Does FAST really want ACS Law to have its day in court?

Monday, February 14th, 2011

The laws surrounding file-sharing and online copyright infringement are confusing, and nothing proves it quite so startlingly as a press release that landed in my inbox today.

The Federation Against Software Theft (FAST) sent over a statement about the ACS Law case currently stumbling to a close in the Patents County Court.

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Taxpayer to fund French file-sharing resistance

Friday, October 15th, 2010

The French are good at many things. Nice wine, good cheese, and a fine line in shoulder shrugging. But let the bureaucrats within a metric mile of the real world and Gallic pragmatism falls apart.

The French authorities have come up with a scheme aimed at encouraging young people (anyone aged between 12 and 25) to buy music rather than download it illegally. All well and good, but the Government proposes using taxpayer money to subsidise the scheme. Youths that buy into the project will receive a card to the value of €50, for which they will pay €25. The other half is covered by the State.

This is enough to make this French taxpayer (vested interest declaration) mad on so many levels.

While one would never condone illegal file-sharing, there are plenty of reasons to dislike the record companies’ aggressive stance and action on copyright. It is a matter of personal pride that the last time I lined the pockets of the recording industry fat cats, The Verve were the next big thing.

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Panorama parents deserve their file-sharing fine

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

This week’s Panorama “investigation” into internet file-sharing delivered nothing new for anyone who’s been keeping even half an eye on this issue. Record labels think it’s killing their industry; Billy Bragg and TalkTalk think they’re talking out of their Supergrasses. Part of the reason it revealed diddly squat was because it wasn’t fronted by a journalist who knew what they were talking about, but by a DJ who didn’t, although that’s an argument for another time (that time being mid April, when you can read my column in the next issue of PC Pro).

However, one thing the show did throw up was the abject attitude of one set of parents to their childrens’ file-sharing habit. The program followed a family with four kids from Manchester, in a bid to prove how teenagers were stuffing hard disks with dodgy downloads, unbeknown to their poor parents.  Lo and behold, Panorama’s “computer expert” (bloke who can read filenames) finds that the teenage sprogs have indeed been giving Pirate Bay a good hammering, filling the family laptop with more suspect albums than the Status Quo back catalogue.

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Time for a truce with the music industry

Monday, December 21st, 2009

The record labels aren’t an easy bunch to love. If they’re not trying (and, brilliantly, failing) to fill the Christmas charts with an endless stream of mass-produced pap, they’re pursuing alleged file-sharers with an almost unhealthy zeal.

“The [music] industry has been extremely slow to listen to the demands of its customers, and has had something of an abusive relationship with them, seeking to punish them before thinking of how to serve them better,” Lord Lucas told the House of Lords recently, when debating whether to cut-off file-sharers or not. He’s not wrong.

Yet, there is a small part of me that’s tinged with sympathy for the music overlords. Perhaps I’m being overwhelmed with Christmas good spirit (although that sounds ridiculously out of character), but I can’t help thinking BPI chief Geoff Taylor had a point when he commented recently that: “There are now more than 35 legal digital music services in the UK, offering music fans a great choice of ways to get music legally. It’s disappointing that levels of illegal P2P use remain high despite this.”

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Why you could lose your broadband connection for doing absolutely nothing wrong

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

How nice to have friends in high places. Having failed to convince Digital Britain author Lord Carter to cut off the connections of alleged illegal file sharers, the creative industry has somehow managed to convince Lord Mandelson and the new Minister for Digital Britain, Stephen Timms, that it’s a good idea after all.

Hence today’s announcement that the Government will now urge Ofcom to suspend people’s broadband connections as a “last resort”. But on what evidence will ISPs be forced to clip your connection?

Rights holders will be required to identify the IP addresses of people they claim to have caught file sharing, and pass those details to the relevant ISP (as they do currently). But here comes the clincher. “The standard of evidence required from rights holders should, as a minimum, establish an infringement on the balance of probabilities,” the Government’s own consultation on legislation for illegal P2P file sharing states. So no innocent until proven guilty – a high likelihood that you’re in the wrong is all that the rights holders need to press the ISPs to cut off your broadband.

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File-sharing lawsuits – no evidence required

Tuesday, January 6th, 2009

It may not be the file sharing or copyright infringement capital of the globe, but New Zealand is still taking the issue seriously by introducing a new law to stop people downloading movies and albums and robbing artists of honestly earned cash.

Except that the new law is such a ridiculous piece of legislation that we can’t quite believe it’s going to come into force. Section 92 of the Copyright Amendment Act will be introduced at the end of February 2009, and says that any individual who is even alleged to have shared files illegally can be disconnected from the internet.

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Music download death stares

Tuesday, May 20th, 2008

Yesterday was my worst, ever afternoon since I started working on Pro all those moons ago. As part of my roving reporter bit I was wandering around the streets of London chatting to folks about online music for the latest edition of the podcast – a task, as it turned out, which would have been made only marginally more difficult if I’d approached them with a necklace of skulls, a voodoo doll, and a blood-smeared machete.

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