Viking porn
But surely vikings WERE pirates?
A government tech quango has handed £250,000 of taxpayers' cash to a British firm which fights to keep erotic fiction, among other things, out of the hands of copyright pirates. The Technology Strategy Board selected MUSO.com to receive a lucrative Smart Award in the hope it will use the cash to turn thieving internet …
The wife reads some of this stuff specifically because of how bad it is.* Especially the "Highland Romance" genre, the kind where the paper version would have a cover showing a muscle-bound and shaven-chested kilted warrior(the fact that I'm Scottish, and she's American may have something to do with it).
* She claims.
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The first three paragraphs of the article have completely missed the point of the TSB. It's given money to MUSO in the hope that it, MUSO, will make lots of money and hence pay lots of tax back to the UK government. So long as it's within the TSB remit, *how* it makes the money is immaterial, as is who pays for its services. In fact if the majority of MUSO's customers are (gasp) not British, all the better.
I presume this misunderstanding is deliberate trolling in the style of the Daily Mail (else the author is an idiot). It's certainly brought out the DM style commenters.
"I have a vague memory of hearing something about companies that make lots of money tending _not_ to pay lots of tax to the UK government."
There are other taxes besides Corporation Tax, VAT for instance. If MUSO employ anyone the government will receive PAYE, NICs etc.
(See Hyde Park Residence Ltd vs David Yelland, et al [1999] EWHC Patents 247, reaffirming Glyn v Weston Feature Film [1916] 1 Ch. 261 on this point.)
... it's particularly ironic to see taxpayer cash going to support someone in trying to stop piracy of porn, which by definition is grossly immoral.
porn, which by definition is grossly immoral.
I would like to see that assertion defended. It might be interesting to see the logical contortions necessary to reason that recording the act of generation (amongst other acts) is "by definition" immoral, especially grossly so.