Rather than go over the insane anti-file sharing plan the government apparently intends to implement, here’s an extract from this month’s The Word magazine talking about EMI.
The average salary across EMI is estimated at £57,328, heavily weighted towards the top. A FTSE 100 company on average has fewer than 20 execs on £500K-plus; EMI is reported to have over 50. These top execs are the ones sitting on top of massive severance packages too…
While all labels rely on that 10 per cent of signings who are multi-platinum successes in every key territory, EMI has (Norah Jones excepted) not signed and nurtured one this side of the millennium…
EMI ignored the warnings of the last ten years to its detriment. The same accusation can be levelled at all the majors. For the first time, a format (MP3) and a delivery channel (online) were developed outside of the labels’ control; their inability to understand the opportunities and possibilities were pre-Luddite.
So obviously, the solution is to cripple the internet industry. Sheesh.
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How are the ISPs going to do this anyway? I’m sure they are doing all they can to stop downloaders anyway, they eat up all the bandwidth after all, but the best they’ve come up with is “fair usage”. I’m sure it’s because actually looking inside all those packets is just far too processor-intensive to do.
I’d imagine the record companies will hire people to police torrents and P2P, relate the IPs to specific ISPs, and then send ’em a ban list. But I don’t know. There’s precious little detail so far.
A lot of the big questions haven’t been answered yet, as far as I can see – eg, if someone’s account is kicked on the music industry’s say-so, will they be able to get another broadband account? If the answer is yes, then the whole thing’s pointless. And if the answer is no, we have a situation where people’s livelihoods – homeworkers, ebay powersellers – and their or their kids’ access to key services (the govt says broadband for every schoolkid is a necessity) and ecommerce (a massive part of the UK economy these days) can be terminated on private companies’ say-so. Which is rather disturbing.
I don’t mind that the government can listen to my phone calls if they get a court order. I would mind if they allowed (let alone forced) Pipex to do it without one. I don’t mind that they can open my mail with a court order, but I like that it’s a criminal offense for a postman to do so. I can’t help but think that, if they manage to establish this precedent, a change to those other laws will follow. I can hear the Home Secretary now: “It is simply ridiculous to insist that, while all a terrorist suspect’s emails and Web activity can be provided by their ISP to the government at any time, the police should need to get a court order to listen to their phone calls.”
Anyway, all that’s going to happen is that people start using encryption (I expect most P2P hosts will build it in shortly, if they haven’t already), so the ISPs will be forced to spend loads of money on monitoring a load of meaningless zeroes and ones. To pay for this, our broadband bills will go up. Do the government really not have one single advisor who’s heard of encryption? Or did they just not believe him?
Yep. Encryption, proxies, clients that disguise IPs, sharing via IM (which is increasingly common anyway), using public wi-fi places rather than doing it at home…
Oh, for fuck’s sake:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUKL1350329920080213
They’ve outlawed redemption.