According to the music industry the downfall of itself is of course only due to copyright infringements, not old and non-working business models. Thus more needs to be done about it and they are quite active in lobbying EU politicians to think about their concerns more. This is reported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) where you can also download the complete memo the IFPI sent to the politicians.
The solutions is filtering! And they propose three „easy“ solutions:
- Content Filtering (ISP should identify audio files, compare them with a database of copyrighted works and block them eventually)
- Protocol Blocking (simply blocking all the P2P traffic. Of course not every P2P service is automatically illegal but IFPI does not care about that. They call web and email regular services while the rest seems to be unimportant to them and has the potential to do harm to them so better block it).
- Blocking access to infringing online locations. So this is simply censorship and depending on which level you activate it (e.g. IP level, DNS level etc.) not only web sites with illegal content might be blocked but others as well.
They agree themselves that even these drastic methods will not get rid of copyright violations 100% but they of course have different ideas in sueing more people with probably more dramatic fines so that people are more and more scared of doing the bad thing.
Of course this will not stop people from downloading music nor will it make them buy music again. It’s their old school business model which does not really work anymore. And even if probably sooner than we think copyright violation will be subject to death penalties it will not stop the music industry from going down.
So please somebody stop these people. The scary thing is actually that politicians listen to them. So write them! Inform them about the implications and better boycott these companies (so they run out of money for such lobbying faster before the whole internet is shutdown ;-) )! There is enough music out there (even legal to download unless the service you wanted to use for that is blocked by your ISP) and this is not the worst (definitely better than number 1 hits)!
As a sidenote: The german government passed a law about data retention recently and from 2008 on ISPs need to store the connection data of their customers for 6 months. While this was mainly intended for terrorism (unlikely to work there) and the real big criminality (like the organized one) some politicians in the Federal Assembly already discussed making use of that data for the music industry.
via Spiegel Online.
Technorati Tags: musicindustry, eff, ifpi, copyright, eu, politics