Piracy is BAD and WRONG and prevents global warming.

[innerbrat]

Charles Dunstone earned a lot of respect from me this morning. Not for any putative ethical issue behind his refusal to police music sharing among the users of his TalkTalk broadband service - but for the shrewd business sense in knowing his customers - a knowledge base shockingly missing these days

Comments

[minnesattva]

do people really think that sex offenders lack the important brain-cells needed in creating dummy email addresses?

I shouted precisely that thing at the radio when I heard it this morning.

[innerbrat]

It must be all the DNA they share with lobsters.

Is it just me or is that sentence dying to be made into an LJ icon?

[minnesattva]

Must be. That'd explain a lot.

Re: Is it just me or is that sentence dying to be made into an LJ icon?

[innerbrat]

I don't know if you need context, but you can get it here (somewhere, couldn't find the exact clip)

[pmoodie]

I can appreciate the desire to protect artists' copyright, being one myself. But of course, that isn't what this is about. It's about MONEY!

This is just part of the wave of panic that's sweeping an indusrty as it sees it's profits potentially dry up and blow away in the wind. But downloading and file-sharing is obviously the way things are going, so they should be sensible and help people do it, not try to prevent them from doing it. No-one ever got rich by not giving people what they want.

[davegodfrey]

As is clearly demonstrated by the meagre profits the music industry make home taping was such a disaster for them in the 1980s.

I have been known to bitorrent, but I generally only do it for TV shows and films I missed in the cinema, can't be arsed to rent, borked up recording when they showed them on TV and certainly can't afford when they first come out on DVD. Most of what I've downloaded isn't commercially avaliable. Johnathan Miller's "Rough History of Disbelief", episodes of Horizon about the Voyager mission to Neptune, that sort of thing. (And Avatar/Dr Who that either hasn't been broadcast here in years/ever).

I won't do the same for music, but then I listen to bands that don't sell many and in some cases probably don't make much more in a year than I do out of their output.