Topic: France and Britain and internet piracy

[Rod ONeal]

Just a couple of articles I found regarding internet piracy that I found interesting.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1594045/filesharing-french-hobby

Filesharing becomes the latest French hobby

Ever ready to surrender to a powerful authority, the French handed over a huge chunk of its legal system to the big media industries and brought in all the laws that the music and movie mongols wanted to prop up their dying business models.

The only problem is that, rather than making peer-to-peer (P2P) filesharing disappear it has made it all the more interesting for French teens to get around. Nothing makes anything cooler than making something that harms no one illegal.

Proof positive that what is required is more unenforceable laws.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1594048/uk-kill-internet-cafes

UK to kill off Internet cafes

Universities will need to work out if they are an ISP or a subscriber. Subscribers can be switched off for piracy. ISPs have to store user data and hand it over to rights holders when ordered to do so.  If you are a coffee shop then storing data for three years on your punter's doings might be a bit like hard work.

Britain just can't seem to decide who to blame and who to pass the laws against.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just somethings that I found trolling my favorite geek sites. It's amazing the amount of effort, time, and money the governments around the world take with this. It's bigger than countries, though. Bigger than continents. It's a massive world wide network that can't be broken. The business model needs to change.

[Sirgod]

It does resemble the old prohibition laws of the 1920's, in the sense that they didn't work, and people where going to do what they wanted to do.

Stephen