Richard J Green

File Sharing Warning Letters

So in the news yesterday on TorrentFreak, Engadget to name a few news sites was the talk of the agreement to mass mail people about downloading of content from the Internet ‘illegally’.

According to news, the big six ISP’s in the UK will be part of this deal being Virgin Media, BT, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse (AOL and TalkTalk). The current deal seems to be that they will issue warning letters to people they suspect of downloading content, a step which Virgin has already taken of late to be much ignored it would seem.

The problem with this whole thing is that they are relying on a scare tactic that people will read the letter, get scared and stop doing it, but in the main this will not be the case. I think the majority of people who no offense to them don’t know too much better will just carry on downloading. Other groups of people who know how will just get deeper underground with encrypted downloads.

The other problem with this whole deal is firstly, how do they know what is legal content and what is illegal content being that a lot of open source projects and even some bands are distributing their works on BitTorrent networks to reduce overheads for themselves, and the bands doing this are the one’s who just want people to enjoy their music and not line the pockets of the Fat Cats, like Joss Stone said recently.

The second problem is the companies doing the download tracking on behalf of the companies owning the copyrights aren’t very good at it as was discovered in the UK recently when a lawyer who was asked to provide details of the tracking data they have on a person they tried to convict backed down because of the obvious inaccuracies in the data. Did you know that networked printers are even on the BitTorrent scene these days 🙂

The most stupid part of this whole thing is the talk of a download tax for around £30 per household and the money would go to the recording industries to help recover the lost earnings through file sharing. How does this work then? Everyone in the UK pays is even if you don’t have the Internet or even a computer? Maybe they will do it only if you download stuff, so how are they going to prove that? There not. All of this sounds extra rubbish when you look at the figures released by Amazon that show they have doubled their net profits making the profits higher than forecasted and that most of these profits have come from CD and DVD sales which are up 31% on last year even though these are the products that are so low on sales and crippling industry.

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