UK Government Warns Google, Microsoft & Yahoo Over Piracy

I would laugh at this but this guy sounds pretty damn serious.

“We don’t look at any other crimes and say ‘It’s such a big problem that it’s not worth bothering with.’ We wouldn’t stand idly by if paintings worth hundreds of millions of pounds were being stolen from the National Gallery. Copyright infringement is theft, pure and simple. And it’s vital we try to reduce it.”

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Oh the stupidity.....

Sigh.

Yes because the real pirates are using Google.

If the U.K. government really wanted to make an impact then they should be going after the corporations who haven't paid the artists their rightly earned money.

“We don’t look at any other crimes and say ‘It’s such a big problem that it’s not worth bothering with."

Except for their own financial banking system.

Na, I think they'll begin to make it work. The ISPs have resisted because it flies in the face of the ideals of an open internet and they have mostly been able to sit on the fence and pretend that it's not their place to be involved with this problem. But that only works for as long as the government allows it. In some countries like China the government doesn't mess around and they have no problem dictating the way things are going to work and in those countries the ISPs play along or they have their doors closed and may even see the inside of a prison cell.

As for pirates depending on Google, dude, he who controls the DNS name space controls the internet for the most part. You can TOR your way around it or you can run on non standard protocols but in the end this makes your traffic look different then other traffic and that actually makes it easy to spot, and crush, once you learn how to look for it.

Last dying gasps of a copyright system that I'm certain future historians will view as something between ridiculous and obscene. Singers are paid $40 million a year to yell into a microphone about killing cops, while cops are paid $40,000 a year to be shot at and killed.

The original intent of copyright law was to protect the copying and distribution rights of authors, DURING THE WORKS' DISTRIBUTION PERIODS. Centuries ago that meant many years, today it means about 15 seconds. Not only has copyright law not been updated to reflect current reality, it's now been forged into a weapon to try and keep an entire world from entering the 21st Century.

As evidenced by the ongoing sales and extinctions of media companies (e.g. Comcast now owns NBC and is looking to buy Time-Warner etc), clearly the current delusions we've been living under, e.g. that the internet qualifies as an "information service", instead of the world's most widely used and vital PRIVATE COMMUNICATIONS UTILITY, or that an MP3 of CD audio equates to theft of the CD itself etc, etc etc etc, will soon collapse under the weight of its own untenability and greed. It must collapse, because the alternative (and only eventuality) is something directly out of George Orwell.

I think you got it wrong JeffDC. I don't think it's going to collapse at all. Instead it will be strengthened because the Governments are going to bend the ISPs to their will. They will either get the ISP's voluntary support to restrict piracy themselves or they will force them to do it, either way, it will happen.

The sooner it happens the better. The sooner it happens the sooner the piracy slows down and maybe I'll get better internet based service for my movies and films. Maybe they will finally kill off those crappy theaters they keep clinging to and we'll get first run access to new titles online. Maybe I'll be able to subscribe to the SiFi Channel for $12 a month and get unlimited access to their entire library, that way I can go directly to the source and get my fix based on my interests and not some bullshit marketing crap.

Maybe.

If it weren't for piracy (and services some would consider "piracy", aka YouTube), those ISP's wouldn't have anywhere near as much demand for their services.

The government is going to take control? That's laughable at best. We know who is pulling the puppet strings, and it's not the government.

Oh dear someone got a little drunk and emotional at their last lobbyist funded lunch.

I wonder how much funding this guy gets from the media companies.

Go Home UK your drunk...

"Copyright infringement is theft, pure and simple"

No, it blatantly is not. It's a totally different class of crime, in theft you deprive the victim of the item. In copyright infringement you deprive the artist of their intellectual property rights. Those are totally different things. Piracy is not right, but it's not theft.

Also, how are Google and Microsoft (who is Yahoo?) doing this? That's like threatening the phone company for listing criminals phone numbers in the phonebook.

So they are basically preying on Anti-Americanism to subvert the openess of their internet.

lcpiper said:

I think you got it wrong JeffDC. I don't think it's going to collapse at all. Instead it will be strengthened because the Governments are going to bend the ISPs to their will. They will either get the ISP's voluntary support to restrict piracy themselves or they will force them to do it, either way, it will happen.

The sooner it happens the better. The sooner it happens the sooner the piracy slows down and maybe I'll get better internet based service for my movies and films. Maybe they will finally kill off those crappy theaters they keep clinging to and we'll get first run access to new titles online. Maybe I'll be able to subscribe to the SiFi Channel for $12 a month and get unlimited access to their entire library, that way I can go directly to the source and get my fix based on my interests and not some bullshit marketing crap.

Maybe.

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Whoever told you the internet is or was created for watching movies was lying to you. Film viewers already have a medium. It's called television.

The bottom line imo is, our Constitutional rights do not simply end at the internet. Our government has no other eventual option but to follow other countries in providing internet traffic with the same basic protections and rights given our telephone conversations and postal mail. If I as a private citizen wish to exchange videos with a friend, it's nobody else's business. That nobody includes ISPs and our government.