Web Piracy Is ISP's Fault, the IFPI Says

Internet piracy is the number one problem on the web right now, it is the sole purpose of huge sums of money being lost every year by media industries, so at one point they got tired and sick of it and they tried to crack it down. Needless to say that with the legislation still under development (at the time) they couldn't do all that much, but they could, in change, find, with the help of the authorities, track down some individuals responsible for the crime and have them punished.

That was in 2006. Two years later, in 2008, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is holding Internet Service Providers accountable for piracy. Well not for the act itself, but for the fact that it did nothing to stop it from happening. Strangely enough, they have found government backing their claims, that in fact it is the ISPs who should be their own police.

John Kennedy, the president of the IFPI, told WebUser.com that "A turning tide of opinion is one thing - a concrete programme of action is another. There is only one acceptable moment for ISPs to start taking responsibility for protecting content - and that moment is now."

The one person who by himself turned the tide, in Kennedy's words, is French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who in late November last year announced that, in the country he runs, ISPs would be held responsible for whatever file sharing is going on within its network and that they had the job of disconnecting the respective users.

"Up until now ISPs have allowed copyright theft to run rampant on their networks, causing a massive devaluation of copyrighted music. More than anything else, the Sarkozy agreement in France has changed the mood, but there has been progress among Governments and in courts elsewhere too," said Kennedy.

Needless to say that this will most likely stir a wave of protest over what will be defined as file sharing or the amount of data that will be legal to be transferred from one user to the other. I'm foreseeing something really ugly looming up, but I'm not the optimistic type.