Oh Mandy! Well, You Came And You Took Without Giving

Home taping didn't kill music and neither will illegal downloading.

What it might do is hit a few big corporations profit margins and that is something they can't allow. And don't give me this, "They won't have the money to bring new artists through" crap. Millions are spent peddling mediocre sound-a-likes as the Next Big Thing. That isn't development in new talent. Its promoting your product, advertising your wares and battering the market with your budget.

Given the threat to their money-making then, it comes as no surprise that Lord Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business, who has doubtless been lobbied to the highmost, has declared a "three-pronged approach" to tackle Internet piracy. And that does include, only as a last resort of course, the power to disconnect you from your ISP. Naturally the government have thought about this in depth and have all manner of contingency mechanisms for encrypted file transfers, news groups, wi-fi connections being hijacked, along with the millions of compromised machines already out there, alongside whatever else you can think of. Or have they just been lobbied to the highmost...

So anyway, we pay this guy Mandelson to hire somebody else to write a report that looks at Internet use in Britain, he then gives Mandelson that report which mostly contains a whole load of suggestions about how best to introduce more ill-thought-through legislation that potentially curtails our freedoms in the, naturally preferred, interests of big business. Fucking brilliant. That's democracy in action right there. We pay some oily bloke to create laws against us.