Nonsense. That was my thought when I first read the articles ” Music industry demands the right to sue ISPs” from the Independent Online Edition and “Indie Labels want copyright shift” from the BBC Online. Several trade organisations including the Association of Independent Music (AIM), the Musicians’ Union and the MCPS-PRS Alliance proposed that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) should be liable for illegal filesharing by their users. (which means that it would be possible to sue ISPs because of this liability)

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The Music Industry (from now on only called MI) is putting a lot of pressure on the consumers. They release copy protected media but fail to realise that this is a punishment for the people who buy music. Even if you don´t download music from the internet you most likely know sources where to get that music for free, without DRM and in high quality. The commercial pirates as well don´t care about copy protection.

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Now thats an intersting article by Ernest Adams about the End of Copyright. Starting with Gutenberg he gives a rough introduction how copyright came into existance. The interesting part begins after this introduction. When the first photocpiers were introduced people started using them to copy parts of books for their own personal use. This was at first frowned at but later a fair-use law was introduced due to the massive amount of people who used the photocopiers.

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I know, its a rather long title but it contains important information for everyone living in the European Union. A parliamentary committee decided to approve a plan to force communication providers (like your ISP) to retain customer data for up to one year. This plan will be voted on soon by the European Council.

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Well this is no big news to the internet community. We, more than everyone else, are keen on using new media devices and like to be among the first when it comes to technology in general. A survey among canadian music retailers now found out what we actually now for a very long time: Copy protection is bad for business. Customers are more frequently than before returning cds which they could not play in their personal computer or copy to their mobile player. Retailers also observe that customers tend to put cds down when they spot the copy protected logo.

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