Recently a lot of what I have been hearing about, reading about, and discussing, has been based on peer-to-peer and/or ‘copyright infringement’. First we saw tv-links.co.uk shut down and its founder arrested. He called it a hobby, and claimed he did not think he was doing anything illegal, and while this may well be true, The Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) claims that it allowed users to access “any one of a large number of films and television programmes directly via the website. This is illegal under UK copyright law”. I look forward to FACT raiding Google, Yahoo!, Windows Live, Ask.com, etc and taking them down, considering they act in much the same capacity depending on the search criteria. It looks like a lot of sabre-rattling, and FACT having to act once told to by the US studios. Whether they would have acted independently we will never know.

Soon after this we saw OiNK, the hugely popular invite-only BitTorrent search engine and tracker, taken down and the owner/operator arrested by UK Police. Again it is a grey area, in my opinion, as to whether these people do anything wrong when not hosting any actual content. What I have found more amusing, and yet worrying, is the massive amount of misinformation that seems to have gone out with this story. Many of the quotes, from IFPI, BPI and Cleveland Police, imply that OiNK was a subscription service which users had to pay for, or that it was run for profit, both of which are untrue. The worrying lack of proper research into this, and the then misrepresentation, means that to the lay-person, the site and the community around it look much worse. Anyone who is not tech savvy, and even some of those who are, do not know how these things work, or what they are, and so when an organisation like the police is quoted as saying that the service was ‘lucrative’, this is taken as the truth. As far as we can tell, all donations to OiNK were used for the upkeep of the site, and key members of the community have stated that it was not run for profit. Who to believe? Both sides have an agenda here, and so it is your call. As a side-note, I called it a community for a reason. While the site has been taken down, the community has reformed in several places online, and I doubt that they will be kept back for very long. Another site, formed from the same users and philosophies, will launch before long and they will simply upload their content from OiNK to it. However, CEO of the IFPI, Jeremy Banks, is quoted as saying that sites like OiNK are “not a case of friends sharing music for pleasure.” At least I will now have no qualms lending a friend a CD for pleasure! The possible backdoors a statement like this opens for a file-sharing community could too be interesting.

With all this in the press, and the obvious political slants to it, it was inevitable that ministers and officials would wade in, under pressure from the record industry. One such minister, Lord Triesman, the parliamentary Under Secretary for Innovation, Universities and Skills, is quoted as saying that Labour would legislate if ISPs did not clamp down on file sharers. The record industry is pushing for such users to be automatically disconnected from the net, which seems like a bold move for the under secretary for innovation to be backing, especially considering the main demographic of file-sharers is those of University age, who are also the greatest hope for future innovation! Another example of the government sending mixed messages. While they make good points about the importance of availability of, access to, and investment in the Internet, they are trying to appease the industry, mainly because of the tax revenue it brings them, and in doing so alienates the users and contradict themselves. While it is understandable that record companies want to look after their profit margins, they do not seem to be able to push a policy which doesn’t cast them in a terrible light and make them even more hated. Along with artists dropping their labels left, right and centre, this would suggest that the industry, in its current form at least, is on its last legs.

Ultimately laws follow what is common practice. Actions are not currently in line with the legal situation, and this leads to these kinds of conflicts. Eventually of course the laws will change to reflect how we, the people, do things, but until then those with a vested interest in keeping it the way it was in the good old days will continue to use them to attack the easiest targets and make examples of them.