Digital Economy Bill passed through the Lords

LiE · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:11

because stopping me from downloading music and movies is suddenly going to make me go out and buy them...

anything I don't mind · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:11

Little confused. So the internet is now a fundamental right that everyone should have. Meaning it cannot be blocked or taken away like water or power. But the new laws say it can be blocked and taken away.

orwellian double speak.

MaX_PoWah · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:12

jamie2497 said:
No matter how many websites are banned there will always be places like IRC to distribute the torrents and nzbs.
Its a stupid piece of legislation and makes me wonder how the old gits of the house of lords even have the capacity to fathom what any of it means.

They probbably dont care, if they stop 5% of people downloading things then thats piles more money for the music industry whom is paying them off anyway.

LordSplodge · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:12

Basher said:
Isn't it already though? iTunes, free music streaming?

Music is getting to that point but movies and TV shows are a mess. God knows how badly ****ed up eBooks and eMagazines will be...

Dj_Jestar · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:13

MaX_PoWah said:
Well they are never going to stop private trackers.. thats just a fact, they will stop the big sites like pirate bay where most people get there torrents from and make it more of a minority activity

Mission accomplished then.. they accept they'll never stop it completely, but to reduce it is a win for them.

Dolph · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:13

LordSplodge said:
Agreed. Funny how they are rushing it through before the election and that the law has a back door allowing blocking of websites. Hmmmm.

Where is this so called "due process" with regards to this bill? Where is the proof that the person has downloaded anything, where is their right to defence?

The whole thing is a joke and kept as a civil matter as if it was ever tried under criminal law the so called evidence would get laughed out of court. Hell a freshly graduated lawyer could defend the case!

Only because the currrent situation requires provable intent to breach copyright. Changing it to an absolute offence (eg you have material you don't have permission to own) would change that dramatically.

By ignoring it and making content easily and legally available at a fair price.

It already is, the fair price is set by the market once sufficient safeguards against unauthorised taking of property are in place.

The absolute best way to get prices to go down is not to take the content for free, but to not consume the content at all. Taking the content without consent only encourages schemes such as DRM designed to prevent it.

photoshop · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:14

What a joke!
This is why i use SSL and private ftp's for my downloads.

This will only create a bigger problem.

I'd love to see ISP's cut people off.....how will that affect they profits...?

BUT they still expect me to pay a 50p tax on my landline to fund broadband for the rest of the UK?

WHAT A JOKE!!!!

LiE · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:16

Piracy will adapt, as it always has.

LordSplodge · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:17

Dolph said:
It already is, the fair price is set by the market once sufficient safeguards against unauthorised taking of property are in place.

Actually not having DRM leads to more sales as proven by the iTunes store. DRM is only bad for legitimate customers as pirates tend to remove it.

Dolph · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:20

LordSplodge said:
Actually not having DRM leads to more sales as proven by the iTunes store. DRM is only bad for legitimate customers as pirates tend to remove it.

I agree completely, and would strongly support measures to ban DRM alongside stronger legal protection for content owners.

DRM is really a result of the law's failure to adapt to the easy copying of intellectual property and it's failure to update laws to treat intellectual property in line with other property related crimes. It's the equivilent of having machine gun nests that occasionally shoot your neighbours and friends because the government refuses to help you defend your property by any other means, and the insurers won't pay unless the government catches the perp. The cost of having it is significant, but the cost of not having it is worse.

MaX_PoWah · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:24

photoshop said:
BUT they still expect me to pay a 50p tax on my landline to fund broadband for the rest of the UK?

WHAT A JOKE!!!!

I forgot about this mate, good point

Paul11 · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:24

integrated encryption to torrent apps here we come

the people that will lose out form this is going to be the ISP's

are they going to pay them for the extra admin this is going to create

mrk · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:25

Sod torrents. SSL Newsgroups is where it's at and also as soon as sites like Rapidshare go SSL too

Basher said:
Just out of interest, how would you tackle piracy?

You can't tackle piracy. Piracy has always existed and always will. The sooner they accept this the sooner we can have our internets and troll like mad once again.

I guess they are forgetting the days when bootleg KVCDs and Music discs were being sold on market squares etc.

iviv · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:25

As mentioned there will always be piracy.

Napster was shut down, people moved to torrents. Since then, there's been tons of torrent sites. Some get shut down, more pop up. TPB is the most well known one, what with all the lawsuits, and its still going. But even without it, there's at least 3 other sites I use.

And if somehow all the torrent sites get shut down then the pirates will move on again. Perhaps to newsgroups? Or some new kind of technology?It does nothing to solve the problems. Not to mention there's a whole load of non-illegal content on TPB. Large game mods often use public trackers to get them distributed, since its much cheaper than hosting on an ftp and paying for all that bandwidth.

Paul11 · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:26

instead of trying to stop piracy they should be putting the same effort in to easy to use, cheap pay sites that would encourage people to buy instead of pirate

Spike_UK · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:26

This will do nothing to stop piracy. All it will do is catch youngsters more than anything.

How does this stop SSL Encrypted Usenet or FTP?
It shows a complete lack of understanding about the actual problem.

The hardcore pirate people will not be caught by this legislation.

Paul11 · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:27

Spike_UK said:
The hardcore pirate people will not be caught by this legislation.

no, but it will probably scare the average man in the street to not pirate

i suppose that is their aim

mrk · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:28

Law makers who consult "experts" are never fully aware of the ins and outs of how these systems work, they just make the loudest noise to scare the average punter off and sue the odd granny and toddler in the process.

meghatronic · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:30

Paul11 said:
no, but it will probably scare the average man in the street to not pirate

i suppose that is their aim

Didn't work. Nothing will. It will happen.

skippy2421 · 16 Mar 2010 at 13:32

As per usual this will not hit those that it's targeted at (the pirates) and impact the innocent as is always the way. lol typical, i really don't know who to vote for come next election when labour come up with this carp and the only alternative is david Cameron. What a sorry state of affairs we have now.

I'd love to see before and after sales figures. They'd go up but i reckon they'd only go up a small amount. Personally i think music as a whole will suffer for this. The torrent system was a great way for new artists to come through to the main stream. Very few people would buy a new unheard of groups album but they could download it for free, find they like it and then end up buying tickets for their gigs. I think the business models of these record labels need re-thinking.