UK ISP Piracy Surcharge Could Force 40,000 Households Offline

[Rob Williams]

Over the past couple of years, media companies have been battling piracy in many different ways, but at the end of the day, their measures all but fail, and prove to be nothing more than an inconvenience to those who ran into the temporary roadblock. Despite draconian measures like DRM, sales all-around are up, and it's for good reason. On the movie side, there have been some stellar titles out there, and for music, the likewise can be said.

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You can read the rest of our news post here.

 

[Psi*]

This is the kind of issue that causes me to consider complete revlt ... well, in a geek way ... so if I had a real jb at a real brick & mortal company, I would disconnect the internet & cable at home.Cut the damn wires off the pole to the house!!! Business is business and business needs it to stay competitive. But for home, who needs this cr@p? If I want weird stuff, I'll either go to the local video rental store or the ads in the back of "Photography", "Popular Science", or some other similar anarchist kind of magazine.

I don't think your article went deep enough as there is a more pervasive issue in the UK from the IEEE Spectrum magazine. The IEEE is a pretty conservative group, I think ... doesn't mean that they are. And this author could be blowing things out of proportion. But is your article & the IEEE article suggesting that the surcharge is actually paying for the means of the UK government to spy on the public?

Personally, I find this hard to believe given no other news story. I will be watching for other news relative to this. Lets face it, if the UK goes this way, will Canada be far behind??

 

[Rob Williams]

That's quite the conspiracy theory, and I'm not too confident that it's true. As far as I'm aware, the UK leads the world in serveillance already, so I'm not quite sure how much more "spying" they'd need to do, or what good it would do.

The record industry has always been hugely vocal about lost profits, and believe it or not, Canada probably <em>isn't</em> that far behind. After all, Canadians already pay a hidden fee on blank media, which the record industry imposed as a means to get some money back, since obviously, all blank media is used for piracy.