Copyright Industry Calls For Broad Search Engine Controls

The copyright battles going on right now are not all about SOPA, PIPA, or even the wider-reaching ACTA: suraj.sun snips thus from TorrentFreak: "At a behind-closed-doors meeting facilitated by the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport, copyright holders have handed out a list of demands to Google, Bing and Yahoo. To curb the growing piracy problem, Hollywood and the major music labels want the search engines to de-list popular filesharing sites such as The Pirate Bay, and give higher ranking to authorized sites. ... If the copyright industry had their way, Google and other search engines would no longer link to sites such as The Pirate Bay and isoHunt. In a detailed proposal handed out during a meeting with Google, Yahoo and Bing, various copyright holders made their demands clear. The document, which describes a government-overlooked 'Voluntary Code of Practice' for search engines, was not intended for public consumption but the Open Rights Group obtained it through a Freedom of Information (FOI) request."

Comments

Re:Do these people understand ANYTHING about IT?

[Dogtanian]

Your general sentiment is correct, but your timeline is slightly askew.

MP3s were primarily a concern of the 2000s. While it's true that the parent MPEG-1 format was around in the early 90s, and a few geeks were sharing MP3 files from the mid-90s onwards, it wasn't until the end of the decade (circa 1998) with those uselessly low-capacity early MP3 players that they were on the industry's radar. And they didn't really hit the public consciousness until Napster launched in mid-1999, i.e. when the 90s were almost over.

And the problem with MP3s AFAIK was *always* sharing and piracy. No-one cared about people ripping them to their computers in the 90s, because for most of the decade hard drives were barely big enough to hold a significant number of MP3s, and (e.g.) mid-90s PCs used most of their processing capacity just to play them back. As I said, nerd curiosity at that point.

You could probably combine the 70s and 80s; people were taping in the 70s, and the industry woke up to the threat in the early 80s- I don't think the Walkman was itself a threat, beyond the fact that it made the cassette an even more popular format. (Remember that most Walkmans and the like couldn't even record themselves).

But you're right- the industry has made a fuss about this sort of thing before. They also did it with video recorders in the US in the early 80s, then realised that they could make lots of money selling prerecorded VHS tapes.

Ironically, I don't entirely disagree that piracy may be an issue, and possibly moreso than it was back then. I'm happy for people to make money and profit from their efforts in the creative industries (that is, if people want the results of such efforts).

This doesn't change the fact that the industry is- and always has been- a bunch of greedy bastards willing to screw over the working people they'd like to tell us are being hurt by piracy, and to use piracy as a useful indefinable excuse to cover up their own shortcomings (e.g. maybe people aren't paying money to watch their films because they're shallow, adolescent-oriented, unoriginal toss?) And while I might be in favour of reasonable copyright laws, that's certainly *not* not to the extent that those old, entrenched interests are pushing for draconian laws, not giving a toss about fairness or our civil liberties, just to preserve their own meal ticket.