On the Today program this morning, someone was saying that ISPs should be held partly responsible for movie and music piracy by their users, in the same way that a house owner should be responsible if the house was being used as a drug den.
But surely that’s the wrong analogy. People don’t in general upload the pirated material to the ISPs’ servers – they have it on their own PCs. Holding the ISP responsible is like blaming the local council because their roads were used to transport the drugs. Why not blame the electricity company that powers the PC?
The culpable ones, if any, are those who share material from their PCs. The media industries can’t sue all of them, though, so they have to find another scapegoat.
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Oh gosh. If you believe the DVD trailers that I’m regularly forced to watch, downloaded movies are also directly linked to terrorism. Sigh.
this is all part and parcel of people not taking responsibiltiy for their own actions and trying to mis-apportion blame. People who sell drugs
are bad people – people who rip and upload zillions of movies and songs are (somewhat less) bad people – people that buy drugs are victims – people that download are part of a game being played between content industry and public to find the right price (its called a market – the profit made on online and offline movie and music distribution is rediculous -al the claims made by the media companies are bogus since the fraction that goes to primary producers is so low – and their marketting is so dumb.
equivalent stories can be told in the “official” drugs market where the fraction of counterfeit and “illegal” copies is
a direct metric for the amount the free market price has not been found.