Now that is just stupid. God, what the hell. Makes me mad. I just think of the time I got a letter from comcast saying I had downloaded a copyrighted movie (the kite runner) and they were goign to shut down my connection. hah... Never happened, but it was a pain callign them, talking to them on the phone, waiting and waiting.

I think this is the stupidest thing they could do. it just makes people more and more likely to download anyway, so in the longrun they lose out.

--Previous Message--
: A small town in the US is paying the price of not standing up to
: the MPAA.
:
: Coshocton, which is in Ohio and does not have a great tradition
: of standing up to authority, decided that it would be a wizard
: wheeze to turn control of its municipal network over to the
: movie companies' cartel. After all it did not want any nasty
: 'pirates' in its fine little town, it wanted only plain decent
: folk who buy lots of gingham and bake lots of apple pies.
:
: Imagine its shock when the MPAA forced the town to shut down its
: entire free municipal WiFi network because of a single instance
: of a single user illegally downloading a copyrighted movie.
:
: We are not talking a big network here. Sometimes it handles 100
: people a day during busy times. The closure of the network means
: that the Coshocton County Sheriff's deputies can't complete a
: traffic or incident report and out-of-town business people can't
: park in town and use their laptops to connect to the Internet.
:
: Because the whole network has a single IP address, the town did
: not know who the pirate was, so the MPAA demanded that the
: network be shut off.
:
: The case is fairly typical of what has been happening on a wider
: scale across the world. The MPAA and its music industry cousin
: the RIAA have been running around, lobbying about the perils of
: 'piracy' and screaming that they'll be forced out of business
: and Western civilisation will fall unless peer-to-peer
: filesharing is stamped out or everyone even suspected of
: copyright infringement is hounded, fined, booted off the
: Internet or all of the above plus criminalised.
:
: Rather than engage their brains and tell the entertainment
: companies along with the RIAA and MPAA to go forth and multiply,
: politicians seem to want to roll over and give the entertainment
: industries everything they want.
:
: France was prepared to switch off Internet connections to those
: the MPAA and RIAA said were 'pirates'. It was only when it was
: pointed out that this was against the constitution without due
: process of law that the government backed down, partly.
:
: In the US, the RIAA has been litigious and made a fool of itself
: by dragging children, the elderly and dead people into court to
: face 'piracy' charges.
:
: In other words we are not dealing with nice people, we are
: dealing with bullies and stick-up artists, much like common
: muggers except they wear suits. We elect people to protect us
: from such things. Society is supposed to collectvely stand up
: against the overly aggressive to see that weaker people can
: thrive and make their contributions as well.
:
: The shutting down of a small town network is a microcosm of what
: the entertainment industry would do to the Internet if we give
: it control. Rather than protecting us, lawmakers are happy to
: give in and switch off whoever the RIAA, MPAA and their cronies
: point to. In this case it was a whole town, but why not all the
: users of an ISP, a cable firm, mobile carrier or telecom?
:
: It is clearly time for the body politic to tell these clowns to
: go away. Any sympathy they might have attracted in their war
: against 'piracy' they have squandered by their greedy,
: self-serving, neurotic and paranoid behaviour.
:
: