And now, the 900th note on Internet piracy written in the past week. It would appear that the UK is inching closer to a law that would require ISPs to disconnect people who download music, movies, etc. illegally. The proposal, currently making its way through the back rooms of the British Government, could well be placed before the Parliament during its next session.
An MP there, Tom Watson, has written on his blog (apparently he was the first MP to have a blog) that people do have the opportunity to affect any such legislation. For one, people who’d be affected by the legislation—British CrunchGear readers; we’re huge in Sunderland for some reason—should contact the Department of Business Innovation and Skills.
Tell it this: how will it benefit the UK to target 6 million citizens and throw them off the Internet? Who’s to say how many of these people don’t improve British society on a daily basis? Doctors, teachers and professors, you name it. And for what, to appease the record labels, which are most concerned with improving their own bottom line? It’s just something to consider.
(In fact, in the book that I mentioned the other day, Ripped, the author estimated that if the RIAA truly wanted to “go after” everyone who’s ever downloaded a song, it would have to sue nearly 50 percent of the U.S. population. And if we’re treating copyright infringement as a criminal matter, then you’d have to build an awful lot of prisons to accommodate all those people.)
Maybe if the music labels had spent more time figuring this Internet thing out than it did suing single mothers? Because things like that wacky file format we mentioned last week are far too little, far too late.
They won’t stop until the few people who are not in jail have had any and all technology that is capable of duplicating any audio or video confiscated. The RIAA and MPIA already made Canon remove the CD/DVD printing tray from their printers sold in the USA. Next they will demand that computers, and even cassette tape recorders and VHS, be confiscated because they might enable someone to break the law. And of course they will kill the Internet as they convince ISP’s to ban more and more people from using it.
They won’t stop until they have the control over duplication and distribution that they had in the pre-cassette tape recorder days of the vinyl album, and when people had to go to theaters to see a movie… or listen to commercial radio stations who were in cahoots with the major recording labels to hear new music.
Pretty soon we’ll be listening to music and watching movies only on authorized DRM-laden players. And if you’re caught humming the tune of a copyright song without paying royalties, paraphrasing the words of Lars Ulrich regarding Napster, “You’re going to jail!”
Its ridiculous we’re overly taxed for everything then to finish it off MPs with no idea how to use computers beyond writing files in word want to control how people use the internet.
The government should be helping its citizens more than handing them over to over-bloated companies who want ISPs to change there business plan because they didn’t.
Make them sit up and listen by joining the Pirate Party UK like I did yesterday. I dont want our digital future influenced by an unelected peer (Mandy) having lunch with the owner of Dreamworks (Geffen). I want it influenced by forward thinking innovative people. Not vested corporate interests.
I see one massive flaw with the plan. Copy protection was tried with games, dvd’s, software.
How long did it take the person who cracked windows xp, vista, etc? That is a full operating system. There are enough torrent sites that already offer up thousands of pirated movies, it will only be a matter of time, and very short time at that, until some geeky 13 year old works out how to turn CMX into a very nicely packaged zip file with guess what…. all the official tracks, album art and the ringtones to put on your phone!
As soon as this format has been cracked, it will just make it even more inviting for the people who were originally just downloading poor quality cd rips.