14 DAY TRIAL // Seeing as, after several years and millions of taxpayer Euros spent, France realized that its Hadopi anti-piracy law didn’t work, the UK decided it will try to implement the exact same thing.
For some reason, the UK government believes that, somehow, things will work out differently there.
Albert Einstein, or Ben Franklin, or the Chinese, or any number of sources to which the quote is attributed to, once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
That seems to be the movie and music industry's motto through and through. However, there's at least some good news, as the ISP-issued warnings for undeterred pirates that the Digital Economy Act mandates, won't start going out until 2015, at the earliest.
The letters, which are supposed to get pirates to leave behind their lives of crime, were supposed to start going out back in 2011, but the move has been delayed several times already.
That hasn't proven too detrimental to the media industry which has since found an easier and more effective way of fighting piracy – censoring pirate sites as they see fit.
The Pirate Bay, KickassTorrents, and several other big BitTorrent sites as well as several big movie streaming sites, including Movie2K, have already been blocked in the UK.
There are, of course, plenty of proxy sites for all of the blocked pirate havens, so no one is actually being prevented from pirating content. But, true to their unofficial motto, the media industry isn't backing down, but instead going after even more sites, including the proxies.
The UK is not the only place where pirates are being "warned" and punished by their ISPs on behalf of media companies. A somewhat similar system was adopted in the US, though this was done by agreement between the ISPs and media companies.