Six Major ISPs Join P2P Crackdown

Well its has been a long time coming. only thing is then why should we pay for huge amount of money to Virgin or BT for fiber optic line and 200MBPS speed. I dont need that much speed to read trustedreviews.com, DO I?
I totally agree with Andrew Marshall illegal downloading is theft no question about it and you can't justify it. but I don't like the idea of getting my privacy breach like that. whats next CCTV at every house, A.I. equipped wheele bins, Irish scanner on every tarin and platform like Minority Report.
I won't say that I don't do a fair bit of downloading myself with torrent, after all I'm no saint.
But I've for blockbuster US movies always go to the cinema (hell I even saw thoes new CCTV they got inside theater in surrey quay Odeon even before the news hit the papers) and I dont listen to thoes BPI artist's song anyway. the ones I downlaod are items that I can't get hold of in DVD's or any other medium with english subs. yes I'm a big fan of Japanese, Korean drama and japanese anime. The dramas I can get hold of with good subs are all imported from USA and I have collected quiet a few but most of them never gets a release in US. And I have loveflim membership so which ever anime gets UK release I rent them out. but for stuff that are japan only, the only way of getting it is torrent. If they air the show over here or release DVD then I don't need to do that but I guess you can't get everything you want. well then again this all can be just me trying to justify myself.
I guess then I'll just wait for my ISP to say that they gona disconnect me bcoz I (didnot) download Amy Drughouse. OH! I guess not. I'm safe for the moment as I'm with Be*.

Theft, n. Dishonest appropriation of another's property with *intent to deprive him or her of it permanently*. [From the Oxford English Reference Dictionary]

Copyright infringement is not theft. Neither is it stealing or robbery (stealing is synonymous with theft, robbery is similar but usually involving coercive force).

Apples: Theft is a criminal act that involves permanently depriving the owner of their property, which copying bytes from one system to another does not achieve. To treat file sharing as theft is to cheapen the very definition of a crime that is damaging to our entire society. Do you really equate someone listening to music or watching a film they didn't pay for with someone stealing your car? How about removing money from people's bank accounts, snatching a pensioner's purse or taking drugs from hospitals?

Oranges: When someone infringes copyright, the legal content owner may not be compensated as they should be, but they are also not losing ownership or the right to distribute that property. Nor do they incur any cost to replace lost material. There is the rather flimsy lost sale argument, but a *potential* lost sale does not equal deprivation of property ownership.

Downloading content freely without any intention of compensating those who created it is a civil wrong to be addressed. But please do not get sucked into this propaganda that it's equivalent to theft; taking away something someone owns. It's not the same thing at all, and it's a damaging over-simplification to suggest that it is. That is precisely why copyright terminology exists in the first place... an apple is not an orange, even if both are rotten.

We can only wonder how many people would be using P2P today if an affordable system had been created that legally and safely offered the same range, quality, speed, flexibility and permanent ownership that illegal file sharing does. The content industry wilfully chose not to provide this service, seeing online distribution as a risk rather than an opportunity, and instead lashed out at their entire customer base. The black market simply expanded to fill the gap in demand that they failed to supply. Now it has so much momentum that they are losing out... let me crack out my tiny violin in a show of sympathy for their incompetence, greed and lack of vision.

@life

Your argument is pure sophistry. The issue is not one of copyright, but whether it is fair to obtain media for free when the owners of that material to not wish it to be so.

You claim that a crime is only theft when it "permanently" deprives someone of their possessions, but a dictionary definition is not the same as a legal one. To illustrate, you use the example of someone removing money from a bank account. This too is digital information, and covered by a bank's insurance but I doubt that you would claim that such an act is not criminal. Someone has to pay for that insurance and that someone is the consumer of the bank's services. Similarly, someone has to pay for the security precautions that media providers believe that they need because of the lost sales argument that you say is flimsy. Where do you think the money for that expenditure comes from? From the CEO's pocket? Hardly.

I do not make this argument as someone "sucked in by propaganda", but as someone whose income is directly affected by lost sales due to piracy. A company's failure to respond to a changing marketplace is indeed their failure, but it cannot excuse theft. I cannot believe that you think such behaviour is acceptable, or moral.

This is stupid. what about web-based <a href="http://www.fileswire.com">P2P</a> services like FilesWire. This can be used from any computer to share files so how can they be sure who is sharing what.