Quote:
Originally Posted by Fat Abe
From http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?...ontent;wrapper
"The bill, covered quite extensively on this blog, will give the state and government to tell ISP’s to disable and suspend broadband and Internet accounts of users through a three-strike system of copyright infringement; in a nutshell, admittedly."
"Clause 4 through to 17 resolves that if users are caught downloading copyright infringed material, the copyright owners must inform the ISP with evidence within the month. ISP’s must respond with details confirming the fact if need be. |
Hmmm. How do you confirm copyright infringement--the copyright owner says "that's infringing?" No defense? What if the person downloading a copy says, "I had permission." (Some bands have said, "if you can't afford our album, download it." This drives the RIAA up the wall.) What if the person claims fair use? Or claims, "I bought this album/book/movie from a website and due to technical problems, couldn't download it--so the customer service rep told me I could just download it from [torrentsite] and that'd be fine, since I'd already paid for it?"
Of course, that's all rhetorical. They're not planning on holding anyone to legal accountability levels; if they were able to do that, they wouldn't want this bill. They want to bypass the legal standards for proof of a crime and replace them with "my company feels its copyright has been infringed; punish the person who pays for this internet access account. Oh, and whoever he allows to use that account, because that'll give them incentive to watch each other."
First result: A whole bunch of angry people get their internet cut off.
Next result: an irate student realizes that, with a tiny bit of hacking expertise (TOR and utorrent run off a flash drive) he can get an entire school's internet access cut off by downloading a few music files.
The real intended purpose of this legislation: to end free public wifi.