Genrewonk

January 31, 2008

Paul McGuinness, manager of U2. Ok, we get it, music piracy = bad.

But, do we think that either a) Making ISPs responsible for policing net traffic for copyrighted data or b) Taxing ISPs to compensate artists (read: compensate the monolith corporations that profit from said artists) are in fact good ideas?

Quoth asshat:

If you were a magazine advertising stolen cars, handling the money for stolen cars and seeing to the delivery of stolen cars, the police would soon be at your door. That’s no different to an ISP.

So a manager for a major rock group can’t tell the difference between a content provider and a distribution channel. So if some *cough*Negitiveland*cough* artist decided to sample too much of U2s songs, he’d figure it was reasonable to expect the record stores selling the offending CD to be liable? Or maybe he just wants the stores to check their product for oversampling.

Category: asshat, intellectual property, rants