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U2 frontman bitchslapped by TalkTalk
TalkTalk has branded U2 windbag Bono's intervention in the debate over illegal filesharing "outrageous", after he said efforts to block child pornography showed ISPs should be doing more to protect intellectual property. As part of his latest execrable, relentlessly pretentious sermon* for the New York Times' op-ed section, …
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 13:27 GMT Anonymous Coward
"noble effort to stop child pornography"
What "noble effort"? Various governments waste huge amounts of money specifically on stopping child pornography being distributed over the public internet. That's it. Child pornography is still produced and distributed, albeit in a manner less visible to the public. "Out of sight, out of mind" is the motto of these people. They couldn't care less about the issues, just fickle, manipulatable public opinion.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 13:29 GMT sickofcrapjournos
Another craptastic article.
"Internet industry figures admit in private it would be significant" is as disingenuous a statement as any you claim TalkTalk are making. If you are going to make claims that an organisation doesn't back up its claims with fact, try not making the same mistake yourself. Who edits this rubbish, anyway?
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 13:31 GMT Chris Williams
Re: Another craptastic article.
That is based on conversations over several years with senior executives at ISPs, who for obvious reasons cannot admit as such in public.
Off the record conversations are essential in journalism because they are sometimes the only way to reveal a truth. If you don't like it I suggest you read something else. Or indeed, nothing at all.
Best,
- Chris
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:00 GMT Anonymous Coward
How do they know?
I was going to question that statement too, but I'll take your word for it.
What I want to know is, how do these senior executives figure it out? Assuming they haven't actually been looking at what all their customers have been downloading, how do they calculate how much customers value the ability to download music for free? Paris because I really don't know.
TalkTalk is pretty much the only ISP I actually like, I would have been their customer if it weren't for the poor lines out here in the sticks which lead to increased cost.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Hold on there buddy...
"Internet industry figures admit in private it would be __significant__."
No offence, but I'm going to go ahead and call 'bullshit' on this. What you're saying is that there is a significant number of internet subscribers who are using their connection to just download copyrighted material. Additionally, if this were not possible they would not keep the connection.
What would be significant? 10% of the user base? Using the subscriber numbers from 2007 ( http://www.internetworldstats.com/dsl.htm ) 1% would be 139,571 people who would give up their connection if there was no copyrighted material to download. (Let alone, 1.3million.) So yes, I say it again, Bullshit.
ISPs are not raking in the cash as they ride the wave made by Pirate Bay as Bono and your self seem to be implying.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:50 GMT Will Leamon
As it was then...
I think that statement was true when broadband first came along (ie music downloads were the killer app for broadband) but these days I seriously doubt we would ditch our highspeed connections if the whole piracy thing just disappeared tomorrow. We're hooked and there's no looking back.
PS. Bono's a twat.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:57 GMT Chris Williams
Re: As it was then...
Agreed. It's privately accepted that P2P - most of it illegal - was mostly responsible for establishing broadband. And as you say, there's no going back.
Equally, what do people think Virgin Media 50Mbit subscribers pay the premium for today? The people I'm referring to in the story say illegal film and TV downloads.
If Bono had his way, and it was tracked or blocked, would there be a market for that service? Genuine question. Please don't mention Linux distros.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 16:27 GMT Samo
Re: As it was then...
Hell yeah! Off the top of my head at consumer level: -
-Online gaming,
- Streaming of HD movies / TV Shows (see Korea for example)
- HD quality video messenging.
- Cloud computing in the future?
Then, at a business level: -
- Video Conferencing,
- File sharing (as in CAD drawings, projects, etc) between remote sites,
- Remote HD presentations (uhm, if they are still used)
I'm sure if I thought about it more, I would find more consumer level reasons, but those are the ones I use in some kind of way (online gaming, SD iplayer, and SD skype, for example... Lowly 2Mb speed here :( )
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 20:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
And more...
More and more people are using VPN access to make home working a reality.
