People who use illegal streams online will soon find it very difficult to do so

Will you be affected?

We’re sure the vast majority of JOE readers are perfectly law-abiding, but it also wouldn’t be a stretch to say that quite a lot of people access material online in a manner which wouldn’t exactly be legal in the strictest sense of the word. Ever streamed a football match over the Internet from a source other than the broadcaster that has paid the rights to show it, for example? Ever illegally streamed a movie or music? You get the picture. Access to illegal streams could be about a lot more difficult in the near future, however, after online search engines Google and Bing signed up to a voluntary code of practice aimed at preventing users from visiting disreputable content providers. According to the Guardian, the code, led by discussions involving the Intellectual Property Office with the assistance of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is the first of its kind in the UK and look to dilute the prominence of disreputable content providers over legitimate ones. Internet users who use those search engines to search for content, for example, will be pointed in the direction of legitimate providers rather than those who provide content illegally. The changes, according to the report, are expected to be rolled out by the summer. The move has been welcomed by bodies such as the Motion Picture Association in Europe, the representative body for UK record labels - BPI and the Alliance for Intellectual Property. “Sometimes people will search for something and they will end up unwittingly being taken to a pirated piece of content,” said Eddy Leviten, director general at the Alliance for Intellectual Property. “What we want to ensure is that the results at the top of the search engines are the genuine ones. “It is about protecting people who use the internet, but also protecting the creators of that material too.”