The BPI has been caught red-handed tampering with politics of a sovereign nation — No-Longer-Great Britain.
BPI is short for the archaic British Phonographic Industry which, like its masters, Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, remains locked hopelessly in the 1970s.
Earlier today “TechDirt’s Mike Masnick confirms some of the documentation openly used by the British government in its Digital Ecomy bill comes from the corporate record labels” said p2pnet, referring to the entertainment cartel Three Strikes law Hollywood and Big Music are trying to force through as law of the land.
Now a BPI spokesman says his employers aren’t embarrassed “at the disclosure of the source of the amendment”, says the Guardian going on >>>
“This was a suggestion that we made to the government in 2009, with this wording. This version of the proposal was sent to the government and also to the opposition parties. The government decided it wanted to go a different way. The opposition parties, while not fully agreeing with it, saw it as a good framework for what they wanted to put down,” the spokesman said. “We have consistently said that the digital economy bill should have sensible measures to deal with peer-to-peer file sharing.”
The BPI’s proposed amendment, in a letter dated 8 January, is almost identical to the version put forward by Lord Clement-Jones on 3 March. The key difference is the addition in Clement-Jones’s version of questions about national security, and of tests to see whether the blocking of a site infringes human rights and freedom of speech, and whether an ISP has tried to “facilitate legal access to content”.
Nor are things going well for ACTA elsewhere in Europe.
A staggering 633 European parliamentarians voted against the entertainment cartel business plan.
But 10 miscreants were for it, all of them from Britain, and all from one party, says the Pirate Party UK, naming them as >>>
- Nigel Farage (leader, UK Independence Party)
- Marta Andreasen ( UKIP)
- Stuart Agnew (UKIP)
- Gerard Batten (UKIP)
- John Bufton (UKIP)
- Trevor Colman (UKIP)
- The Earl of Dartmouth UKIP)
- Mike Nattrass (UKIP)
- Paul Nuttall (UKIP)
- Nicole Sinclaire (UKIP)
Corporate copyright cops
The Three Strikes law is part of a concerted international campaign called ACTA, the entertainment industry’s Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Under it, file sharers everywhere could be taken offline on the say-so of the cartels, ISPs would become corporate copyright cops acting against their own customers, and governments would be taxpayer funded copyright agencies.
But ACTA wouldn’t have reached first base without the active cooperation of governments elected to represent the interests of local citizens, but which are instead diligently working as Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures.
That this could be happening seems wildly impossible. But it’s real, and it’s being all but ignored by the traditional print and electronic media.
US president Obama has “reiterated his administration’s commitment to enacting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement”, says Tech Daily Dose, going on >>>
During remarks at the Export-Import Bank’s annual conference, the president discussed the need to “aggressively protect” U.S. intellectual property.
“There’s nothing wrong with other people using our technologies, we welcome it — we just want to make sure that it’s licensed, and that American businesses are getting paid appropriately,” Obama said. “That’s why [the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative] is using the full arsenal of tools available to crack down on practices that blatantly harm our businesses, and that includes negotiating proper protections and enforcing our existing agreements, and moving forward on new agreements, including the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.”
This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following events.
The year is almost over, said p2pnet as long ago as December, 2008 >>>
… and in what has to be the biggest-ever of Big 4 music label PR scams, eclipsing even their sue ‘em all marketing campaign, they say they’ll stop suing their own customers.
Enlisting the major on- and offline print and electronic media as unpaid PR pumps, with Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal as the principal mouthpiece and New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo as coordinator, Vivendi Universal (France), Sony BMG (Japan and Germany), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music(US) are now touting ISPs as corporate copyright cops.
In the WSJ, they say their Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) will, “try an approach that relies on the cooperation of Internet-service providers”.
The newspaper doesn’t say if the RIAA is paying Cuomo for his services, or if New York taxpayers are subsidising him on behalf of the Big $ labels.
Meanwhile, there’s one thing we have yet to see mentioned other than in these pages: the financial costs of this wholly entertainment industry enterprise.
They’re incalculable, costing taxpayers around the world unknown hundreds and millions of dollars, yen, pounds, you name it, not to mention tying up entire government departments.
None of this time can be recovered, and none of the money will ever be reimbursed.
And back in LaLa Land, it’s bidniz as usual …
Jon Newton