Slashdot Mirror
UK Government Wants Google To Police Copyright
judgecorp writes "the UK's culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt will this week ask Google to stifle sites deemed to be pirates, pushing them down the listing and cutting off their advertising revenues. The UK government has already outlined plans to make ISPs police copyright breaches by users."
Google already removes illegal things like child porn. Copyright violating sites are just as illegal, so what's the problem? Like the article states, court order would be required for it. I think it would also only apply to google.co.uk.
Police wants UK Government To Google Copyright.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Due to the extensive illegal use of their product, police have asked Remington to stop the Mexican drug trade.
In case you weren't paying attention to the way Google works, if their actions in China are taken as an example, Google could, if exasperated enough, just redirect all search traffic to servers located in a place with different laws. This is the internet. Location isn't all that important.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
No it really isn't. Copyright makes a fundamental error in thinking, and that is thinking that ideas are equivalent to property. The key difference is that ideas can be shared with no loss to the original. For example, if I have a car only one person can be driving it at a time. If I were to share the car with someone else, it would be a compromise, neither of us could use the car exactly how we wanted it all the time. On the other hand, ideas are nothing like that.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Let's just get rid of copyright and replace it with something sane.
Maybe it's a sign of my age, but when someone comes out with a sentence like that, I feel I've got to ask "such as?"
Sure, you'll get plenty of "stick it to the man" positive moderation, but you haven't really made the world a better place, have you? Nor have I, so I'll shut up and crawl back to my coding.
Yes. Shhhh.
which is totally what she said
Abandon? Probably not, but at this point you have to ask yourself who needs whom more. As ElectricTurtle points out, there are ways Google can make compliance with any restriction easier for themselves at the expense of UK business that make money from local listings (whether that's relying on advertising, ecommerce or just having people find out about them via their name appearing on the first page of Google.co.uk). That's not going to go down too well with UK business leaders, which traditionally account for a lot of the Conservative party's supporters/financial backers. If Google want to play nasty the UK government is basically pretty toothless in what they can do (other than shut off access to Google completely, in which case multiply the aforementioned backlash by X).
This huge push toward strong enforcement of copyright, patents and other IP seems completely inevitable; the government will never stop pushing for ever tighter national and international monitoring and enforcement.
The reason for this is that, as a nation, we really can't afford to stop. We have next to no natural resources that can profitably be sold, our labour is too expensive to compete as a manufacturing base and the days of sailing around exploiting our colonies are long behind us. The only two things we have left that we're good at are financial services (for which London was a powerful centre due to historical reasons as much as anything else), and developing new technologies that we can sell or license to others (e.g. the arms fair currently going on in SE London). A world in which IP rights are not strongly protected is one in which British companies have nothing to sell.
Now, I know that patent and copyright are very different things. However, as many of the big Western economies slide further from having economies that rely on selling physical objects into having economies that rely on selling or licensing information (patented designs, copyrighted films, etc), I can see them becoming strongly linked. For increasingly information-based economies, the fight to establish all forms of IP as sacrosanct is really the fight to still have a place in the world economy in a couple of decades' time.
when someone comes out with a sentence like that, I feel I've got to ask "such as?"
I'm not sure how rhetorical that was... but numerous alternatives to the current copyright scheme have been proposed. Obviously there is considerable debate and disagreement, but there are actually some (reasonably independent) studies which show that copyright terms of 7-12 years maximize social good (lower and the incentive isn't enough, higher and the returns are insufficient to justify protection, etc.). My point is that there are, certainly, alternatives. "No copyright" is also an alternative, though not necessarily the best one.
In my own opinion, I think the options are, going from best to worst:
1. Social contract copyright: the protection is commensurate to the social benefit offered by the copyright holder, and terms are reasonable. E.g. free & open-source material is protected for 15 years, partially open-source (can see all source material, which is eventually public domain, but derivative works are not allowed until then) is protected for 10 years, all-rights-reserved copyright is protected for only 5 years.
2. Commercial-only copyright: enforcement/lawsuits against companies and those who turn a profit from infringement are allowed; individual citizens are exempt.
3. Reasonable-term copyright: just like status quo but with shorter terms (7-10 years).
4. No copyright of any kind (alternative business models will arise, such as patronage and donation-based works).
5. Taxed copyright: to maintain a copyright, companies must pay taxes (a sort of 'intellectual property tax'). The tax rate can increase year by year. Thus companies will only keep paying as long as it is profitable, and works will naturally fall into the public domain at some point.
6. Subsidizing art/entertainment production through taxes.
7. Paying artists/entertainers through licensing fees and levies (on blank media, radio stations, venues that play music, etc.).
8. Status quo copyright (fairly long terms, considerable enforcement).
9. Zealous copyright (even longer terms, massive enforcement campaigns).
10. Infinite copyright.
My point is that alternatives exist, which are likely better for society overall (but not necessarily better for the select group of people profiting off of the status quo). Moreover it's entirely possible that "do nothing" is a better option than the current system. (Doesn't mean it's the best possible option, but far too often people don't even consider the possibility of simply having no low/rule/regulation in a given area.)