[Air-L] UK Gov consultation on digital consumer rights

[Ren Reynolds]

[usual if this is a re-post, don't think my other email is registered here]

The UK Government’s Department of Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) launched a consultation titled “Consultation on enhancing consumer confidence by clarifying consumer law”. The deadline for the consultation is 5 October 2012.

The consultation proposes a range of options that seek to harmonise UK consumer law. What marks this out for digital industries such as social media, cloud computing, computer games, music services etc is that as part of the consultation the UK Government is proposing options for a set of consumer rights designed specifically for ‘Digital Content’. 

In short the proposal is to bring UK / European notions of consumer rights to the digital arena i.e. putting in place statutory notions of quality and rights such as return.

The consultation makes direct or side reference to famous cases such as Amazon removing 1984 from Kindles and Sony forcing patches on users that stopped PS/3's running linux. Some of the proposed options would mean that companies would not simply have these rights. What's more the consultation makes is clear that the rights apply to all companies selling to the UK (wherever they are based) and they cannot be contracted out of. 

tVPN have created a short summary of the consultation here: http://www.virtualpolicy.net/ukcontentrights.html

We are very interested in hearing from legal and other academics who would be interested in contributing to a joint response - see the link above for details. 

ren
 


Ren Reynolds FRSA
Founder: the Virtual Policy Network
www.virtualpolicy.net
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