Fifty Strikes and… we'll tell your Mum

50 whats?

50 is hardly a large amount if you count say for example singles.

Heck should you lose your mind and decide to grab the latests "Now that's what I call pop sh**" that could be you out straight away!

@"fifty free download sessions"

What so if you reconnect 50 times (even while downloading 1 file), then its time up.

Well thats just about every file sharer. Within 50 days, everyone using file sharing software could be easily squeezed into this definition of "fifty free download sessions".

Sounds like another empty and meaningless political statement. So they want to re-word the document, so they can tell us, hey everyone, look we done good, (just before an election) yet its actually meaningless.

Sounds like another typical two faced politician. :(

Vote Lib Dem

What have we got to lose.

Our civil liberaties - GONE

Our Money - Paying bankers bonuses

Our Pride - Gone

Our Chocolate - Gone

We have nothing left to lose

why don't they...

Ignoring the dodgy figures spouted by the recording and music industries because we know that every downloaded album is not necessarily a lost sale, much as they want us to believe it is.

Why not levy a charge on every unlimited broadband user, say £20 a year, to be divided up between the copyright holders.

ISP's moniter traffic, but to allow fair division of the cash raised to the copyright holders.

So they get the cash owed and serial downloaders are no longer worried about a knock on the door from plod.

If you don't want to pay the £20, then you are fair game for possible legal actions.

Seemples

What's needed is a STIFF penalty -- for making false allegations

The way to ensure action is only taken only when justified is to have an anti-fine of at least ten times the standard penalty if somebody implies another has committed an offence and the implication turns out to be false.

Example -- man knocks on door "You don't have a TV licence, please prove you don't have a TV".

If TV found -- fine £1000. Fair enough, an offence was committed.

It TV not found -- fine the caller £10,000 for investigating without adequate proof.

Same with file sharing, ebay takedowns, etc -- if you don't have 100% irrefutable proof, don't take action -- there must be compensation of at least ten times the potential fine to prevent abuse.

hey

I want a free unicorn...

@Alan Gregory 1

oh dear, you were sounding reasonable until you decided to put the fucking meerkat twat quote in there :(

it's advertising, they are trying to get in your head, for their own purposes, and it appears to be working.

-Wake Up Alan!

@registerfail

Intelligent mindset?

That would be why here in Southport, the Lib Dems have systematically destroyed our once thriving town. Under their leadership they have taken a seaside resort and tried to turn it into a shopping centre. The last thing the area needed was more shops as weh have shopping centres on all sides - Liverpool, Preston, Ormskirk and Wigan all competing for shoppers money.

The sensible thing to do would have been to provide attractions to bring people to the town to spend their disposable income on, things that other areas could not provide. Instead we now have an endless parade of shops you can find anywhere - M&S, Next, Topman, River Island etc etc which is hardly an incentive for anyone to come. Why should they bother if they can get the exact same things on their own doorstep? The Lib-Dems are at a loss to explain why visitor numbers to the town are down, when most of the residents can tell you exactly why.

Anytime anyone comes up with an idea for a new attraction, they shoot it down. Anytime a new shopping centre wants to open it gets the go ahead, while all the time they increase the council tax rates while reducing the available services and have gradually moved all decisions about what happens to the town over to Bootle, instead of keeping it locally in our own town hall. They have public consultations on plans for the town and then completely ignore the wishes of the residents. Look up the pedestrianisation of Chapel Street as an example. It was put to a public vote, we decided we didn't want it so they ignored us completely and spent millions of pounds of our money because they had already decided that is what they wanted to do.

Council services are a shambles, repairs are a shambles, local housing is expensive despite constant reassurances they are commited to affordable housing for local people, the roads are full of pot-holes that never get repaired and all the time the 'intelligent mindset' that you mention complain about what is happening to the town and how badly run it is.

Then at the next vote guess what they do - they vote them in again because that's who they have always voted for and are too scared to change. They then continue to complain about lack of services, council tax increases and all the rest because the 'intelligent mindset' didn't have the sense to get rid of them at election time and not because they thought that they are doing a good job.

Whatever you do, do not vote Lib-Dem - even the monster raving looney party would do a better job of management than those idiots. I shudder to think what they could do if they got control of the whole country. As a former Labour voter, I feel my only option in the next general election is to vote Tory as Labour have made a complete mess of the country and the Lib-Dems have made a complete mess of my town.

Losing the plot

I'm sure that I've missed something but isn't a chunk of this bill about making an acitvity (copyright breach over the Internet) that only has to be proven in the courts on the balance of probabilities and for which there has never been a successful plaintiff., into a crime for which no evidence need be shown, with absolute power to enforce punishment.

Reminds me of CBBC Horrible Histories

"Have you had something bad happen in your life? Then call Witchfinders Direct! We'll burn an old women without justifcation. Call now"

LORD RAZZALL

He sounds like a Nordic death metal band or something! Wasn't he also a porn mag back in the day?

Paris, why who else?

Origins of slang

"Unlicensed file sharers have a new name to toast this morning: Lord Razzall."

Hence the slang term "on the razz" meaning "to participate in a session where alcohol is imbibed in quantity" - something which people toasting others in the morning are quite likely to be doing.

The BPI - technical humourists

Living in VietNam I enjoy the benefits of a 'Mandy' free environment where Bittorrent rules and copy software compilations on DVDs sell for a $1.50.

