GOT TO LOVE THE BPI

To be honest, we had been hoping the BPI would prove to not really have its heart in the insane policy of prosecuting its own customers for a practice that still has to be demonstrated to be a threat to its members, but there's a growing sense that the BPI guys are really enjoying crushing people. Once again, Geoff Taylor seems to have got a little caught up in the excitement and implied that not filesharing isn't good enough - they really want people to be prosecuted for not buying their products:

"If you want to avoid the risk of court action, stop filesharing and buy music legally."

(And, of course, he's pushing the lie that filesharing itself is in some way shady, when, of course, it's only sharing some files that is a problem).

But then it gets even better: Taylor attempts to suggest that music sharing is on a par with those other electronic bugaboos, the groomer and the predatory paedo:

"The risks of allowing children unsupervised access to the internet are well-known," said Mr Taylor.

"To that long list should now be added the very real possibility of legal action if music is uploaded to the internet illegally.

"The safest thing that parents can do is check their computer regularly and disable any file-sharing software."

But... file sharing isn't an illegal activity, and a lot of Taylor's members are even exploring ways of using filesharing to boost their bottom line by stripping out distribution costs for digital music - this attempt to try and get parents to fear the very word filesharing could prove to be a bit of a long-term cock-up.

music bpi downloads filesharing