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Re: [LUG] My letter to my MP / ISP ban to The Pirate Bay

 

 On 02/05/2012 12:24, paul sutton wrote:
On 02/05/12 11:48, Julian Hall wrote:
  On 02/05/2012 08:02, Mark Cross wrote:
FOR THE ATTENTION OF:

Sarah Wollaston MP
Totnes

Wednesday 2 May 2012

Mark Cross
Totnes

RE: Proposed request to ask UK Internet Service Providers to ban
access to web sites that facilitate copying of copyrighted material

Dear Sarah,

Please could you explain the UK government's change in position since
the 1980's on the subject above?

At the time many tape to tape recording devices were explicitly
manufactured for the purposes of copying audio cassettes. These
consumer priced items, known at the time as "ghetto blasters" were
legally sold on the High Street, by chains of the time, such as Dixons
and Currys.

No such ban was put in the place to block the retail sale of these
devices, please could ask the minister concerned as to what has
changed since that time requiring a change in the law?

I remember that tape copying was like a rash at school, but somehow, I
have accumlated probably 1000 CDs and my cassettes have all been
thrown away. Likewise my peers all seem to have vast legally purchased
CD collections.

Yours sincerely,

Mark Cross MBCS CITP

Not forgetting the likes of the Amstrad DD8900 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sACT3emJZmU

Also, although my own music cassette library is pitiful in comparison
to most other people I know, I have all of my cassette albums on MP3
purchased from Amazon, therefore the record label has benefited twice
- I won't say the artist since they get such a pitiful fraction of the
total cost of each sale.

Julian

This is something many people don't realise the artist gets very
little,  I did read the google+ article (well it was linked from
google+) on this written by a young artist with first hand experience of
how much the company gets vs the amount the artist gets,   once you take
in to account, fees for this,  marketing, middle men,  agents and such
like.

We need to do more to highlight this issue to raise awareness of
this,    There used to be a policy of fair usage,  so you could take an
LP and copy to tape for the car or walkman (personal use) this was
revoked but I am sure the government have back tracked on this,
There is a legal review underway to allow people to copy across different formats, since the current situation makes it technically illegal to copy your own legally purchased music to your PC/MP3 player/CD for backup etc.
1. the recording industry argument is that if you share this material on
file sharing sites, then neither the company or artist get anything for
it,   and you are hurting the industry,  which is a fair argument until
you realise how that money is distributed and it starts to unravel.
The fact I can share a track illegally and that person then perhaps goes
out and buys that album anyway is probably never taken into account.  So
its a sort of underground promotion ( as you said in what you wrote above)
http://blog.collins.net.pr/2006/05/cd-costs-breakdown.html

OK this is 2006 but I'd bet it hasn't changed that much in the last six years. Classic example of someone breaking the mould was Prince releasing his last couple of albums as newspaper inserts. I wouldn't mind betting he got a bigger payout from that than he would have from sales through a record company.
2 the thing people forget is that the pirate bay i guess is the same as
megaupload, it is used to share more then just a copyrighted material,.
Even in the legitimate material you get Anti-theft adverts on every commercial DVD, DRM in many (not all) commercially downloaded MP3s, and copy protection in games. On one laughable occasion a friend of mine bought a game and it wouldn't play on his PC. He contacted the game publisher and it turned out it wouldn't play because he had a DVD-RW drive! Then the *game publisher* told him to download and use the No CD crack! Oh and apparently on such games the frame rate is stuffed because the PC spends too much time checking constantly if it's a legal CD and not enough time actually playing the game.

So the law abiding citizen gets hammered with theft adverts, stopped from (for example) copying tracks from their computer to their MP3 player, or playing games they have legally purchased, while the pirates strip all that out so the illegal file-sharers have no such limitations.
it is like this argument on blocking children from accessing porn
sites,  google seems to argue that it is UP TO PARENTS to take control
and acually PARENT their kids rather than being lazy and letting someone
else do it for them and moan when it goes wrong.   I agree with google.
on this it is up to PARENTS to do this, install filters not expect
others to do it for them.
That's a whole new argument, and one I completely agree with you on.

At the end of the day all this proposed legislation is being pushed by MPs seemingly without any reference to professional technical expertise to find out if what they are proposing will actually work. Blocking sites (for any reason) won't work because quite simply those who want to circumvent the block will do so with proxies and/or anonymising websites. One minute with an IT technician would tell them that, but they'd rather be seen to be doing *something* than wait longer and actually do something that would work.

Julian

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