Obsessed With Film

3 strikes rule for piracy offenders in the U.K.

Posted by Matt Holmes

You probably heard this yesterday but it’s still worth reporting on.

Legislation’s will be put forward to the British Parliament next week which if put into place would legally oblige Internet service providers to issue a warning email to users caught downloading pirated music and films, a suspension to offenders caught for the second infringement and a complete termination of their Internet line for a third offense.

If the ISP were to fail to comply with the proposed legislation then they would be forced into court and the details of the offenders made known.

Can’t help but feel a one-strike rule would be far more effective in stopping users from downloading illegal material on the web because if nothing else, they now know that they have the barrier of being safe to download until they get one e-mail telling them otherwise. Downloaders who may have been previously unaware of the laws, will now know they have a safety barrier to download as much as they like until they get caught.

And seriously. Hollywood producers are living in cuckoo land if they think that it would save the music and film business billions of dollars in lost revenue. Just ask how many people who download whether or not they would actually purchase the film, song or album from a retailer.

Not many as Hollywood studio’s would like to claim I’m sure.

source - variety

categories - Movie News

2 Comments »

I’ve said this elsewhere, but this stands to be a horrible mistake and will kill a lot of the UK internet industry if it goes ahead.

If the RIAA lawsuits are anything to go by (where they are apparently incapable of restricting their lawsuits to people who owned computers, let alone actually did anything wrong), it’s unlikely to just affect pirates. There’s no foolproof way of working out, for example, whether someone is using their BitTorrent feed to download public domain movies, Linux ISOs, game patches or illegal content. So they’ll probably take a low-tolerance approach that will affect many innocent users. Scary when you realise that most of the new upcoming content models such as Miro and Joost depend on P2P techniques.

Meanwhile, those who are intent on pirating will switch to foreign proxy servers, encrypted traffic, streaming, and many other techniques that make it difficult to catch them. The upshot of this is that it raises the penalty for getting caught up in the mix but won’t actually help the industry. As has happened with the music industry, this could just turn many people away from wanting to watch some movies in the first place - why risk even legal downloads if your internet connection can get cut off?

Comment by PaulT | February 13, 2008
PaulT nailed it. There’s no way of knowing what content people are downloading and there’s TOO many ways for the pirates to keep their piracy secure.
Sites and forums run by rebellious under-18 kids who don’t know or care what “laws” they’re breaking-and who can’t be sent to jail, which is the ONLY real teeth such legislation could ever have. The RIAA found out the hard way what a bitch suing a 15 year-old can be.
And the really sophisticated online movie-piracy operations are in Asia and Russia where these British/US laws have no jurisdiction and the governments wouldn’t lift a finger to stop piracy. Hell, those government wouldn get a kick out of knowing the “superpower” is aggravated at nopt being able to make money off of something.
And the suits who think this will make a good scapegoat for falling box-office/home video revenues need to look at themselves and hacks like Lorenzo Boneventura instead of online pirates.

Comment by JaySmack | February 13, 2008