| gwailoh wrote on Sat, 07 March 2009 20:01 |
Hi Bill: I'm not a lawyer, but your description of complicity certainly seems to describe the ISPs who enable illegal activities by providing the bandwidth they require, and who profit from the fees paid to them by large and small pirates alike. Perhaps if those with intellectual property to protect were to band together to sue ISPs, they might be encouraged to shut down P2P ports and etc.
Perhaps this has already been tried, I dunno. Just thinking about what you wrote.
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This had already came up in another thread where someone that worked for an ISP said that the ISP's are getting hammered by bandwidth hogs and having to upgrade, and asked the question "why do you see no more ISP's popping up?". Which were all good points. That's not to say that the ISP's don't have some part in this, but by the time they realized what was going on, they got sucked into it too.
Is there absolutely, absolutely nothing the ISP's can do? I don't know if I buy that, because they technically probably could have developed tracking software a long time ago. Right now, they issue warnings to offenders, but they
could just shut the internet down and pull their servers, and what would people do about it? They could complain, but the ISP's could just say "tough luck".
The ISP's are like the landlord of the building that file sharers are stealing out of. Eventually the landlord could go down and kick those tenants out, so that as landlords, they are not held accountable for actions that are happening in their premises. Right now, though, the file sharers are going on a dope, guns and fucking in the streets kick, and the landlords aren't quite armed enough to be able to safely get them out of there. Remember, this is the Wild West, and even the sheriff doesn't have the ammo and resources to take on those thugs, the best he can do is say, "hey guys, can you kinda sorta, like, please, uh, stop doing that?". They're laughing in his face.
But get the sheriff some backup--the entertainment industry ready to sue the bejeezus out of bit torrent sites and the like, as well as enough
content providers speaking up and saying "no, it is not alright that you can distribute or do whatever you feel like with our material online". Or even a guy like Bill, who is trying to raise enough ruckus to stand up for what he believes are his rightful dues from his gaming developments. I can only imagine how it burns him up as someone is getting endless thrills from his games, while he sees the store till dry up significantly. "Sorry man, we don't have the money, oh, but by the way, LOVE the game, man!!! The graphics and interplay are really well thought out". How long could you endure that before you snapped?
Right now, the town is being robbed, and the general storekeeper doesn't want to name names of who robbed him in fear of retaliation, same with the blacksmith. This reminds me of a trial where witnesses don't want to come forward to convict the felons, because they're scared of the retaliation.
Similarly, most bands and musicians and labels that
want to talk about this sort of thing don't, because they don't want to be tarred and feathered. Look at Lars Ulrich, even his management and entourage were telling him to shut up and now he's like, "it's alright if you download, really!!". Does he really believe that, or does he just not want Wild Bill Pecos to shoot him in the night sometime when he's asleep?
