{"id":449685,"date":"2010-03-19T21:57:45","date_gmt":"2010-03-20T01:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20100318\/1238008619.shtml"},"modified":"2010-03-19T21:57:45","modified_gmt":"2010-03-20T01:57:45","slug":"would-uk-politicians-support-the-digital-economy-bill-if-it-applied-to-offline-activities-as-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/449685","title":{"rendered":"Would UK Politicians Support The Digital Economy Bill If It Applied To Offline Activities As Well?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The entertainment industry always likes to take the digital world and compare it to the physical world as if the two were the same — often making claims like unauthorized downloading is “just like stealing a CD from a store.” However, they don’t seem to like it when you do that back to them to prove all the inconsistencies in their arguments. Lee Griffin wrote up a good blog post about the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, wondering how people would feel if the same rules were applied offline<\/a>:<\/p>\n


\nWould you appreciate being put under house arrest not because of any court determined guilt, but because of someone making accusations of copyright infringement against you for something that may or may not have occurred in your property at the time? Is it even remotely justified to put you under house arrest, to stop you from going to the library, to work, or to socialise with your friends because of those accusations alone?<\/p>\n

Or how about point 4…how would you feel if the police were stopping you from accessing your local community centre because a single individual or organisation had threatened the local council in such a way that it is too much for the council to risk the financial cost of allowng it to continue functioning for the community? Imagine arriving at your local pub only to find it inaccessible to you, even though anyone that is visiting from another town can use it freely; not for anything that you or your town have necessarily done, but because of the implications made by an individual in a completely unscrutinised manner?<\/p>\n

Finally, point 5 would be very interesting. Could you imagine the police coming and turfing you out of a building you’ve legitimately bought, and putting it back on the market without paying you a penny, simply because you knew it was in a good location and could make some money off of the future sale? Somehow I don’t think that’s all too likely!
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Of course, supporters of the DEB will claim that “this is different!” but they seem to be the same people who will still insist that infringement is no different than theft. Funny how that works.<\/p>\n

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The entertainment industry always likes to take the digital world and compare it to the physical world as if the two were the same — often making claims like unauthorized downloading is “just like stealing a CD from a store.” However, they don’t seem to like it when you do that back to them to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}