Completely outrageous.
14 European countries were raided by police this week, in a bid to sniff out suspected illegal file sharers.
The raids were apparently part of a two-year investigation prompted by Belgium police and have taken place in countries such as Hungary, the Netherlands and Sweden.
The UK is also said to be a target, although this is still to be confirmed.
While there were reports that PRQ, the ISP for Wikileaks and the Pirate Bay, was raided this is not quite the case.
PRQ did confirm to TorrentFreak that it had been visited by police, but it was about specific clients' IP addresses rather than the two sites it hosts.
Police arrest European file sharers in co-ordinated raids | News | TechRadar UK
Pirate bay is down once again
Time to wipe my hard drive again, I think so
I struggle with this one because as a musician I understand that creative industries need to preserve intellectual property but I despair at how long it is taking these industries to wake up and smell the coffee. --
I tend to stay away from file sharing websites, it is a form of theft (IMO) but what I'm always curious about is whether people are downloading or sharing high quality CD / .wav files or compressed MP3s?
"Compressed" to me, means not the same quality as a full wav (I know you can have full quality MP3 but that defeats the purpose of MP3. I also think the music industry needs to look at the marketing and merchandising of other things that could go with CD releases so that people might prefer to buy a product comprising quality magazine / article + music + memorabilia etc. Anything digital can be uploaded and then shared illegaly whereas band memorabilia / T-shirts that are part of a package cannot.
Still thinking this one through..
-- Bearing in mind the limitations of the equipment that most music is being played back on and the limited capacity for our ears to pick up high frequencies (especially as we get older) the compressed files make a very good compromise --
I struggle with this one because as a musician I understand that creative industries need to preserve intellectual property but I despair at how long it is taking these industries to wake up and smell the coffee. I strongly believe that if they hadn't initially tried to use the technology to try to rip people off with ridiculous prices for legally downloaded music for example then the illegal file sharing would have been curtailed. Even now they try to charge extortionate prices for a product that incurs no transport or physical manufacturing costs. I look at Amazon and see them selling a music CD cheaper than the cost to download the same music and ask myself if they have really thought this through.
I understand what you are saying, and frankly I have to admit that it is 100% the industry's own fault. As you said they were slow to smell the roses, and frankly STILL are too slow. The copy write laws are outdated and have not been even remotely looked at. The idea of copy write being linked to a geographic location is idiotic in today's internet world. They should have long ago gone with the idea of letting people buy access to material online regardless where they are. But instead they allow idiotic things like the Itunes store which is nothing but even more limiting as it requires specialised equipment to use. There are still very few sites where you can legally buy music online with no preconditions like hardware and they are all limited to geographic restrictions. Movie and TV makers are making the same mistakes as the music industry did btw.....
Now personally I use to download music illegally, but now days I use Spotify and similar free services that are fully legal to stream music to my machine.
I struggle with this one because as a musician I understand that creative industries need to preserve intellectual property but I despair at how long it is taking these industries to wake up and smell the coffee. I strongly believe that if they hadn't initially tried to use the technology to try to rip people off with ridiculous prices for legally downloaded music for example then the illegal file sharing would have been curtailed. Even now they try to charge extortionate prices for a product that incurs no transport or physical manufacturing costs. I look at Amazon and see them selling a music CD cheaper than the cost to download the same music and ask myself if they have really thought this through.
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