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UK ISPs To Face Piracy Deadline
superbrose notes that despite lots of legal difficulties regarding Internet privacy, the UK government is going ahead with plans to punish ISPs for allowing their customers to download illegal music and films. The claim is that there is "rampant piracy" in Britain with more than 6 million broadband users downloading files illegally every year. "The government will on Friday tell internet service providers they will be hit with legal sanctions from April next year unless they take concrete steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films. Britain would be one of the first countries in the world to impose such sanctions. Service providers say what the government wants them to do would be like asking the Royal Mail to monitor the contents of every envelope posted."
Let your MP know what a bad idea this is: http://www.writetothem.com/
It's surely more than that. What is the total amount of people in the UK between 15 and 25, for example? Every person I know in the EU in that age bracket downloads most of the media they consume rather than buying authorized copies. P2P is mainstream. If users could only group together for political power like some are starting to do in Sweden, the course of democracy might be able to break copyright law.
If they acted like that, they might get a reprieve.
what I mean is, if all ISPs in the UK staged a strike by cutting Internet access everywhere for two or three days and claim that would be the only possible way to ensure their customers aren't pirating anything, I am sure that the outrage would force another look at the law. And if they did this 2 different times, like once on Thursday Friday and Saturday, it could cause direct deposit information and payroll services to be interrupted. If they did this on again a week later on lets say Monday and Tuesday, there would be so much upset and confusion that those who think they wasn't effected will be.
I've been wondering about this since the story broke last week, presumably someone will have to keep a definitive blacklist of banned users, otherwise you could just go to another ISP and sign up for another connection.
This makes me wonder, will the address/telephone line be blacklisted or the individual user whose name the line was in?
If the former, then it would suck if you just moved into a place that had been blacklisted. If the latter, what's to stop someone else in the household from signing up for another connection?
I can imagine many student houses with 4 or more people living there, assuming it takes a few months to get noticed and sent you first warning, another couple to get your second and another couple of months to get cut off, you could then sign up again under another name and go for another round...
Nobody is suggesting abolishing copyright but trying to make 6 million people criminals is also wrong. Maybe they should consider something new.
Perhaps a special broadband connection that cost more but allowed these kinds of activities. I bet a lot of people would be prepared to pay extra (maybe even double the current cost of broadband) if it allowed them to download music etc. At £15 per month thats a billion pounds a year.
What bothers me is that, at the moment, there's no legal way for me to download the content I want in the UK. I suppose I'm atypical in that I'd be happy to pay for TV I watch through iTunes (or a similar service), as long as it becomes available at the same time it's originally broadcast in the US. What cheeses me off is having to wait months before it's available in the UK, then only available to a particular broadcaster I can't receive (Sky), and then it's only after it's picked up by a terrestrial broadcaster and their season ends that it's released to DVD and I can pick it up and watch it according to my schedule. This is usually a year after it's originally broadcast! Sorry, but I'm not too hot on delayed gratification for the sake of someone else's out-dated business model.
Good news is that the Beeb are catching on and starting to stick their latest programmes on iTunes, like Ashes to Ashes, but I don't just want their stuff. Who only watches one TV channel?
The crux of the argument is that an industry is using legislation to a) protect their out-dated and increasingly irrelevant business model, and b) keep artists under their thumb so they can use them up and then discard them when the cash cow dries up. These BPI and BFI people are talentless vampires, sucking the life out of creative geniuses - don't protect them, eliminate them. And reward the content creators! Now they've got their pay deals sorted, for the love of FSM buy the content off the interweb or on DVD if you like it. If you've already downloaded it on the sly, think of it as pro-active timeshifting.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
Yes there are a few that use the terms "imaginary property" and the like, but I think most people simply recognize that the current situation only stays in place because a few people with very deep pockets would like their ideal distribution method to work forever.