filesharing != illegal filesharing!
I had another read of the Charles Arthur article I referred to yesterday. Charles notes something that creators and users of free (as in freedom) software should do their utmost to prevent. Namely, allowing the term filesharing to become synonymous with the phrase illegal filesharing.
“Why did this strike a chord? Because of all the fuss that’s grown up so quickly around the UK’s biggest record labels, represented by the BPI, over their memorandum of understanding with the six biggest UK ISPs (BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Carphone Warehouse and BSkyB) as part of an effort to curtail filesharing. Illegal filesharing, I should emphasise, as the chief executive of the BPI Geoff Taylor was careful to do. (I’m pretty sure it’s because he was trying to divide it from the legal variety – such as getting Linux distributions – and not because he was trying to get us forever to associate “filesharing” with “illegal”.)”
(It’s a rather awkward quote, but I needed the first two sentences to provide the context for what followed). I’ve little doubt that the content companies and major copyright holders would dearly love the activity of filesharing to become something that will earn you a visit from a BPI, BERR or even RIAA-invoked SWAT team. But this kind of insidious conflation is something that really must be prevented if we are to remain within the computing equivalent of a free, democratic society and not an authoritarian state (and no, this is not to condone “software piracy”, as anyone who knows what filesharing actually is will understand).
Tags: copyright, filesharing, Free software