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UK ISPs To Pay 25% of Copyright Enforcement Costs
Andorin writes "The UK's Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has released a report (PDF) related to the new Digital Economy Act. The debate between copyright holders and ISPs about who should front the costs for the enforcement of the Act's anti-piracy provisions has come to a close: Rights holders will pay 75% of the copyright enforcement costs, with the remaining 25% of the bill going to ISPs (and therefore their customers). Says the Minister for Communications, Ed Vaizey: 'Protecting our valuable creative industries, which have already suffered significant losses as a result of people sharing digital content without paying for it, is at the heart of these measures... We expect the measures will benefit our creative economy by some £200m per year and as rights holders are the main beneficiaries of the system, we believe our decision on costs is proportionate to everyone involved.' Not surprisingly, some ISPs and consumer groups are up in arms about the decision, with one ISP calling it a government subsidy of the entertainment industries."
This cost will get passed on to the ISP's customers. Everyone with broadband will be required to subsidize the entertainment industry as it pretends to die from losses to piracy while reporting massive profits. If they're forcing me to compensate them for losses based on arbitrary made-up amounts for 'imaginary' lost sales then I will force them to compensate me by giving me free movies & tv shows based on my arbitrarily assigned figures for its value. I think a 2500th of it's retail price (as they like that figure and use it to calculate lawsuit settlements) is fair. I'll be more than happy to bittorrent the equivalent value with my broadband connection.
If they're being forced to foot the bill to protect the Right's Holders interests, ISP's should start getting 25% of the profit the Rights Holder's make from those Interests.
The Government is indirectly subsidizing the Creative industry by taxing the internet industry and giving the taxes to Rights Holders
No they aren't. As a member of Britain's creative industry, and someone who has been a 'victim' of copyright infringement, I doubt I will see a penny of this money. It is a subsidy on the litigation industry, not the creative industry. Those of us who actually do create things are more worried about turning potential customers into real customers than suing people.
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How can we become your customer (I'm a fan of putting my money where my mouth is)?
It's only fair that if you are "subsidizing" an industry because of claims of "lost profit", then said company should open up their books so the public can see what losses they are talking about. And I guarantee that ain't going to happen.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Those of us who actually do create things are more worried about turning potential customers into real customers than suing people.
I feel like this should be shouted from the rooftops.
It's getting depressing the amount of time, money and effort the government is spending in the vain hope of protecting some special interest groups who generally speak for a tiny minority of the creative industry. What's worse is the amount of collateral damage in the form of both technical and legal measures that can be used to infringe on our freedom to speak.
Copying someone's hard work without paying for it is a dick move. Restricting said work with onerous DRM so that it's not possible to pay for a copy that can be used as one wants, or taking my money on the assumption that I'm infringing your copyright, or crippling the connection between my PC and monitor, or trying works up in copyrights so long that we'll never see them made public in our lifetimes, or tracking my online behaviour, or any number of other moves made by the entertainment industry lobby, is such colossal asshattery that the initial act of infringement pales in comparison.
As a member of Britain's creative industry
If you're not a "Rights Holder", you're nobody. If you merely produce "creative" things but hand over the rights to someone else, you're no more part of the creative industry than a lettuce-farmer is part of the fast-food industry.
fewer people would go into the music business if they had no way of providing for their loved ones if they died an untimely death.
Yup, just like fewer people would go into the janitorial business if they had no way of providing for their loved ones if they died an untimely death.
Or fewer people would go into the plumbing business if they had no way of providing for their loved ones if they died an untimely death.
Or fewer people would go into the lawyer business if they had no way of providing for their loved ones if they died an untimely death.
So - if people won't go into "X" business unless they can guarantee they'll get paid for years after they're dead, how does anything get done?
You could buy something from this page, if you can find something that you find interesting.
I've not tried for a while, but Google used to return a pirate download site as the first hit when you searched for my Xen book's title. Some asshat also decided to post a copy of the PDF version to the Xen Devel mailing list a while ago. I don't encourage piracy, but I don't see the point in doing anything that harms legitimate customers in an attempt to reduce it, which is why I added a clause to the contracts for all of the books that I've written (the third one's due out later this year) forbidding the use of DRM in the eBook editions.
I recently talked to a guy in India who pirated my second book. His family's income for a week is about the cover price (he's using it to learn GNUstep - he can't afford a Mac either) so I've clearly not lost anything from his piracy - he couldn't have afforded it anyway, and he wrote a positive review of it so I might have got some sales out of that.
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As a copyright holder I wouldn't object to a twenty year term (and I have two registered copyrights that would have expired if that were the case), but I object vehemently against the insane lengths of today's copyrights. Having a copyright last longer than a human life hinders and harms creativity. Like science and technology, art is built on what has come before. Imagine how badly technological innovation would be stifled if patents lasted as long as copyrights? These insane lengths help nobody but corporations.
Cory Doctorow credits the fact that anyone can read his books for free, whether hardcover from the library of downloaded from his website, for his status as a New York Times best seller. Nobody has ever been shown to have lost any real money to copyright infringement, but many have been greatly harmed by obscurity.
Ten years is a little short; I wrote a series of journals back in 2003-2005 that I'm just now getting into book form. But OTOH I'm using the CC license; any noncommercial use is OK with me, and I'll thank anyone for uploading or downloading or torrenting or sharing in any other way. Like I saw on an indie music DC, "Be kind and burn a copy for a friend."
Anybody who doesn't want anyone to see his work until it's paid for probably isn't very good.
Free Martian Whores!
See: RIAA, MPAA, writer's guild,
None of these are producing copyrighted works, they are organisations of lawyers representing the publishers who won't adapt. My publisher is happy to change their business model (see: Safari Books Online, InformIT) when they think it can make them more money. The RIAA and MPAA (and writer's guild, although to a lesser extent) are groups of lawyers who would rather change the world than change themselves.
Richard Stallman and his freakish infectious copyright ideals.
I don't really disagree with Stallman - I've signed a copyright assignment with the FSF for the GNUstep stuff I've done and my (second) Objective-C runtime is a GNU project. Stallman's ideas are quite simple - creating is harder more valuable than copying, so that is what should be financially rewarded. The copyright system exists so that you can do the hard bit (creating something original) for free and then get people to pay you for doing the easy bit (creating copies of it).
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