The Digital Revolution.

I see that Lord Carter's report on digital Britain is proposing yet another attack on illegal filesharing. Given that a very large proportion on people with Broadband access are engaged in this proccess nearly every day of the week and given that the technology around filesharing is constantly evolving, unless you are prepared to legislate to disconnect persistant offenders, a solution that european governments now seem to be ruling out, I doubt that you are ever going to be able to prevent the practice. Despite over twenty years of action against video piracy, whether in the form of the old video tapes or in the more recent form of DVD's even those reletively simple forms of piracy remain rampant.

Anecdotally, it now seems that some people now just download pirated material for the sake of it. Some, allegedly just want to download some obscure albums that they lkent yo someone in 1973, whilst it would seem that others have computers full of stuff that they will never get round to watching or listening to in a lifetime. Perhaps the only way for any government to regain monies lost through copyright theft would be to slap a small tax on all fixed landlines and distribute it amongst media producers but given that Broadband is becoming increasingly mobile and given public hostility to taxation I cant see it happening. I suspect that filesharing and intellectual piracy in one form or another is firmly here to stay.