As a computer professional (and I know many others that do the same from time to time) a fast Internet connection is essential for a practical home solution.
Granted, you don't need 50Mbit but how many people actually have that? An insignificant proportion I would guess.
When broadband was first being bought up, it was probably true that the vast majority were tech-savvy hackers wanting the latest cinema-ripped off content from some dodgy sites. Today, although they are the bandwidth hoggers, I suggest that they are a very small minority of Internet users.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 21:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Exactly as above...
From a consumer point of view, at least - I know many households (my own included) who have more than one online gamer / heavy internet user at at time using thier service - a not unusual line up when I used Virgin's 20Mb service would be: 2 x WoW clients, 1 x Eve client 2 x Spotify clients, messenger clients plus Teamspeak / skype / Ventrillo and web browsing etc.. all these over 2 machines. More if the kids are round (iphones etc). It's very easy to suddenly produce a large amount of data traffic over your connection these days whilst remaining wholly within the law.
Now I don't live in a cable area, and I'm kinda missing it.. <itch> 8Mb (more like 4 - 7ish) doesnt cut it.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 17:10 GMT copsewood
Different business model needed
If the content carried by the network sells the network, morally the providers of the content should reasonably get a commission, but when they do, the commission has to be conditional upon legitimising use of content for which sales commission is due. The idea that content providers can police use of the network is incompatible with human rights concerned with privacy and expression.
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Wednesday 6th January 2010 12:57 GMT Tempest 3K
Re: As it was then...
@Chris,
I have one of these 50Mbit connections - the reason? I do a LOT of work with large files and websites, alongside broadcasting on an internet radio station (licensed I might add before anyone jumps on that point). I also do a lot of gaming alongside said station, so being able to download games on steam etc and new MP3's from Amazon etc at high speed is great for me!
I suspect I'm not the only one using these 'premium' connections for these sort of reasons.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Equally off the record...
... the music industry might concede what several not-very-cooked-by-them studies, and in fact some book publishers from practice(!) have found: That there is significant gain from ensuring a wider audience gets reached, regardless of how ``illegal'' that is done. Right, that'll happen. But lobby industries' denials do not change whether such a thing is true or not. Political failure for the good for the citizens to prevail is politicians directly failing their core market customers. Not mentioning ``core competencies'' though.
And as regards child pr0n, I disagree with talk talk (and various governments the world over including the UK government), in that mandatorily blocking anything constitutes censorship, which is bad and undemocratic any way you look at it, and does exactly nothing for the children that are, will be, or might be abused. And a fix for the moral panic it sprang out of it also is not.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 13:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
He really is a sanctimonious twat
To quote Graham Norton:
"People like Bono really annoy me. He goes to hell and back to avoid paying tax. He has a special accountant. He works out Irish tax loopholes. And then he's asking me to buy a well for an African village. Tarmac a road or pay for a school, you tight-wad!”
I'd take his views on government policy a lot more seriously if he paid something towards it.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:00 GMT SuperTim
tracking content.
It is indeed easy to track content (if it is hosted on a website that doesnt move). Tracking encrypted porn being P2P'd is harder, but even assuming that's possible, it is easy to say that it is ALWAYS illegal.
Now, blocking a song being sent over the internet requires the ISP to KNOW that the song should not be sent. That is altogether harder. It may be a track i have written, that i own on one computer but need to send to another, or that is not copyrighted at all. The ISPs cannot know all of that.
I know what bono is trying to say, but then the problems are not at all the same.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Bono is a god not a dick!
How dare Steve 70 suggest Bono is a dick. Clearly the man has a point, as does everyone is in the music industry saying illegal downloading is killing the industry.
Ignoring the fact that the week after Christmas the UK had a record amount of Single sales, 4.22 million of them, and in October the record for most amount of singles sold in a year was broken with 10 weeks of sales still to go and final figures are expected to be around the 150 million mark. Its also clear looking at sales figures over the past few years that as internet users increase so do single sales.
