ACCORDING to BBC News’ interview with Feargal Sharkey, a former musician in popular 80s band The Undertones, educating people about music rights is essential.

Sharkey notes that Music piracy is not a new problem and that people have been copying music since the day cassette tapes were introduced.

“Someone said to me the other day, ‘when I was young I’d pop the odd cassette over the garden fence to my next door neighbour’.” he told the BBC’s Digital Planet program.

“The reality is because of the modern world we live in, the next door neighbour’s garden is now global in size and populated by billions of people”

But is there a need for a solution?

The story comes about just after Virgin Media (an ISP and music label ironically) begin writing to customers whose Internet connection may have been used to download unlicensed content.

It also appears that as of next year new laws are set to be enforced in New Zealand of which will force ISPs to be responsible for monitoring people’s online activities and cutting them off if there are allegations of illegal file-sharing.

Mr Sharkey also told Digital Planet…

“There was some research done earlier this year that seemed to indicate that up to 80% of people would actually stop doing it with nothing more than somebody sending them a letter indicating they knew what they were doing”

What are your thoughts?

Should ISPs be responsible for controlling their users?

I’ve been talking to people in the ISP industry, and they’ve told me that it should really be seen like this:

On the Internet the web host or the person sharing the file is on the P2P network.

The ISP fulfills the role of a real estate agent which the seller has leased their shop from as an example.

In the offline world the real estate agent doesn’t get sued and the [copyright] owner would go after the seller.

In fact section 116AH of the Copyright Act supports this by pointing out that merely providing an infringer with Internet access does not constitute “contributory infringement.”

So there!

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