UK Three Strikes plan too costly: ISPs
p2pnet news view P2P | Politics:- There they go again. “Lord Mandelson’s proposals to cut off ‘persistent’ file sharers do not make financial sense, according to estimates of its cost put forward by those who would have to implement it,” says the Guardian.
Of course they don’t make sense. Nothing about the plan makes sense.
And as we keep on pointing out, it isn’t Mandelson’s. It’s no more than the UK version of identical ‘anti-piracy’ schemes dreamed up by Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music and Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures and thrust upon timorous governments around the world.
Mandelson is merely the person hawking it around the halls of the UK Parliament.
The cartels accuse the hundreds of millions of men, women and children around the world who share music of being hardened thieves and criminals, claiming when someone shares a piece of music with someone else, a sale is lost. It’s exactly the same as stealing a CD from a store, they say.
However, neither the movie studios nor the record labels never come even close to upholding the assertion. And with sharing, unlike stealing, no one is deprived of something s/he used to own.
Be that as it may, “British Telecom and Carphone Warehouse estimate that running the enforcement system would cost about £2 per broadband line per month – a total of £24 per broadband line per year. With 17.6m broadband connections in the UK as of September, means it would cost £420m annually to run a system to defeat a problem the music industry complains costs it £200m per year,” says the story, going on »»»
Lord Mandelson said that “ISPs and rights-holders will share the costs, on the basis of a flat fee that will allow both sides to budget and plan.”
If the costs of running the system are equally shared between rights-holders and ISPs, that means that ISPs will have to push up bills for the majority of law-abiding customers who do not download illegally, while the rights-holders spend as much as they claim they are losing.
Reactions from the music and music streaming industry to Lord Mandelson’s reasserted determination to cut off “persistent” file-sharers has not been positive either.
And let’s not forget taxpayers – including musicians and their dependants — in Britain and everywhere else.
They, too, would be forced to support entertainment industry efforts to turn governments into corporate copyright agencies, and local ISPs into copyright cops.
But unlike ISPs, citizens have absolutely no say in the matter.
Stay tuned.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Guardian – Costs would exceed savings on Mandelson plan, ISPs say – and streaming companies not eager either, October 28, 2009
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