Potentially bad news for you UK readers. An amendment to the big Digital Britain report would kick off “hardcore copyright pirates” from the Internet. The amendment would require ISPs to tell repeat offenders to knock it off, or else. The cost for doing this—it’s not exactly inexpensive to keep track of copyright infringement, mail out letters, etc.—will be burdened by both the ISPs and rights holders.
We all know why this is happening: rights holders there (the UK’s version of the RIAA and MPAA) are freaking out because they never bothered to update their business model, and now are seeing their business (standing in between musicians and their fans, “distributing” music) blow up. Ten years ago, all these companies should have seen the success of Napster, hired the best and brightest right out of college, and have them develop a service that would have limited the proliferation of Internet piracy. I’m thinking OiNK and What.cd: far and away better than what iTunes offers, in both selection and file quality. Now, if the record labels had introduced something like those sites in 2000, or 2001, charged a reasonable amount, they wouldn’t be in this position today.
Again, read Ripped for more on how the music industry screwed itself so, so badly.
But anyway, this UK thing. For their part, the Internet Service Providers’ Association claims to be “disappointed by the proposal to force ISPs to suspend users’ accounts.” It even referenced an earlier ruling by the European Parliament that called kicking people off the Internet a violation of people’s basic rights.
In a coup, I asked in a bunch of file sharing-related IRC rooms that I idle in all day—Linikus for Mac OS X is a great piece of software, even if the thought of paying for an IRC client is 100 percent bonkers—what UK users thought about all of this. They’re very skeptical, with one user claiming outright that “it’ll never happen.” He gets letters from Virgin (a big ISP in the UK) all the time, yet nothing ever comes from it. So if this whole campaign is there to scare people, well, it doesn’t seems to be working.
Hold onto your hats, everyone.
How much are the “Rights Holders” paying the ISP’s to shut down their own customers?
Or are the “Rights Holders” threatening the ISP’s with frivolous lawsuits?
I just don’t understand why the ISP’s have to gain by losing customers, and angering a portion of their base.
And by ‘why’ I surely meant ‘what’.
In a way, I really hope this crap goes through. Then everyone will simply… stop buying music. Buying music will be seen as an explicit failure of intelligence – as will listening to pop radio or attending any mainline concert.
The UK is corrupt, I hope Europe forces us to see sense.
Encryption kills the idea anyway. Besides which, this already happens so it’s no change, just a reannouncement to get headlines so that more people think sharing is bad, therefore less people share. I guess that’s the hope anyway, because otherwise this will just turn into a farce of 12 year old girls and their mums being taken to court because they’re clueless, while the rest of us go on downloading with no restriction.
Guess what? The ISP’s need the millions of people signed to their services to make – you guessed it – money. Its not in their interest to start banning people, I strongly doubt this will come to fruition.
And if it does, people will revert to the 90’s/early 00’s ways of pirating music and video – burn that junk onto a CD/DVD or put it onto an external harddrive to share with friends. There are so many other ways to share stuff it just won’t make a difference, it’ll just be a damned inconvenience.