Sky: Everyone must tackle filesharing

Sky's press writers have an excellent grasp of diplomatic language. Allow me to translate:

"The only way to prevent piracy is for information distributors (ISPs) to collude with information-restriction advocates (recording industry) and demand that the government curtail individual rights in order to allow the information-restriction people to maintain the illusion that they are "creating" (copying) a valuable product."

Making the industry happy would require that thousands of sites be directly blocked by every ISP in the country. But that wouldn't stop piracy. You would have to block everyone who has ever intentionally pirated domestically, and block every otherwise allowed site that proxies traffic to banned sites. To be effective, that would require outright bans on every foreign network, whitelisting only authorized sites. (This is the state of the "Great Firewall of China") And it STILL wouldn't stop piracy - think email, IM, IRC... So, now you have to ban any non-authorized communication, and we've reduced the internet to cable television. And it STILL won't stop piracy because people still have the ability to directly connect to their friends and neighbours.

Preventing piracy is a form of censorship. The internet sees censorship as damage, and routes around it. If you want to kill piracy, you will have to kill the internet at the most basic level - destroy the ability for two individuals to communicate without explicit authorization. Anything less, and you're wasting your time.

This kind of censorship is something you would expect in a Communist country. It goes against freedom-of-speech in a democracy. If the government are allowed to start banning websites for being connected to filesharing, how long will it be before they start illegally restricting sites for other reasons. I don't agree with a lot of content on the internet but they could have given these powers to law enforcement agencies to stop a lot greater problem such as terrorism and paedophilia.... its funny how this is only brought in when money is flying around.