Up to 25000 British illegal downloaders sued

I see they are now targeting the people who actually download warez. Good.

Hopefully, this will spur more people to stop pirating software....and buy it instead.

I heard that France was going to implement (or may have) a three strikes policy. If you're caught pirating on the internet three times, you're barred. I like that idea.

I love all the stories in the press at the moment about illegal file sharing and how they gloss over reality in favour of a good story and backing the big companies because it sells newspapers.

So let's take a moment to explore some of the things that get left out of these stories shall we?

1. The idea that ISPs should be monitoring for this stuff. For starters that'd cost a small fortune and the ISP market in the UK has already been comoditised so there is no money for this kind of stuff. Even if the ISPs are ordered to monitor this someone will just make a system that encrypts everything and give the governement the choice of outlawing encryption (goodbye Internet shopping/banking etc) or giving up the stupid idea of monitoring who is sharing what.

2. The idea that it "costs the music industry billions of dollars every year". This is rubbish. It only totals billions if the people who download music "illegally" would've bought every single track they download. They wouldn't, and the people who quote these figures should at least be realistic about the sums of money involved.

3. The idea that a "download tax" needs to be applied to everyone with an Internet connection. It's a serious possibility that everyone with an Internet connection in the UK will have to pay £30 to the music industry to make up for the lost earnings. WTF?!!? What about all the software engineers? What about all the actors? What about everyone else who has their stuff taken without compensation? And, what's more, most of this money will go to people at the record label companies, not the artists themselves.

4. The music industry needs that money to survive. Yeah. Right. Just like when blank casettes became available it was going to be the end. Then blank VHS casettes. Yup, that killed it. Wait ... no it didn't. The music labels were established to solve a massive problem. Artists on their own couldn't get their stuff to the masses. Unfortunately the Internet also solves that problem and does it far cheaper than those massive companies. Allowing them to continue to profit from a problem that no longer exists is just backwards. When the railways were first built and there was no longer a big need for horse shoes for horses used for transportation, the blacksmiths weren't allowed to lobby to have every train fitted with horse shoes. Technology moves on, get over it.

5. Outdated business models. Capitalism is about paying for value. Not forcing people to pay for something they can otherwise get for free. Music labels currently have contracts on all of the top artists preventing them from distributing their works far and wide across the Internet (which returns to them massively via all the live gigs they can do). In a few years this won't be the case and music will be paid for on the basis of a month subscription (that covers the cost of agregating everything plus a profit) but will allow unlimited downloads. The value isn't in the music itself but in the ease of finding it, searching for it, downloading it etc in terms of distribution or in the entertainment value when the artist is physically there in front of you on a stage.

Discuss.

Instead of hitting the downloaders in the pocket book, hit the operators of the WAREZ sites and shut down every peer to peer server there is. That way you will stop all the movies, games, and programs being illegally shared & downloaded.

But no they rather fine some person for downloading whatever.

Gimme a break.