So ignoring the fact that the internet has actually increased sales figure the internet is clearly killing the music industry
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 17:08 GMT The Indomitable Gall
Increased singles sales != Increased sales
The great pick-n-mix of iTunes is killing the album.
Of course, the album's integrity was continually undermined during the nineties and naughties by gimmick marketing: incessant "bonus features" destroyed the experience for the listener.
The "hidden track" was never well hidden and meant your CD would go silent for a minute or three before playing a minute or two of title track reprise. Kind of took the point out of getting a CD multichanger if you couldn't just let your CDs run continuously.
The "rerelease album with extra track that we released as a single" or "now with added bonux tracks" thing almost invariably led to an inconsistent sound across the album (because the tracks were recorded at a different time with different instruments and/or settings and possibly even a different band line-up), a bit like inserting a purple picture into a collection from Picasso's blue period -- similar, maybe; good, again maybe; out of place, definitely.
And then there was remix fever, which meant getting two or three songs from the album repeated at the end in a completely unrecognisable version in a style that fans of the artist's original style probably wouldn't like anyway. This combines the negative effects of deja vu with a rather extreme version of the inconsistency of the "wrong colour" bonus tracks problem above.
The album should be able to be taken as a single work or a collection of works (consider that "opera" is a Latin plural word, yet many purists still hold that a single piece from an opera cannot be fully appreciated outside of the complete opera). Short-sighted sales-chasing by the labels undermined that and now they're taking the hit.
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 20:31 GMT Steve Davies 3
Figures, Stats & Ingoring the truth
You can wave those single's sale in Bono's face until his cows get milked.
The RIAA(U) & BPI etc are infamous for ignoring the real facts. They will bend it, squeeze, & shake it until they get them to show what they want.
ego,
All downloads of Music are pirating. Think of the poor musician said Bono. Balls I say (especially those of Ed Balls)
I don't DL Music. I have used the iplayer and 4OD a few times. There again, I'm of an age where there is precious little new musing that interests me being produced. Certainly not some Simon Cowell close whiner.
however the writing is on the wall. DPI will become the norm nd everything we do on the interwebs will be censored probably within 5 years.
How long before NuLab proposed a £100/year license to use the Internet?
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:16 GMT BristolBachelor
Tape / Video / Internet is killing music
Yawn - Heard it all before.
"Home taping is killing music"
"Video killed the radio star" (like how I fitted that in? no - I'll get me coat)
"Video is killing movies"
"Internet is killing music"
To be honest, the heydays of music have passed because you know what, the kids have more to do now. They don't sit in their bedrooms listening to 7" all day anymore; they spend thier hours killing people in drive-by shootings on their PS3/Xbox, or taming ponies on their Wii.
I have to ask; how much poorer would society REALLY be if there were no record conglomerates, nobody recorded music for the masses, and maybe even if there were no more films? Yeah, I can see why this is SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than the energy crisis, global warming, people being afraid of what a group of kids will do to them if they ask them to stop smashing up a car, research into diseases that kill thousands...
(for the record, I'm not a freetard, just a free thinker)
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 14:50 GMT Mountford D
Way to go BristolBachelor
You hit on the nail there buddy.
It is about time the music industry realised their market and business model has changed permanently and making easy millions out of pop music is no longer an option.
On behalf of our reality overlords, I welcome the music industry and all those who think popular music is the path to instant fame and fortune. Subscribe to Simon Cowell's ruthlessness if you really want that and try understanding the word "business" in the description "music business".
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Tuesday 5th January 2010 16:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
What else did we expect?
It's natural for the likes on Bono to invoke the spectre of child Pr0n to support his argument: politicians are at it, the police are at it and advocates all over the shop are always at it. It's a cudgel with which to beat down one's opponents and an effectively blunt instrument in almost every situation. But let's not take too many more lectures about the good and evils of world off this obscenely wealthy mutlimillionaire and his chums in the music biz. Hardly the best of role models, are they? More like snake-oil salesmen.
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