Money making scam :-)

OK, government trying to help the music industry by making it possible to send warnings to ISPs customers... Annoying at best. So many things wrong with their proposals I do not know where to start.

But it leads to interesting things. They seem to propose sharing cost of sending notices, i.e. ISP charges half their cost (I assume), but LINX's response (sensible, I might add) suggest the complainant just pays a fee. They go on to say the fee should also discourage frivolous complaints, i.e. be some reasonable charge. Sounds good to me.

But then you have interesting posibilities. People already poisen trackers and do things like making an hp printer accused of file sharing... How hard to set up trackers that deliberately make whole swaths of IP space apparently guilty of file sharing.... Then automated complaints go out, and the ISP charges.

So A&A customers could do this knowing we are raking it on the warning letter fees. Cool.

Maybe that would encourage them to actually investigate their allegations more carefully and actually follow the normal legal processes... I am sure we can set up some IPs for "Mr Coffee Machine" in unit 4 so that we can legitimately deliver the letters and let people know what IPs they are...

After all, it is not as if copyright is not already getting some serious special treatment. Many rights that people have are enforced by civil action only (like patent). Copyright already has some activity criminalised, something patent holders would love.

After all, if someone wasn't going to pay for a copy of something, but makes a copy anyway, then the copyright holder has not actually lost anything financially at all by that, and full recompense for the action could be done by simply deleting the copy.

In my view they need to come up with commercial models that mean the easiest way for people to get music and videos is the legitimate way and not a rip off. Then everyone is happy. Filer sharing would not happen (or if it did, it would in effect be free advertising leading to sales later).

We don't need any more special legislation for copyright holders.

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