FACT vs. Fact
For anyone that doesn't pay attention to the trials, media and farce that is occulted from major media perspectives, there's this thing called piracy that is making international waves. In the UK, the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) recently lost a case against a site called TVLinks. More about this here.
There's lots of people out there who would like to control what you can and can't see or do on this thing called the internet. It's getting so bad that things ACTA trade agreements are being conducted in secret that bring many world governments together to agree on how best police the proliferation of piracy. This is not a good thing. The position that business takes is that piracy isn't conducive towards good business. That is quite indeed the problem. They say that piracy reduces business' profit. Yet we can quite clearly see this is not the case, particularly with Avatar. Despite being the most downloaded movie on bittorrent, it has broken box office ticket sales set by Titanic. This is certainly only one case and leaves a lot of other individual cases to be sniffed out by those who wish to dig, but I'll get quickly to the point.
None of this legislation and secret trade agreements is relevant at all. It's all bogus and incidental. None of it matters, but they're trying to make it matter.
The internet is a utility. It is a cable that comes into the house/apartment/porn studio and things come in and out. This isn't too different from an electrical cable. We don't restrict what people can and can't do with electricity. That's impossible. Big Media argues that ISPs facilitate a crime. Does electricity facilitate a crime? Sure, serial killers use refrigerators to store heads and rotary saws to cut off limbs. It facilitates marijuana grow ops and all sorts of other 'criminal' activities. But do the police go after the electrical company because they facilitated the electricity to store those heads frozen? If there hadn't been a refrigerator maybe the heads would have gone bad and smelled and the neighbors would have known there were severed heads a few dozen feet away! Why not go after the refrigerator company for providing refrigerators to serial killers? You can see how ridiculous this gets.
Some will argue the internet is more complex than that. That you can't draw an analogy between electricity, which is what powers things to something that facilitates social networking, telephony and Web 2.0. I say there's not a damn difference. Electricity is passed around between individuals through their heart rates every day. That's a form of unacknowledged social networking. And that's just humans. How many different electrical circuits between herbivore and carnivore does it take to complete an actual ecosystem in Nature?
If the Big Studios get their way in controlling what we can see and do on the internet, that's not going to be good. Big Studio Brother might be more apt. If everyone who downloaded a torrent donated a penny to a cause that introduced a new sustainable ecosystem of creativity that countered the existing big business model, we'd have a new model of creative support in a very, very short amount of time. But big business probably will win, because in fact, it only works because people are lazy.