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The UK government has sent out warnings to Microsoft, Google and Yahoo stating that if these companies don't address the issue of online piracy and stop linking to illegal content voluntarily, then legislative action will be taken.
Over the last year or so, the UK government has shown its full support for the creative industry and has begun spending public money to enforce anti-piracy laws. Court orders have forced ISP's in to blocking websites that the government deems infringing and a new Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has begun making arrests, locking up those who host streaming sites or so much as provide a proxy to circumvent the new ISP blocks.
Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid, told those at BPI's AGM event yesterday that “We’ve given £2.5 million to support the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, PIPCU. The first unit of its kind in the world, PIPCU is working with industry groups – including the BPI – on the Infringing Websites List. The list identifies sites that deliberately and consistently breach copyright, so brand owners can avoid advertising on them.”
The culture secretary then went on to say that search engines have a bigger role to play in fighting piracy:
“They must step up and show willing. That’s why Business Secretary Vince Cable and I have written to Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, asking them to work with the music industry to stop search results sending people to illegal sites.”
“Let me be perfectly clear: if we don’t see real progress, we will be looking at a legislative approach. In the words of Beggars Group chairman Martin Mills, ‘technology companies should be the partners of rights companies, not their masters’.”
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KitGuru Says: The government is continuing to push the entertainment industry's problems on to the likes of Google. Should piracy be dealt with by search engines? Should infringing content be voluntarily sought out by Google, Yahoo and Bing?
What about the LEGAL torrents on these sites? how are we supposed to get access to them?
Yes, because this helps the current situation. Shutting down the websites that have SOME illegal content means that they deny access to LEGAL content too, but do they care about that? Of course not. Plus itll only be a matter of time before this gets circumvented anyway.
So much is wrong with the UK gov. … they should just suck it up and let people do what they want like proper people. Piracy will never go away (hopefully at least) since its the right thing to do in todays strict, boxed in society.
*pork out*
Clearly, if they’re beginning to threaten people with legislation in this way they need more people to stand up to them. If every single person who lost business by the downing of a torrent site (e.g. musicians hosting on there) sued the government for their losses, I expect that would teach them a lesson.
How much longer before we are only allowed to access what the government thinks is appropriate for us?
I said this when they were trying to impose those stupid monitoring laws not so long ago, i thought that they were squashed and thrown out? Obviously not, i said back then that this is the tip of a slippery slope of decline, give it 10 years and the we will have that stupid “premium” internet subscription fee if we wish to access sites outside of the “safe net” that the government create, i do not torrent, but restricting these sites restricts legal torrent also, restricting these sites allows them to use the same bullshit lines to restrict other sites in the future, copy right infringement is the lowest possible issue on the internet, i would have thought that HATE SPEECH and CALLS TO JIHAD from BRITISH CITIZENS living in the UK would have been a higher priority that the pockets of big multinational corporations, obviously i was wrong, the priorities of this bullshit coalition government are all wrong, posh middle and upper class toffs who do not live in the real world, making decisions that effect everyone but themselves. I hate this government, and their backward priorities.
Looks like these companies need to just stop functionality in those countries for a little while. I’d like to see how that works out for the UK.
well you dont need an advertisement to show where they are if you know what a computer can do then your fine but if yu do not then i sugest go out and buy a proper copy
I wonder why the government doesn’t do crack downs like this for something like Child Porn (ya’ know, the important stuff that needs to be eradicated)??? maybe it’s because the record companies are paying them to do this, or maybe some politicians just like child porn, who knows ??
Considering the massive cover-ups in the mid 80s regarding child abuse by known PMs, the fact a lot of PMs supported the Paedophile Information Exchange (the home office even gave them £70k in grants) and the ‘loss’ of documents from the time which detailed a lot of the claims and the people involved you can draw your own conclusion… it wouldn’t shock me though if it came out that the people who are ‘benefiting’ from torrents, etc being harder to get are the same people who were bidding to play a tennis match against Cameron and Boris at the Tory fundraiser.