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Labour wants to ban illegal file-sharing
A SENIOR government official has warned that if ISPs do not do more to crack down on illegal file-sharing, then Labour will bring in more legislation.
Lord Triesman told the Beeb that the government cannot tolerate stealing and would crack down on illegal file-sharers unless ISPs did more to stop it.
Lord Triesman is the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills and he wants ISPs do snoop on the use of their customers to find out which ones are pirating and turn them them into the rossers.
He noted that the ISPs were in talks with the music industry and these were progressing better than people might have thought.
Lord Triesman believed that there were going to be successful voluntary schemes between the "creative industries" and ISPs and the government should not have to regulate.
Interestingly enough however Lord Triesman said he did not want the UK to go down the same route as the US. He did not want to see the industry "hounding 14-year-olds who shared music". What he wanted to see was more tracking down those who made multiple copies for profit.
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He's focussed on "file sharing" but hasn't quite grasped the idea that the problem is the file, not the file sharing. 

Knowing the way the UK government has with technology they'll just ban file transfers. Which is going to make criminals of everyone.
Once again we have filesharing equated with stealing.

Yes, I'm sure it does happen a lot, no objection there.

But I'm also certain that there are filesharers who distribute perfectly legal things.

And what about promotional material that is made available on this medium ? I'm talking about ads being digitised and then shared. Nobody ever seen a Pepsi ad on a computer ? 

Does Pepsi disapprove this activity ? I think not.

That is perfectly legal sharing, and Pepsi (or Coke, or Nike, etc..) very probably approve of it.

Now you tell me, how are we going to make the difference between an ad and a copyrighted video ?
By all means, do it! If people won't respect the existing laws, just pile on new ones. 

Add enough laws, and eventually they'll start enforcing themselves through sheer gravitation implosion. 

That'll teach the scofflaws...
So the G want's to ban file sharing let me guess they'll fine ISPs if programs such as LimeWire, Bearshare etc is used on the network.

Next they ban FTP sites fine you for sharing files between PC's on your home network.

If p** was expensive the government would tax your backside.
Id say that Lord Triesman's plans would be difficult to enforce especially in the case of Bit torrent and eMule. 

Both of which have perfectly legitimate uses (Bit torrent for Open Sauce software e.g. Linux/OpenOffice.org and eMule as an archive of copy-left films e.g. films that made vhs, but were then dropped by the distribution company).

I think that he should focus on the scores of bootleg cd / dvds and the underlying reasons why people buy them in preference to official ones. 

He will probably find out the reason is due to overcharging and the "rip-off Britain" effect.