3-strikes comes to Ireland
Bear with me - there's a good reason I have a video of the dating app, Tinder, linked to piracy and 3-strike rules!
Note: I'd originally planned to push this out on April 1st but suspected too many people may read it as a joke.....
The High Court in Ireland has told ISP UPC that it must introduce a "three strikes" scheme to deal with subscribers who pirate music online. The ruling is a major victory for Sony, Universal and Warner who will only be required to pay 20% of the installation and running costs, with UPC picking up 80% of the tab.
From TorrentFreak.com
Sad day mainly for the reason that this ruling abroad has been shown to be largely ineffective and as we've seen that filtering usually does not work (as it's usually easy to work around). I disagree with piracy completely, mainly for the idea that I appreciate that someone had to go to the effort of actually making whatever content is being stolen - I also have first-hand experience from my own writing and photos here of material been taken without any credit.
But I also believe in fair access and prices to content so sympathise with people who do this activity - I'd be willing to bet that if users were given access to material at a reasonable (and still very profitable) level, they'd take the honest road. Devices such as the Apple TV which make it easy to purchase legitimate content show that the possibility is there to make money from digital, distributors just need to be less greedy. Perhaps a solution needs to be found using something like the innovative pricing structure that 'dating app' (if that's what category it falls into?) Tinder has just announced, with increasing prices depending on age - the logic being that the older you are, the more disposable income you have. Not so crazy and perhaps a solution such as this needs to be considered for movies and music - I'd be willing to bet that most piracy is by younger age groups so why not try to get slowly train them into responsible purchasing?