say that in contrast to Digital Britain's emphasis on legal measures as the first resort – that is, that rights holders should sue individual offenders – "we believe such technical measures should be given priority".
Lord Mandelson, the business secretary, has proposed introducing laws to suspend the internet connections of people who persistently fileshare and ignore warning letters. ISPs have largely condemned the proposals and voiced concerns over how they would be enforced and how they risk unfairly affecting the wrong internet users. Some music artists have raised similar concerns.
The deadline for comments in the government's illegal filesharing consultation is 29 September.
Bectu and the NUJ slammed the ISPs' arguments that the proposed laws threaten broadband consumers' rights and that disconnecting them could limit their freedom of expression.
"Congress believes this is an issue of preserving workers' jobs and that ISPs should not be allowed to pursue their ruthless commercial interests under the cover of false and misleading justifications based on freedom of information," the motion said.
"Congress therefore calls on the General Council to campaign for government to take early and effective action to introduce and implement such measures."
The forthright comments from journalists and broadcasters follow a debate around filesharing and the potential crackdown that has centred largely around the music industry.
NUJ and Bectu are both part of the newly formed Creative Coalition Campaign, which brings together industry groups from the creative sector and trade unions pushing for tough measures against filesharing.
The Alliance Against IP Theft, a coalition of organisations against intellectual property theft, welcomed the new motion as demonstrating the breadth of industries affected by piracy.
The AAIP director general, Susie Winter, said: "This demonstrates that the problem of filesharing does not just affect music and film, and that sports broadcasters, publishing, software and computer games are similarly affected."
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