Only in Singapore do you find the government owned media (which is all of them) acting also as the official mouthpiece of an industry special interest group. I found this gem of a piece in TODAYonline.
THEY may find it innocent enough but when users post or share songs or other copyrighted material on their MySpace page or Facebook, they could be engaging in piracy.
And that intro was followed by this delightful quote from Vice-President and Regional Director of the BSA, Jeffrey J Hardee:
Internet service providers have reported that 50 per cent of their traffic arises from illegal file sharing, said BSA’s vice-president and regional director Jeffrey J Hardee. Content providers, obviously, are none too pleased and Mr Hardee said: “The government should take a proactive role in regulating the Internet and making it safe. The Internet has to operate efficiently as a market place.”
So what Mr Hardee is saying is that, when some 11 year old girl posts up a video of her friends, dubbed in with their favourite pop song, on the video pages of Facebook, the government should proactively send in a SWAT team to her home, arrest her whole family and confiscate all their computers and electronic equipment capable of copying electronic data. That Sir, is what we normal people call “fucked up”.
Furthermore, from which orifice did Mr Hardee pull out the figure that 50% of traffic over the internet is from illegal file sharing? Firstly, we know that ISPs are capable of distinguishing whether data sent over their networks are from P2P applications. However, it is not possible for them to know the CONTENT of those data. There is no way to know whether the data is copyrighted content or not, or if they are copyrighted, whether it has been legally obtained.
The most popular and efficient P2P protocol is Bittorrent and the legal uses of Bittorrent far outweigh the illegal. Most open source software are distributed using Bittorrent, such as OpenOffice, and most flavours of Linux. Oh, hang on, BSA is a special interest group comprising owners of PROPRIETARY software. Hmmm… perhaps there is a pattern here?
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Oh, come now.
Industry lobbying exists even in more well-adjusted democracies.
Sometimes more so, even.
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