Comments on: U2’s Manager Wants To Violate Your Privacy For Violating His Bank Account

By: Swankster

Swankster — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 10:28:04 +0000

His analogies would work better if he said...

"If you were a transportation agency that owned and advertised roads leading to chopshops filled with stolen cars, handling the money for tolls in and out of these roads and seeing to the ready availability of said roads, the police would soon be at your door," he said.

"That's no different to an ISP, but they say they can't do anything about it because they don't control the legality or illegality of cars on the road..."

See completely meaningless. ISPs are the infrastructure. You don't penalize airplanes or plastic baggies for the drug trade.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:46:11 +0000

ISP's already monitor everything you do.

there are only two real gaps in this manager's assertions:

1) that ISP's are "getting rich" off of illegal downloads, as if somehow the more traffic goes over an ISP's network, the more money they make. in fact, the exact opposite is true. the #1 reason why universities are engaging in port blocking and the like for popular file sharing networks is not fear of RIAA litigation, but simple expense management. P2P file sharing was driving university bandwidth usage through the stratosphere. the more per-user bandwidth an ISP has to provide, the less money they make. if ISP's -could- prevent file sharing without restricting legitimate usage on top of illegal usage, they'd have done it a long time ago, not in the name of copyrights, but in the name of profits.

2) that all file sharing is illegal and that therefore ISP's should simply block -all- file sharing to solve the problem. while ISP's can port monitor and packet sniff and the like to have a sense of what you are up to, they have no way to verify if you are sharing the latest U2 single (which would be illegal) or the latest mix of a track by my own band (which would be totally legal since we allow you to distribute on our behalf). ISP's are not throwing up their hands and pretending they can't help because they're somehow getting rich off file sharing (they aren't, they're losing money). they're throwing up their hands and saying they can't help because they can't.

By: coolfer

coolfer — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 05:28:53 +0000

while this subject certainly makes for a good debate, i think you’re going to far when you say ISPs will “summarily kick them off if they note anything ’suspicious.’” McGuinness, the French government and the IFPI have talked about cracking down on mass infringers, not the casual track-here-and-there types. It doesn’t change the core of the privacy debate, but it means far fewer people would be affected than you imply. My main issue with this strategy, from an economic point of view, is that there’s probably far more casual infringement than mass infringement, and it’s very possible that the casual infringement represents the lost purchases the industry wants to recapture.

By: Ned Raggett

Ned Raggett — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:05:17 +0000

He and Doug Morris should go on a lecture tour.

Meanwhile, that photo above is not what I needed to see first thing in the morning.

By: Dickdogfood

Dickdogfood — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:00:25 +0000

It’s cute that he still thinks record companies–shrinking by the nanosecond–have any kind of sway over the telecommunications industry.

By: matthew

matthew — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:53:41 +0000

I can totally see ISPs going for something like that…I’m sure they’d love to be liable for all illegal/copyrighted material that goes over their network.

By: Dickdogfood

Dickdogfood — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:52:31 +0000

These guys are from England and who gives a shit?