If you enjoyed file sharing in the past or downloading free music, then you might want to rethink how you top up your record collection in future. In fact, you may need to totally rethink how you use the internet.

Anyone who has watched the news this week will know that ‘Wash up’ refers to the last few days of a Parliament, after the election has been announced but before dissolution when outstanding bills that are unopposed are rushed through. Fine for uncontroversial laws but the Digital Economy Bill (DEB) is a beast and it escaped the chains of scrutiny last night. Only a handful of MPs turned up for its second hearing.

The DEB will add a clause to the Communications Act 2003 that says that ISPs must provide “copyright owners” (defined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act’s section 173 with details (though not identities) of copyright infringers.

It introduces powers that may see households disconnected from the internet merely on accusations of file-sharing and websites blocked by British ISPs just because they stand accused of copyright infringement. Clause 8 enables the blocking of ‘a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright’. With wording that broad it’s going to be like shooting fish in a barrel for contentious IP lawyers.

Which has the potential to find innocent people with their internet connections cut off, the end of public WiFi, and the end of sites such as Wikileaks.

Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt called the Bill “a weak, dithering and incompetent attempt to breathe life into Britain’s digital economy”, while shadow science and innovation minister Adam Afriyie referred to the bill as “botched legislation” according to Out-law.

Statements of Interest, written by a lawyer has taken a look at the worst aspects of the DEB and its U.S. equivalent ACTA.

…it has clearly been drafted by people with little to no understanding of how the technology works, or how and why people use it. By failing to understand its value the government is about to destroy it, and with a casualness almost more egregious than any deliberate intent to destroy it might be, for the government is so far? affording only the most scant debate to the most titanic shifts in English Internet law.

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A bad day for British internet users.