Slashdot Mirror
Canadian ISP to Name Music Swappers
Daemon writes "The Globe and Mail reports that Videotron, a Canadian ISP, will not be fighting the request to turn over the names of music swappers to the Canadian Recording Industry Association (CRIA). According to a lawyer for Videotron, producing the identities of Internet users alleged of wrongdoing happens so regularly that they believe that it is justifiable to hand over the names of people who share large volumes of songs on-line. The five Internet service providers named in the case -- Shaw Communications, Rogers Cable Communications, Bell Canada, Telus Communications and Videotron -- can't divulge the information without a court order because privacy legislation requires them to keep customer information sealed."
Shaw Cable is the source of a lot of the spam that I see. I think people should just vote with their feet on this one.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Canada is the one place in the world that you're actually shielded from being sued because you use file sharing software. So this is a scare tactic.
Don't subscribe to Videotron, because they don't give a shit about my rights.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
I guess that "pirate tax" on all recordable media is redundant and can be removed now? It was there to "protect the artists," but now the lawyers on the hunt trying to "protect the artists."
This is part of why I use a small-time isp. Not only am I supporting a local small business but there are so few customers (comparitively) that it wouldn't be worth it for anyone to ask for a list.
[..]"Piracy of music, piracy of TV, piracy of film -- it's all the same. It's piracy of intellectual property and cultural products," Mr. Sasseville said Thursday from his office in Montreal. "Nobody gets paid. Not only the big companies but also the creators. It's really important that we protect our culture."
IMHO that file shareing does not harm ones culture. The only thing it realy harms is big business. I am a musician myself and am under the camp that music should be free and people get paied for doing SHOWS.. The music itself should be promotional for the shows. And having almost signed a contract untill i read what i would get the musicians do not much per copy at all. They do make money on merchandizeing and doing shows.
Its a shame how deeply rooted the music industry is and what it can pull off. I just cant see how they are pulling the "culture" flag out of their pocket in this one. How does free music ruin culture? It only enhances culture due to the fact that more people are able to share in this cultural music. Atleast its just one ISP for now that is not protecting your privacy rights. But how long is it till others follow suit?
string sig = llGetSig("dimentox"); llSay(0,sig);
Although no one would seriously want to be exposed as a 'criminal' by the five corporations that control the world's music recordings, the only good aspect of being on this list is that you will be one of the few people that the music industry will hire to restructure their industry when they (finally) realize that their current business model simply doesn't work anymore.
One thing that the music industry doesn't seem to understand is that the MP3-P2P revolution has changed the way that people think about buying music recordings. In other words, the market is not going to go back to the way that it was ten years ago. If they do manage to stop all the file-sharing, it no longer follows that the file traders are going to restart buying recordings in the way that their older siblings and parents did previously. They will find other areas such as video games to spend their entertainment budgets.
It doesn't matter to the global entertainment corporations where people spend their entertainment budgets, because they own the entire global entertainment industry . They're going to get the money anyway; whether it comes from recordings, movies, concerts, games, whatever. It's just a matter of time before this concept sinks in on the upper management levels of the entertainment corporations and they tell the recording division executives to finally stop harrassing their customers to the point where those customers will make a focused effort to avoid buying any product produced by the company. This is the only real scenario that they have to worry about.
Eventually the copyright situation will change from micropayments from individual recordings (sorry, superstars) to a more cloud-like revenue stream shared by all the musicians of a particular genre. Recordings will be sold in giga-byte chunks with less emphasis placed on individual musician's product and more on 'bulk' collections of recordings of the same type of music. In a manner not unlike today's swapping of hard disks full of MP3 files among music collectors.