Annually BPI comes out with its 'guesstimates' of hot software used in the Indochina region based upon pure fantasy. If the government of VietNam doesn't know how many computers are in existence in the country, how does BPI know?

The police, along with some government techies from Ha Noi, make a lot of noise and search offices, without warrants, for computers loaded with hot software. . Fortunately we have a totally corrupt police force and for $16 they will warn people of impending inspections.

We have now gathered a collection of very, very realistic disks - complete with hot licence stickers (sold in China) - so when our green-uniformed Plod arrive we proudly show them our licences and after a coffee they disappear.

Little wonder Linux is being blessed by governments hereabouts and schools have standardised on open/freeware programs.

But as sure as hell, the BPI will out and about spreading their lies and idiots like Mad Mandy will be taken in yet again.

Who gets the £20?

"Why not levy a charge on every unlimited broadband user, say £20 a year, to be divided up between the copyright holders."

The problem with this concept is deciding just who the 'copyright holders' are. It's all very well assuming it's the big 4 record labels or certain Hollywood or other big media players, but it's wrong-thinking to follow this train of thought. The copyright holders could, in reality, just as easily be small independent labels or film production companies, or even individual artists and creatives themselves. What slice of the £20 are they going to see?

If these indies don't get a slice of the £20 how fair does it make a system which guarantees income for some businesses at the expense of others, because if subscribers who are music or movie fans have £20 less to spend each year, it's those struggling grassroots creatives who are going to suffer the most.

The EASIEST option is simply to change the current civil laws to allow for file-sharing without financial gain. As soon as money enters the equation (if somebody is charging you for downloads), it becomes a commercial venture and thus uncompensated copyright infringement becomes an actionable offence, under civil law, just as it currently is.

So now...

So now you just repeat the same accusation 50 times instead of 3 and it magically becomes fact! We need this bill to be dropped entirely - no part of it is welcome.

btw... The word 'fail' is a verb, not a noun. Why do we accept continuous Orwellian new-speak style distortions to our language? No wonder shit like this gets through.

Mandelson again?

we're DOOMED....doomed, i tell ye!!!!!

An interesting read:

The bit I liked in this was about how 90% of the worlds media is controlled by 4 corporations.

Edited for size - go have a read of the entire article tho - it's very informative.

http://questioncopyright.org/bob_ostertag_speaks#comment-6397

Copyright notice: These web pages are devoted to questioning the idea that copyright is necessary for the promotion of creative expression. Therefore, our content is released to the public and can be considered to be in the public domain: you may copy, share, excerpt, modify, and distribute modified versions of this and other pages from QuestionCopyright.org.

The Professional Suicide of a Recording Musician

Submitted by bobostertag on Mon, 2007-04-09 13:12

Bob Ostertag

"When record companies first appeared, their services were required in order for people to listen to recorded music. Making and selling records was a major undertaking. Recording studios and record manufacturing plants had to be built, recording technology and techniques developed. Records not only had to be manufactured but also distributed and advertised. Record executives may have been crooked in their business practices, callous about music, or racist in their treatment of artists, but the services the companies provided were at least useful in the sense that recorded music could not be heard without them. Making recorded music available to the general public required a significant outlay of capital, which in turn required a legal structure that would provide a return on the required investment.

What exactly are these corporations? To begin with, we should note that the major “record companies” are not actually record companies at all but huge media conglomerates. Most “independent” labels are owned by a corporate label. Each “major” is in turn owned by an even bigger corporation, and so on up the food chain. At the top of the chain sit a tiny handful of media giants: Time Warner, Disney, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Bertelsmann of Germany, Viacom (formerly CBS) and General Electric. These corporations are among the world’s largest. All are listed in Fortune Magazine’s “Global 500” largest corporations in the world. They have integrated both horizontally (owning lots of record labels, lots of newspapers, and radio stations) and vertically (controlling newspapers, magazines, book publishing houses, and movie and TV production studios, as well as print distribution systems, cable and broadcast TV networks, radio stations, telephone lines, satellite systems, web portals, billboards, and more).

This incredible concentration of power over news, entertainment, advertising, music, and media of all kinds is a recent phenomena, and is fueled by the very same digital technology that has made the Web and the recording-studio-in-the-bedroom possible. In 1983, 50 corporations dominated US mass media, and the biggest media merger in history was a $340 million deal. By 1997 the 50 had shrunk to 10, one of which was created in the $19 billion merger of Disney and ABC. Just three years later, the end of the century saw the 10 shrink to just five amidst the $350 billion merger of AOL and Time Warner, a deal more than 1,000 times larger than “the biggest deal in history” just 17 years before. As Ben Bagdikian, author of the classic study The New Media Monopoly noted, “In 1983, the men and women who headed the first mass media corporations that dominated American audiences could have fit comfortably in a modest hotel ballroom… By 2003, [they] could fit in a generous phone booth.” [4]

These companies own the most powerful ideology-manufacturing apparatus in the history of the world. It is no wonder they have convinced most musicians, and most everyone else, that the entire endeavor of human music-making would come to a screeching halt if people were allowed to listen to recorded music without first paying a fee – to these corporations. I know many musicians for whom making records in an environment dominated by corporate giants has been an exhausting and thankless task from which they have derived little or no gain, yet they remain convinced that taking advantage of the free global distribution offered by the Internet would constitute some sort of professional suicide."