"The Internet is not the music industry's plaything"

Filed in archive International , Legal on July 19, 2006

A ZDNet commentary called "The Internet is not the music industry's plaything" starts with the following:

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? no it's...the British Phonographic Institute. And it doesn't fly. Unlike the real Superman, the music industry body has not been endowed with god-like powers to change the very fabric of time, space and established law - just a vociferous PR department.

The latest example of the group attempting to make time stand still occurred this week when the BPI announced that, not content with taking legal action against file-sharers itself, it thinks that ISPs should do its questionable work for it.

BPI, the English equivalent of RIAA, requested that Tiscali, a European ISP, terminate the accounts of 59 alleged file sharers, with virtually no evidence. Brazen, perhaps. Surprising, I think not, at least in the U.S. Here RIAA has shown little shame in enlisting others to conduct and pay for their civil investigations, in particular the U.S. government and the Department of Justice.

BPI recently forced Tiscali to kill its Juke Box legal P2P streaming music service. So it didn't expect Tiscali to comply. The objective instead was PR that incriminated ISPs as complicit with P2P users in copyright infringement.

ZDNet remarked on the absurdity of the claim:

"We look forward to the BPI calling on British Airways to stop holidaymakers flying back from Thailand because they might be carrying cheap CDs"