Geeklawyer has  com­mented before, like ORG along with very many oth­ers, on the grotesque pro­posal to strike peo­ple accused, but not proven, to have engaged in unlaw­ful file shar­ing off the Intar­web. Two main things lie at the heart of this thinks Geeklawyer: one is the asser­tion that copy­right cre­ators are los­ing vast sums of money from such infringe­ment; sec­ondly pre­vent­ing it is dif­fi­cult and pur­su­ing infringers is dif­fi­cult & expensive.

On the first point the losses the BPI/MPAA etc rou­tinely assert in press quotes or to politi­cians are absolutely phoney: fig­ures pulled out of the eth­er­net. Every down­load is counted as a lost sale whereas it is prob­a­ble that in the absence of the Inter­net the down­loader would never have bought the work, so where is the loss? Geeklawyer would guess that a tiny minor­ity will down­load rather than buy but it is prob­a­bly very small.

The sec­ond point is an issue when rich pow­er­ful inter­ests can buy politi­cians pol­icy tends to get skewed. The Amer­i­can copy­right indus­try, and let us not delude our­selves that it is any­one but them — notwith­stand­ing their EU lack­eys doing as they are told, have not had a mas­sively suc­cess­ful time cur­tail­ing down­load­ing. All the threats of legal action have not dis­sauded sev­eral mil­lion Britons from doing so; and when they sue they have to go to court and engage in the time and expense of lit­i­ga­tion. How much more con­ve­nient to buy laws cir­cum­vent­ing the tire­some process that all other peo­ple have to go though.

This is the pro­posal cur­rently doing the rounds in the EU and MEPs have been caught try­ing to tack it secretly onto a bill meant for some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent — in a failed attempt to avoid scrutiny; a well used trick in the US that seems to be being imported to us. Twatty MEP Mal­com Har­bour is say­ing “no, we didn’t really mean the text to say that, hon­est.”

Don’t worry about prov­ing your case we’ll assume it is you, we’ll assume you knew. Rely on the Inter­net for your job or liv­ing? Tough shit.

It really makes Geeklawyer want to open the plane door over Paris, on his way over to Japan, and defae­cate on the idiot French but Geeklawyer is told this causes sta­bil­ity prob­lems for the air­craft and much fallingoutness.

PS: You would do well to join ORG.