“There is no difference with going into a store and stealing Pringles or a handbag and taking this stuff. We need enforcement mechanisms and we need governments to play ball.”
That’s Rupert Murdoch, the Australian media dinosaur on Hollywood and Big Music plans to hijack ISPs and world governments as copyright enforcers.
Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures, are demanding that ISPs everywhere become industry copyright enforcers, working against their own customers.
By “play ball” Murdoch means local taxpayers should finance the movie and music studio Three Strikes scheme, touted under the UK Digital Economy bill, to have governments acting as copyright agencies.
“The measure, championed by the business secretary, Peter Mandelson, would give the British authorities new tools to clamp down on piracy, including the right to cut off the Internet connections of persistent copyright cheats” the New York Times continues.
However, Mandelson is an industry shill and the Three Strikes measure Murdoch alludes too, and which would have alleged file sharers thrown off the net on industry say-so alone, is merely part of the entertainment industry’s ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement recently thrown out by the European parliament.
“Such a system has been approved, though not yet implemented, in France” and going on >>>
The British proposal, set to be taken up by the House of Commons on Monday, goes further. Under an amendment to the bill in the House of Lords this month, courts would be empowered to order Internet service providers to block access to Web sites that provide pirated movies, music and other media content.
Supporters of the amendment say it would finally give copyright holders the tools to tackle the piracy problem at the supply and demand levels, after more than a decade of largely futile efforts. But critics of the bill say it raises the specter of censorship on the Internet, and could undermine the development of Britain’s digital economy, currently among the most advanced in the world.
But “Britain is not the only country considering tougher measures to fight piracy”, says the NYT item, which might have been hand-crafted by an industry hack, implying other countries have independently come up with their own ‘anti-piracy’ plans.
“Along with France, South Korea also recently approved a system under which Internet pirates who ignore two warnings to stop illegal downloads face the loss of their Internet connections”, it says. “Lawmakers in Spain have proposed a measure that, like the British proposal, could require Internet service providers to block access to certain sites” it says.
However, ACTA and its components are in fact part of a global plan by the entertainment industry to gain exclusive control of how product is handled online, with themselves as the controllers. And some governments, such as those in the UK and France, are falling over themselves to cooperate.
The story has the the Open Rights Group’s Jim Killock saying the bill contains “unusually broad scope for abuse”.
Individuals or companies, might try to use it “to suppress any Web content they found objectionable, under the pretext of protecting their copyrights”, he said.
“British libel laws, which put the burden of proof on the defendant, are already employed in this way by wealthy plaintiffs, critics say; rather than mount expensive defenses, bloggers and others accused of libel often back down and withdraw whatever statements drew offense” says the story.
UK politicians were “looking to make the Digital Economy Bill even worse by adding a provision that would allow a judge to block all access to a website if that site was accused of facilitating copyright infringement” said TechDirt, going on, “After widespread outcry against the proposal in the UK, the Lords changed the proposal, but came back with an even more ridiculous proposal that would be even more stringent in allowing courts to shut down websites.”
A newer TechDirt post stressed, “Now some leaked documents are showing that it was a pretty blatant copy-and-paste job from the BPI, the UK’s equivalent of the RIAA. The BPI wrote up a draft and the politicians basically proposed it as is.”
But, “when your role as a politician is to be little more than a sock puppet for the industry, it’s easier just to propose the legislation given to you”. Nor are politicians the only sock-puppets.
Stay tuned.