On Tue, Oct 20, 2009 at 5:03 PM, Brian McNeil brian.mcneil@wikinewsie.org wrote:
Joking aside, I think that if I had a moment alone with Peter Mandelson and could curb my violent impulses for five minutes, I'd put it to him that cutting off someone's internet for illegal downloading is a punishment liable to be suffered as much by the innocent as the guilty.
Take a bog standard family of four, married with 2 kids... maybe a 15 year old son downloads copyrighted media, gets caught, internet cut off.
Now dad can't run his business, mum can't do her grocery shopping and the studious daughter who respects copyright can't get her homework done.
[Note, I'm aware that I'm assigning rather stereotypical gender roles re work and shopping, I hope you will forgive me...]
I understand that being cut off wouldn't happen until there's been more than one warning, which would give parents a chance to intervene and son to change his ways but you could still argue that the family as a whole has effectively been warned despite three of them being beyond reproach.
I'd also like to tell Mandy that copyright terms of life plus 70 years is helping a select few whilst denying huge amounts of culture to the many and that owning something for 70 years after YOU'RE FRICKIN' DEAD is unlikely to be the spur to activity the government thinks it is. In addition, a next generation that inherits income from copyrighted works actually is disincentivised from getting a job if the income from the copyright is sufficient to support them. The government normally *loathes* people who don't go out to work, but apparently it's fine if your dad happens to have written The Da Vinci Code.
Arstechnica has a good article relating to this today. Those well-entrenched and profiting from creative works have a 100+ year history of scaremongering and depriving the public domain what they agreed to give it in the first place.
Are you referring to this one?
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/10/google-book-digitization-pro...
If not please send a link as I'd be interested to see it.