Slashdot Mirror
UK Musicians Back Watered-Down "Three-Strikes" Rule
A brace of anonymous readers sent along coverage of UK musicians who have turned around to support three strikes, or a milder variant of it. What they suggest is more like "three strikes and you're hobbled" — after a third offense a downloader would be not disconnected, but rate-limited. The artists involved include Lily Allen, George Michael, and Sandie Shaw. The Guardian has more details. The final quote from the music industry, striking out at UK ISPs, is priceless: "BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading. That's not only unfair to artists and creators, but penalizes BT's many customers who use the Internet legally."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HL9-esIM2CY
http://www.pirateparty.org.uk
Illegal downloads hurt all of us
So do laws which find the accused guilty based on the accusation alone.
It doesn't matter how mild the punishment is. Accusation alone, no matter how many there are, should never be sufficient to determine guilt or impose a sentence.
In any civilized society, the accused must have an opportunity to defend himself, and guilt must be determined by an impartial party.
The pillars of justice are more important than the profitability of business models built upon artificial scarcity.
Never heard of her. But I have heard of Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Ravel.
Maybe it would be a good thing if the modern music business died.
Metallica's bed-wetting cowardly lion of a frontman James Hettfield famously confessed that he used to crash on friends' couches and stay up all night copying his friends' tapes.
You know, the Metallica that helped kill the original Napster many years later?
One artist wrote a open-letter/song on this. It's brilliant.
Y'know, I have one major point against ideas like this (okay, I have a lot of points against it, but one that really bothers me, as beyond my personal control)...
What counts as a "strike"?
I know the obvious smartass response of "anything the RIAA/MPAA wants", but in practice... Let's even say, for the sake of argument, that "they" can 100% reliably detect when I download something copyrighted. We then have a problem in that everything (in the past 75 or so years, varying a bit by country) has a copyright on it. When I visit the totally legit New York Times website, I have downloaded copyrighted material. When I buy a song on iTunes, I have downloaded copyrighted material.
So now we need the qualifier of "unauthorized", which becomes much more subjective. Who can authorize me? If I have Trent Reznor in my office and he tells me to grab a copy of his latest unreleased album off Kazaa, then I have "authorization" from the artist himself. Yet my ISP has no way of knowing that.
Okay, too unrealisitc? How about MySpace, which Ms. "Can't even write her own anti-piracy rant and has to steal it" Allen used to great effect to promote her own career... Any moron can upload tracks there, even under the band's name (if the band didn't already think to make an account). How can the ISP ever know which count as legit and which don't? For that matter, how can we know the difference?
So yeah, I have a problem with effectively taking away my primary means of communication with the rest of the world, by force of a law that I can't accurately know whether or not I've violated.
Call it overly dramatic, but I don't think the courts realize yet that for anyone under 40, depriving them of internet access amounts to a "dead to our entire peer group" sentence. Just wait, we will see people going on mass killing sprees over this.
Congratulations <Anonymous Coward>, we at slashdot are happy to inform you that you're the one-millionth poster to blur the line between downloading music and stealing a physical object. Your prize, should you wish to accept it, is a one-week vacation in The Guantanamo Bay Hotel. Please reply within 48 hours to accept your prize.
Guilty until proven innocent. I bet you think that is actually a unique idea. You clearly think it is a good one.
Sadly, it isn't far off from what we have now. There are too many crimes out there that are too heinous to be found innocent of; simple accusation warrants the worst punishment. The legal system may still be applied, but the minds of those in it, and those who make the laws, are too clouded by knee-jerking to actually think rationally. Innocence? You were accused; innocence is no excuse, and you will be punished.
Outcry has replaced justice, and pundits have replaced judge and jury. What the sparkly box with faces in it says is true cannot be argued with; what is written in Wikipedia must be fact; what the drudge report aggregates must be news. Welcome to the Information - or perhaps, Media - Age.
Great Intellect...
OTOH, accusation is sometimes enough to warrant corrective action. Which while it might be inconvenient, should not be so harmful that it can't be resolved afterwards, should the accused in fact be innocent.
You are a danger and a menace and should be removed from posting on Slashdot.
See how that works?