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UK IP Chief Wants ISPs To Police Piracy Proactively
An anonymous reader sends this report from TorrentFreak:
The UK's top IP advisor has published recommendations on how Internet service providers should deal with online piracy. Among other things, he suggested that Internet services should search for and filter infringing content proactively. According to the report, ISPs have a moral obligation to do more against online piracy. Mike Weatherley, a Conservative MP and Intellectual Property Adviser to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, has pushed various copyright related topics onto the political agenda since early last year. Previously Weatherley suggested that search engines should blacklist pirate sites, kids should be educated on copyright ethics, and that persistent file-sharers should be thrown in jail.
To learn about copyright ethics -- that is, how unethical the very concept is -- be sure to read Boldrin & Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly and Lessig's Free Culture.
Circumcision is child abuse.
That is a particularly badly thought out response. Of course there will always be people who are prepared to pirate in order to avoid spending $.99, but these people would not have spent the money in the first place, so they are of no consequence. What matters is the people who would pay regularly and substantially but who are so inconvenienced by DRM or who perceive that so much of what they are paying is going straight into the pockets of middlemen that they choose to pirate instead.
There are lots of pieces of software which are effectively donationware, and if a developer gives an easy method of donating and acknowledges those donations then I will be happy to send a few dollars - indeed, where a developer provides both a Google Play store version and a downloadable APK, I choose to download the latter and then send money e.g. by PayPal to them, because I'll be fucked if I'm going to accept someone taking a 30% cut for payment processing and adding to an automated catalogue. Just because your thought processes are based on regulations rather than values, it doesn't mean that most people choose to offload responsibility like that.
The police should be interested in criminal offences, not civil matters. Copyright is complicated because (in the UK at least) infringement can be both, but the two aspects get conflated. The criminal offences (broadly) are to do with dealing in infringing items for profit, and it's reasonable that the police pursue people committing such offences.
The issue of whether these things *should* be offences is a separate matter. What we don't want is the police deciding which offences they're going to try to enforce. If society doesn't want criminal copyright infringement then that should be for legislators to decide, not law enforcement.