No its not a football score!
This week sees spain enacting tough (and by tough i mean dumb) new laws against P2P file sharing. It will now be a civil offence for an individual just to use P2P programs! Also, it’ll be a criminal offence for ISPs to allow filesharing to happen over there! And as if that wasn’t bad enough, they’re bringing in a tax on blank cds, DVDs, USB pen drives, memory cards, hard drives, mp3 players – basically anything that can store data. They’re calling this a ‘copyright tax’, and the tax will go to ‘the copyright holder’. How are they going to ascertain the copyright holder i wonder? maybe they’ll just hand the money over to the MPAA/RIAA
They’ve totally sold out to the MPAA and RIAA, which pisses me off no end. Its bad enough that half the governments of europe (including our own) are stepping over each other to be america’s bitch, but this isn’t even america – this a bunch of greedy lawyers set on the world by entertainment companies a decade or so ago, who’ve gone completely out of control to the point of suing 12 year olds and OAPs.
So thats why it’s so refreshing to hear another euro country going the opposite direction. Who else but france! New laws passed this week will require Apple to open up its DRM standards for other mp3 player manufacturers. This means two things:
1. Other music players will now be able to use itunes
2. There’s a chance you’ll be able to switch players from shitty ipods to something else, AND keep your music collection.
I say chance because its well possible that apple will find some other way of circumventing this. Now we can only hope that germany follows suit with a similar stance on the media/DRM issue, leading the way for a euro-wide directive.