Slashdot Mirror
UK ISPs Near Agreement On Illegal File Sharing
ISPreview UK writes "UK Music's chief executive, Feargal Sharkey, claims that progress has been made on a deal between the music industry and broadband ISPs to tackle illegal file sharing. The comments came during yesterday's annual Internet Service Providers' Association conference in Eversheds, with an ISPA spokesman confirming that 'some kind of agreement between rightholders and ISPs can be reached,' adding, 'everyone wants to work together to make legal online models work.' The news follows July's crucial Memorandum of Understanding agreement between copyright holders and six of the UK's largest ISPs, which account for roughly 90% of the country's broadband market. The initial agreement approved a principal of sending warning letters to customers who have been accused of downloading illegal music or movies."
if half the resources were put into combating online identity theft, pornography or malicious hacking, these problems could be stamped out.
If Atari, Activision, Sega, and Nintendo can sue gamers for distributing "out of print" 8-bit games from the 70s and 80s, I'm sure RIAA will just-as-happily sue you for copying out-of-print records. Reason: Even out-of-print stuff is still copyrighted. It's not fair but that's the way it works.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
The BPI and the various other rights groups in the UK want to have their cake and eat it. They want ISPs to police their users for illegal downloads, send out warnings & then cut them off completely AND they want them to pay for all the costs of doing so in addition to the potential lost income from cutting off the users.
Understandably the ISPs aren't overly happy about this arrangement, which is why I'd be very surprised if this was anything more than vague agreement of "Yes, we should probably do something about all those people paying us large monthly fees to download your music illegally".
Shall we state it again for prosperity?
America != World.
No matter how much you want to think so. How this relates to a story about **UK** ISP's, I don't know. However, if you wish to turn Slashdot into Slashdot World Series (i.e. only America actually contributes - my apologies... Wiki says that there is one Canadian team too...), then feel free to keep whinging. Or just read the story at the top of the front page about the election that, with its sister postings over the last few days, has made me remove "News" from my topic lists. Do British people shove comments on random pages when a new Prime Minister is elected? No. Why not? Because it would annoy the Americans and others who have precisely zero interest in such things.
spending much of my - as a customer - money on lawyers
I can absolutely guarantee that they won't spend a penny on lawyers, mate. They'll spend it on solicitors and barristers.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
If the work isn't distributed you wouldn't need a temporary monopoly on the distribution of the work.
Copyright was intended to provide a temporary benefit to people who distribute things so that they _would_ distribute things.