I spend a lot of time in Australia and of course I use the internet. I have always believed that the actions of internet users are their own and do not 'belong' to the Internet Provider. Sabiene Heindl of the Australian Music Industry Anti-Piracy Investigations(MIPI)
is of a different view. Following MIPI's line of reasoning, every corporation should be able to do deep packet inspections of every bit of internet traffic you receive or send. Just in case you might be infringing someone's copyright.
They've picked a smallish ISP to bully in court and try and force them to be the thought police.
What's next, the telephone company letting everyone listen in to our calls in case we libel or otherwise say something which purportedly infringes some corporation's rights?
I don't for a second think piracy should be OK, bit if the music industry hadn't been overcharging for their products, making them difficult to obtain and bundling a couple of good tracks with a pile of rubbish and forcing consumers to buy an album for 20
times the value of even a couple of the tracks, they might not find themselves in this situation.
I note that they've hired the former music and file sharing pioneer and creator of Kazaa as a turncoat to supposedly 'cure' consumers of the problem. Well I've got news for you, if you think you can stop it by suing ISP's and forcing them into becoming the
thought police, it will come back to bite you many times over. Apart from the fact that anyone who claims to be able to defeat piracy would be most likely be taking your money under false pretenses, the manner in which the record companies are attempting to
claw back income is bound to fail.
These bloated corporations have plenty of skeletons in their own closets and I'd suggest a little digging by journalists would uncover some of the illegal and unconscionable practices that the record companies routinely engaged in, in the past.
I fail to see how they will gain any sympathy from consumers by their latest tactics. They are, as usual, about a decade or two behind the times.
Australia has recently decided to take a leaf out of the Chinese rule book and is attempting to create a massive censorship mechanism to stop anyone from seeing anything the government determines as being unsuitable. Way to go. Who's advice are you taking?
The snake oil salesman who wants to sell you the Big Brother gadget?
Any mechanism for oppression (ie censorship) is bound to fail, and worse, be abused by corporations or politicians just too keen to get their hands on the power.
Wake up, there is no going back to the book-burning days. Information sharing is here. If you attempt to censor the internet it will fail, both as a medium for the exchange of ideas and knowledge and the very attempt will fail.
There are better ways to protect children and make people who do wrong accountable for their action that don't include a Fascist recipe for disaster.
The entertainment industry is hoping to become part of the censorship machine, but would be better served looking at ways to make it easier and cheaper for consumers to enjoy their employer's (the content creators) products. The old economics are gone and
the entertainment companies have to get rid of the grey haired fantasists running them and get into the 21st century.
The outcome of any attempt to censor the internet is very likely to be the reverse. There are a multitude of ways to share information and so long as the entertainment companies want too much of a share of the income, and are willing to pay the likes of
itunes, and inflate the prices further, there will be piracy.
Censoring the net will merely see a new business opportunity for the neighbourhood criminal. Stand by for peddlers on the street offering passers-by any track they want for a few cents via wifi or bluetooth. They could carry every song and movie ever made
in their backpack and still outrun the average cop. Will the kids swap tracks at the bus stop waiting for school just because they can?
New gadgets will make it easier to share tracks with your friends and neighbours and the ISP will know nothing about it. What will you do then? Stop people in the street and perform random searches?
It's time the entertainment companies grew up and realised. 10 years on and they're still living in a fantasy world. Probably a hangover from all that drug-taking in the 70's and 80's.
I'm willing to predict, yet again, that the entertainment companies will fail miserably. I'm shorting their shares now and I suggest you do the same. It's like 1997 all over again - a few dinosaurs fighting for their overly large share of the pie, while
the world passes them by.
As I predicted and told them in 1997 - if you take that course of action you'll lose billions. They did, they lost.
They will lose again, only this time it'll be the end. Hey I didn't make much from them directly, but boy was it easy to pick which share prices would tank (Sony, BMG for instance). I was amused to see them all consolidating as a last gasp effort, and this
latest effort is the death rattle.
Sell, or short those shares now, the entertainment industry crash can't be far off if they make every consumer the enemy, when the real enemy is within their own ranks.