Re: Penalising downloaders

On Wed, 12 Mar 2008 18:34:01 -0000, "Norman Wells"
<norman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If it's done through an organisation, the organisation can be
targetted in just the same way as Napster.

One such "organisation" is Usenet. There are lots of groups that
carry MP3 files. You think that the government is likely to block
access to every news server?

Suppose they said, as from this weekend, that any computer or mp3 player can
be inspected at any time by an authorised person, and that any music files
found whose legal provenance cannot be proved by the owner will generate an
automatic £100 fine, you'd be deafened by the sound of files being dumped in
the trash bin all over the country.

The impact on civil liberties of allowing the police to enter and
search any house at any time would be devastating. The police would
inevitably misuse such a power to look for things other than MP3
files. And it would also entail every teenager having to keep
documentation to prove the provenance of every music file on their MP3
player. It's not going to happen.

I'm not saying the government would go that far, but they do have some
experience of somewhat similar provisions in respect of kiddie porn.

Except that KP is not something that is desired by the average
teenager.

So, if
they have the will to stamp out illicit file sharing, I'm sure they'd be
able to find one way or another to reduce it considerably if not stamp it
out entirely.

Like they have with illegal drugs? Which, being a physical commodity
that must be smuggled into the country and passed person-to-person, is
a *heck* of a lot easier to stamp out than digital data obtained via
the Internet.

So you'd be perfectly happy for the government to block access to all
news servers and to all chat sites and to places such as MSN, and to
spend loads of your tax money searching for web sites that offer
unlawful music downloads from other countries and blocking them?

No, I wouldn't. But that's what governments have to do, choose between
various courses of action for what they see as the greater good.

You naive fool! Governments do *not* do things for the "greater
good". They do things to get re-elected. Which involves *not* doing
something that will piss off a great many people who will be voting in
the next election.

Even if all that was achieved, the teenagers would still copy CDs and
swap MP3s, such that I would think less than 10% of teenage music
would be lawfully obtained.

Not if it was made very uneconomic,

How would you do that?

or even a criminal offence, to possess
illicitly obtained tracks.

The problem will be in proving BRD that they were obtained illicitly.

It's just the same as illegal pornography. Make the penalties severe
enough, and people will be discouraged.

The only reason it works for illegal pornography is because most
people are disgusted by it and therefore condone the enforcement and
penalties. Doing the same to something that is popular and not seen
as a serious wrongdoing by the majority will not work in the same way.

Anyway, there will be quite a few difficulties involved in placing
every MP3 downloader caught in jail. There are nowhere near enough
youth detention centers for starters, and forcibly removing a large
percentage of people's children could very easily start a revolution,
let alone just losing the next election!

--
Cynic


.

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