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How to wind me up over coffee
Sitting here with a coffee and checking the state of the world on Bloglines, I stumbled on Geoff Taylor's response to Bill Thompson.
The way Geoff Taylor constantly twists and sometimes reverses facts shows how desperate the BPI and other bodies are to hang on to control of something that is slipping further from their grasp. And with the PRS now building up to claim every owner of a device with speakers now needs to pay PRS because other people might hear what we're listening to, we could well be heading for a very different tipping point than Geoff Taylor hopes, in the form of a backlash against the recording industry's propoganda.
In talking about how the details supplied to Virgin Media obviously prove infringement just because the same information has been used in cases across Europe, he triumphs the much heard statement:
"Not one of those cases has recorded a mistaken ID, or been successfully contested."
He fails to mention that when the "evidence" is contested, the legal case is magically dropped, so that the "fact" that there are no "recorded" failures can still be quoted.
He also tells us that "By sending hundreds of thousands of information messages to illegal file sharers, ... the music business has worked hard at consumer education". The only problem is that this "consumer education" doesn't seem to be making any difference to how people sample music that they either a) go on to buy, or b) decide not to listen to again; but of course Geoff will insist that every download is a real financial loss to his members.
Finally (as I've finished my coffee now), if the information is so "public" as Geoff Taylor claims, why is it the ISP (and so by extension, the consumer) that has to carry the cost of contacting internet users?
By Theo Gray on June 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comment
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