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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.
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.
IP is worth approximate a jillion times more than the total value of all physical goods sold for the entire existence of humans on this planet, so yes, it should be the priority of every single human being on the planet to ensure every copy is paid for.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
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.