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More Copyright induced Crazy Talk
I've just read Ashley Highfield's "Should the ISPs be fined if they knowingly carry illegal content?" and I just don't understand the argument for ISPs policing content.
[The article was pulled down for a while, but its basically Ashley letting his mind wander about various arguments for ISP policing.]
A simple debunk is - How does the ISP know that an unprotected MP3 file from iTunes is legal, but the same MP3 downloaded from another website isn't?
Equally, if I have a private server that requires authentication but allows me to access my MP3s over http, how would the ISP know that I wasn't breaking the law?
People would argue that you can create lists of legal download sites and legal torrents, but that just doesn't scale when it comes to the internet. Suddenly you create a barrier to new startups wanting to get into the digital distribution market, creating the same mess as BluRay DRM keys has to date. This barrier would make the big content providers very happy as they suddenly get to monopolize the internet in the same way they have analogue spectrums to date, but it would be bad for everyone else, including ISPs.
And then there's encryption which kinda renders this sort of automatic policing useless anyway!
I guess Ashley is trying to raise the issue yet again and get people talking about it, but the only answer to his question is a resounding "No".
By Theo Gray on June 19, 2008 | Permalink | Comment
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