UK Consumers To Pay For Online Piracy

Wowsers writes "An article in The Times states that UK consumers will be hit with an estimated £500m ($800m US) bill to tackle online piracy. The record and film industries have managed to convince the government to get consumers to pay for their perceived losses. Meanwhile they have refused to move with the times, and change their business models. Other businesses have adapted and been successful, but the film and record industries refuse to do so. Surely they should not add another stealth tax to all consumers."

Comments

This makes my day.

[bertoelcon]

Anytime I feel bad about the current state of affairs here in America a story shows up with EU, UK, Australia, or Canada doing something that would be worse. It makes me remember that we haven't hit those points yet so we always have somewhere else to look at whatever policy in practice before we have to deal with it

I just wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

How much of this money will the artist see? Wouldn't suprise me if it was zero. Still, the real losses are worth $0 too so it's just another industry bailout in an industry posting record profits.

Re:I struggle to understand their basis for argume

[MacWiz]

One is the opportunistic thief that intends to merely take a copy of a product for their own use, the other is the opportunistic thief that wishes not only to copy your product but also wishes to make money from it.

The latter group sounds like it includes Sony, which has taken Idol outtakes and made albums that they don't feel obligated to pay the performer for their efforts. Sony also still owes the Bay City Rollers about $60 million from the 70s, which they haven't paid because Sony "lost" the original contract and isn't sure how to pay it out -- so they've kept it for 30 years. Then there is the list of 300,000 songs that all the majors put on compilation albums over the last couple of decades and never bothered to pay royalties on.

Now decide for yourself which is the actual pirate?

Re:tax?

[Martz]

So are seedboxes going to cause entire data centers or hosting providers to be disconnected? Users in the closed tracker communities pay for seedboxes at remote hosting facilities to help boost speeds and their ratio and they could single handily cause down time or disruption to 1000s of users if this laws consequences was applied to them.

My guess is that if this law goes through then seedboxes would become even more popular. Seed from the remote box, and VPN between the box and the home user. It has to be a much safer option already... bandwidth is cheap and disk space is always getting cheaper.

What about public WiFi projects and airports, hotels etc? As usual there are some fringe cases where this law just doesn't work.

From a staunch anti-piracy supporter...

[Computershack]

This is going too far. Check through my posts and you've seen many many times I've been in favour of penalising people who pirate. I've lambasted TPB et al and the people who use them and been modded down many many times. BUT. As a UK citizen who will be paying this, if they're going to extort money out of me for something I've never done, then fuck em, I'm going to get my money back and in that case, that means jumping on the P2P bandwagon. After all, I'm now going to be paying for what I download. I reckon 3-4 MP3s a month is about fair compensation going on the average legal download service track price.