In the UK – Lord Peter Mandelson has outlined the details of anti file-sharing legislation set to come into play – naming the date when illegal downloaders’ internet connections could be cut off.
The Business Secretary, speaking at the digital creative industries conference cabinet, said that if the amount of illegal file-sharing taking place in the UK hadn’t dropped by 70 per cent a year on from April 2010 measures to cut off file-sharers’ connections would come into place from July 2011.

Piracy – what is it?

From day one of computers and the fact that all information is stored “Digitally”, people have found ways to share and make copies of items. I recall way back when the top 40 hits was played on the radio every Sunday from 4pm to 7pm and recording the songs I liked to Cassette tape, back then they said

Home Taping Is Killing Music

Is it not funny though that music did not die and to this day there is still shops that sell records, CD’s and the such? Is everybody who has a computer and an internet connection downloading illegal files, be they music, film’s or games??

Where do you get these files?

The majority of the computer based generation is happy to go to the cinema, buy the album they like and buy that game for the xbox, they do not even know about this downloading thing, they struggle to download drivers let alone music. The next set will know about torrent’s and would rather get the stuff that way then buy it, mostly as they do not have an income (children) and it is all they know anyhow.

The final set is the heavy downloaders – they know of this thing called “newsgroups” and probably grab everything just because they can. Will the above idea of been 3 strikes and your gone stop them?

3 strikes and your gone

This has already been tried in the UK before and all that happened was the ISP (who was not that big) lost half of there customers. The people who got cut off just went somewhere else and carried on doing what they used to do.

Blu-ray is now out and for me to enjoy this I need to buy a BluRay player (expensive) and splash out full cost per disc with a lot of the times movie’s I already own on DVD but seen as they are BluRay, higher resolution. Did they need to re-shoot the movie and incur new cost or did they just re-write the disc onto a new format? Would I have bought that movie in the first place or even went to the cinema to see it? The answer is no each time.