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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.
They need to do something. Local bobby on the beat? Gone. Investigate burglaries, assault, vandalism, all on camera - no chance. How about going after someone that said something naughty on twitter, yes, they'll do that. Terrorists out in the open, hate crimes from muslim groups, no fucking chance. They're so lazy today they don't even bother with speed camera behind bus stops.
Anyone visiting from another country would wonder whether the nation has a police force. They gobble up plenty of money, but what they do for it is anyone's guess.
ISPs have about as much 'moral obligation' to filter pirate content as do power grid companies to filter electricity used for the same. And it's about as hard to implement, I'd imagine.
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.
Damn right they should educate kids on the ethics!
You know about how copyright was about enhancing the greater good by restricting the free flow of ideas temporarily to improve the pool of ideas and how the current insane terms break this contract.
So he doesn't actually mean that, (surprise! he's a liar!) what he actually means is educate kids with corporate propaganda.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
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.
OK, where IS that evidence?
Go on, all you did was tell us to look at it, you never supplied.
Why not look at the greatest "pirates" were the biggest buyers, or how when the biggest filesharing network was canned, the increase in revenue by the music industry fell into a decline within six months.
How about we look at that evidence?
Not to mention the evidence that the "IP industry" have already broken the contract, so I feel no obligation to feel the slightest twinge of guilt at their "loss" even if it killed the entire set of intellectual property and dropped millions into poverty.
Yep I fully agree. I hope they start knocking off all sorts of legitimate media as a result because how the hell are they supposed to identify is any specific website hosting content actually owns that IP? What with thousands of publishers owning the IP rights to billions of pieces of media who knows if Sony has the right to distribute a video they are showing on their own website? Heck streaming a football match on ESPN isn't even certain. Maybe there's a dispute in the background and they don't own the IP there either.
I saw we block everything, starting with all the media companies. Man that would make the internet far more pleasant.
Also:
The word will be a safer place if everyone checked that their customers were innocent!
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.