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Bandwidth and Service Limits Proposed to Curb Illegal Downloads - Poster MarkJ (Sunday, March 15 2009)
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When the industry figures out that they need to put more of the effort into the carrot than the stick, they might get somewhere. Because the days when they can dictate terms have long since disappeared.
No obligation to monitor
The E-commerce Directive states that Member States must not impose a general obligation on service providers to monitor the information which they transmit or store. It is normally accepted that if you do monitor the content on your servers then you are at greater risk as you will be treated as a publisher of that information.
Can UK ISPs be forced to monitor their networks? The EU's E-commerce Directive states:
Though I suppose that doesnt stop the government forcing ISPs to filter content.
Thank you James for taking the trouble to write out all that!
Well, my own feeling is that the whole copyright situation is copy-wrong. (I speak as a retired software engineer who used also to be a recording engineer). Copyright law wasn't handed down from Mount Sinai along with the ten commandments. Surveys have shown that most people do not feel instinctively that there is anything morally wrong about copying, in the way that most people know instinctively that theft or murder are wrong. The original 1956 Copyright Act was bought and paid for by EMI at the beginning of the pop industry after the war; they pushed it through Parliament to give themselves a virtual monopoly on recorded music, and we poor suckers have let them get away with it ever since. But now technology has out-paced them and they're fighting a losing battle against an incoming tide. But it's a battle they can never win.
If Person A can earn a living by making something and selling it, but Person B can make and sell it cheaper, then as far as I'm concerned Person B has my blessing. The argument about stifling innovation cuts both ways (see http://www.againstmonopoly.org/). The way for a creative individual to secure his income is by continually generating new output and by keeping ahead of the others. If a musician, inventor, programmer, engineer or whatever has to resort to the courts to secure his income, he's lost the plot anyway. If you want to do just one thing and then live off the proceeds for the rest of your life, then you should do something that can't be copied. But in reality there is nothing done by one artist or engineer which cannot be copied or got round by another artist or engineer, and that's life. The likes of EMI should have enough sense to realise that, and the rest of us should have enough sense not to let them turn our country into a police state for the sake of preserving their profits.
I have spoke!
Ian H.Thain