{"id":2214,"date":"2008-02-12T10:46:03","date_gmt":"2008-02-12T15:46:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/02\/12\/drop-that-mouse-and-put-your-hands-up\/"},"modified":"2008-02-12T10:46:03","modified_gmt":"2008-02-12T15:46:03","slug":"drop-that-mouse-and-put-your-hands-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/02\/12\/drop-that-mouse-and-put-your-hands-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Drop that mouse and put your hands up!"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to The Times, a draft bill — known as a “green paper” — is being circulated in Britain recommending that Internet service providers become a kind of police force<\/a> for copyrighted content, with anyone who shares such content illegally automatically subject to a “three strikes and you’re out” rule. After two warnings, the draft legislation says<\/a>, they would have their Internet access cut off.<\/p>\n

There are a couple of obvious problems with this idea. For one thing, it isn’t likely to stop serious downloaders at all. As Stan Schroeder suggests in his post<\/a> at Mashable, there are any number of ways around the filters that ISPs might use to detect such illegal activity — including anonymous proxies, steganography<\/a> and so on. Would all of those things become illegal as well? And how many illegal files would you have to share before you got the warning from your provider — one, 10, a thousand?<\/p>\n

As Mike Masnick notes<\/a> at Techdirt, this is hardly the first time this idea has come up. Not only did U2’s manager Paul McGuinness effectively come out and demand recently<\/a> that ISPs police the Internet, but the French government has been considering legislation similar to that<\/a> proposed by the UK green paper. But there has been very little discussion of whether such a move would even work, let alone whether it is advisable. I would argue that the answer is no in both cases.<\/p>\n

Not only would turning ISPs into Internet police open up a giant can of worms — would they be filtering for hate speech or disturbing images or potential anti-government sentiments as well? — but criminalizing copyright infringement on such a massive scale is just wrong. It’s all out of proportion with the damage that is allegedly being inflicted. What we are seeing is the evolution of the content business, not a worldwide crime spree that needs draconian legislation.<\/p>\n

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According to The Times, a draft bill — known as a “green paper” — is being circulated in Britain recommending that Internet service providers become a kind of police force for copyrighted content, with anyone who shares such content illegally automatically subject to a “three strikes and you’re out” rule. After two warnings, the draft … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Drop that mouse and put your hands up!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2214"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2214\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}