Studios crushed: ISP can't be forced to play copyright

RST101 makes a very good point. Many music (and movie) downloaders would not buy the content under any circumstances and therefore they represent no loss to the copyright holders. They download it because they can. And they can because someone UPloaded it. Torrent trackers and indexers do not house content. They only connect users who wish to share content. ISPs are even further removed... they only provide access to the Internet and would lose customers if they were thought to be spying on them.

If I owned a liquor store, would I be liable for everything my customers did while drunk? Should the booze merchant be monitoring my drinking habits?

raydabruce said:

If I owned a liquor store, would I be liable for everything my customers did while drunk? Should the booze merchant be monitoring my drinking habits?

In my opinion, there is no comparison.

You can't kill someone downloading content off the web. Where as a drunk leaves the liquor store, then gets behind the wheel...

Without debating what is right or wrong in morals...


One of the things I have seen over the years is manufacturers "Prices are high due to piracy" but then CDs come out and you couldn't copy cds (at least unless you had a LOT of money for a burner) but games stayed the same price...they claimed the same thing when DVDs came out, and there were no burners...yet they stayed the same...

they claimed the same for the game consoles...they couldnt be copied for a period of time until a mod chip was released etc...

fact is they will price it however they want, whenever they want and piracy is the excuse, not the reason.

Personally, with the exception of Movies I am a HUGE fan of, I won't buy the dvd until it's less than $15. Fact is there are LOTS of DVDs around for $10, and they are big movies, but they just aren't the newest...obviously people still buy them or they wouldn't be at that price.... same deal as the above with Games...

If all games and DVDs were released at $10, how many piraters would stop? Most people I know would happily pay $10 for an original over a pirated. I understand the costs to a small company to do such a thing - but nowadays you can download it easy enough - so do that instead. Sure you will always have people copying stuff, but the majority would pay a reasonable price.

An example of this was WinPatrol - last week(?) it was on sale for $1. I hadn't used it, but it was recomended here, and for $1 - I bought it...great little app and would recomened to others... but I wouldn't have paid the $30 they ask for at normal price... I would have just found a different app that was free to do the same thing.

It would be inresting to see how many sales he made at $1 compared to $30, and see how close it was to breaking even (ie. 100 sales at $30 vs 3000 sales at $1...same income...different price) Not saying this will be the case, nor will it for all products. I would be interested to see if a company was willing to do this.

Just my thoughts

The Government here is now considering if the law should be changed for allowing third partys like ISPs to become responsible for the actions of their users or if a three-strikes policy should be implemented like NZ and the EU. During the trial, AFACT made the argument that iiNet was not blocking access to sites like thepiratebay and thus was permitting its users to commit copyright, They are now petitioning the Government to have torrent sites blocked using our Internet filter.

Lordbob75 said:

dmex said:

The Government here is now considering if the law should be changed for allowing third partys like ISPs to become responsible for the actions of their users or if a three-strikes policy should be implemented like NZ and the EU. During the trial, AFACT made the argument that iiNet was not blocking access to sites like thepiratebay and thus was permitting its users to commit copyright, They are now petitioning the Government to have torrent sites blocked using our Internet filter.

So will they also try to ban CD drives because you can pirate CDs with them?

~Lordbob

I bet they would if they could, would be a little hard since every machine in the last 10 years has more or less come with one

It was bad enough they wanted iiNet and other ISPs to disconnect users without court orders, based solely on their evidence but now wanting search websites like Isohunt and Mininova filtered when they dont break Australian law is just frighting.

How is downloading a song that everyone also hears on the radio the equivalent of this:

Main Entry: pi·ra·cy
Pronunciation: \ˈpī-rə-sē\
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural pi·ra·cies
Etymology: Medieval Latin piratia, from Late Greek peirateia, from Greek peiratēs pirate
Date: 1537
1 : an act of robbery on the high seas; also : an act resembling such robbery
2 : robbery on the high seas

dmex said:

They are now petitioning the Government to have torrent sites blocked using our Internet filter.

Allowing a government the option to filter websites, and\or make decisions on what content a citizen has access to, is the first step towards communism or a dictatorship...