entertainment industry

COMMENTARY | Right now, I'm as grateful to be an American as I've ever been. The old guard entertainment industry had it good for a long time.

And all of their support was meant to be paid back with the passage of the so-called anti-piracy bill commonly referred to as SOPA.

But the people would not have it, according to an Associated Press report.

We've noticed a disturbing trend among the various negotiations going on around the globe about changing copyright law or policies to make ISPs act as copyright cops.

Whether it's "voluntary agreements" or imposed by law, the general public is left out of the conversation.

Instead, it appears that there are three parties involved in most of the negotiations: the entertainment industry, the ISPs and the government.

As was unfortunately expected, despite no evidence that this made any economic sense at all, the member states of the EU have agreed to retroactively extend copyright another 20 years, at which point you can expect it to be extended again (thanks to jtdeb

With all the talk of musicians and their contested termination rights lately (as well as a few early cases about termination rights), it appears that Congress is starting to pay attention.

Rep.

For a while we followed the important Cablevision remote DVR case, in which the entertainment industry argued that Cableivision offering a hosted DVR service for its users was infringing on their copyrights, even though DVRs are legal.

The entertainment industry strained its credulity by arguing that because the DVR device was on Cablevision's property, rather than in someone's house (even though they functioned nearly identically), it completely changed the rules.

Just about a year ago, a court in the UK found OiNK's operator, Alan Ellis, not guilty of criminal charges for running the community.

Even though plenty of people had pointed out from the very beginning that it was crazy to charge Ellis with criminal charges for actions by people in the community, prosecutors still went through with it.

What was even more amazing is that they continued to try to do the same thing to others as well.

One of the popular claims from entertainment industry supporters, who somehow want ISPs to be liable for file sharing, is that "ISPs profit from file sharing." We hear this over and over again.

But there's little evidence that's true.

In the last few months, there's been a growing movement by the entertainment industry to blame Google for "piracy." One of the favorite talking points is the claim that Google is "profiting from piracy," by linking people to sites that point people to unauthorized infringing copies of content, and then placing ads on those sites.

Of course, this ignores the fact that the standard "pirate" out there isn't exactly the sort of person who goes around clicking on ads either -- and is probably a hell of a lot more likely to ignore the ads entirely or use something like Adblock.

It's getting pretty ridiculous watching law enforcement and politicians simply take the entertainment industry at their word in attacking various individuals who they misleadingly blame for their own inability to adapt to a modern digital era.

We've seen it here in the US, where Homeland Security's Immigration and Customer Enforcement (ICE) group has been seizing domains on extremely questionable industry-provided evidence.

Over in the UK, it's been leading to wrongful arrests.

While the entertainment industry still wants to believe the myth that somehow it's possible for Google to monitor all of the content that is uploaded to YouTube, the fact that the company now has 35 hours of content uploaded every minute would suggest otherwise.

To some extent, this seems to be a confusion over scale.