UK considers Pirate Finder General
No, it's not what you think: a swash-buckling extra-legal pirate hunter with a musket, a clipper ship and letters of mark stalking the coasts of Somalia. It's about copyright piracy. And it's kind of sinister.
The British Secretary of State is proposing legislation that would give his position the ability to create anti-piracy legislation without Parliamentary debate. The goal is to crack down on copyright infringement in a big way.
Cory Doctorow at Boing-Boing broke the story:
This comes as some see the music industry starting to recover from a hard decade of battling piracy. The Economist wrote last week that though sales across the industry are down a third, the music business is adapting successfully. And moving beyond suing the pants of off random downloaders. Viacom's chief counsel told a group of Yale law students that suing P2P users "felt like terrorism".
Well it certainly seems like the Brits are gearing up for the sort of extralegal powers we're used to over here with our War on Terror. ...But...wait...that's backward...the terrorists are....the lawyers? Ah, somebody'll figure it out.
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The British Secretary of State is proposing legislation that would give his position the ability to create anti-piracy legislation without Parliamentary debate. The goal is to crack down on copyright infringement in a big way.
Cory Doctorow at Boing-Boing broke the story:
This is as bad as I've ever seen, folks. It's a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.
This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.
This comes as some see the music industry starting to recover from a hard decade of battling piracy. The Economist wrote last week that though sales across the industry are down a third, the music business is adapting successfully. And moving beyond suing the pants of off random downloaders. Viacom's chief counsel told a group of Yale law students that suing P2P users "felt like terrorism".
Well it certainly seems like the Brits are gearing up for the sort of extralegal powers we're used to over here with our War on Terror. ...But...wait...that's backward...the terrorists are....the lawyers? Ah, somebody'll figure it out.
Recently on the Current News Blog:
- Why 14.6% of America can't afford enough food - Real Recovery
- The last Supreme Leader of Iran
- Problems facing California prisons: Cell phones
- US, China to work on clean energy - No bill this year
- Did airport slaughter scene get Modern Warfare 2 banned in Russia?
