If only there was some sort of grouping of individuals who made bombs and stuff to fight off the Evil EMI hmm theyd have to be a 3 letter acronym to be on equal terms with EMI.
Even though blocking such sites would do **** all to stop illegal downloading and file sharing? It annoys me how the industry goes on about stopping piracy and yet they do nothing about making content more available and affordable through legal means. A lot of my illegally downloaded music, I couldn't find legally. I download TV shows as they are shown in the US because they make us wait for months to see them here, if they show them at all. How about providing an online service where we can download or stream TV shows legally as they are originally aired? How about a service where we can pay to download movies and TV shows instead of buying DVDs or Blu-Ray? We can do it with music, why not movies or TV shows? The entertainment industry needs to seriously look at the availability and affordability of legal content and this will reduce illegal downloading considerably. Rant over!!!
Finally the music companies are suing Ireland for failure to have any implementable copyright legislation; http://entertainment.ie/music/news/EMI-launches-lawsuit-against-Irish-state/97275.htm Even the most "cynical/daring" comments on this topic really don't get it. Ireland has not been run as a normal state since 1998 or so, and there was every indication from back then that the music industry - in the mid 90's perhaps the biggest in the world pro capita - began to be used for the creation of huge scams Please be open to the idea that Ireland was positioning itself to be a zone where copyright laws did NOT apply, and where the "financial services center" was to be a magnet for every scumbag in the world However, the 2000 copyright act in Ireland should have anticipated all these problems. In 2000, the Internet was a reality and frims like MP3.com had already had their day; http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/2000/en/act/pub/0028/index.html The problem is that the act was drafted by criminals. In a rather famous incident, while the act was being drafted, the member of Parliament piloting the Copyright and Related rights Bill 2000 got a record contract for his son David Kitt through Warner Bros; "Kitt has a charmed life and he escaped public opprobrium before when it emerged that in 2000 he had given a demo tape of his son, singer David Kitt, to Dennis Woods, head of Warner Studios and chairman of Phonographic Performance Ireland. This would have been an exchange hardly worth mentioning were it not for the fact that Kitt was then piloting the Copyright and Related rights Bill 2000 through the Dáil; that this legislation benefited PPI members and that the PPI, one of the organisations most affected beneficially by the act, lobbied the Government strongly." See also http://davemarsh.us/?p=951 We can continue with the admittedly labyrinthine narrative on http://seanonuallain.com/id2.html To summarize; musicians start to notice that their song copyright registrations are altered when they attempt to repatriate them from Britain and the USA to the nascent Irish music "rights" organization (IMRO). Companies close to the government suddenly "own" part of the songs. The musicians check further, and notice that they are credited with writing songs that don't exist, often spelled in Gaelic with a letter missing. They get the police involved; one of the police is made a job offer he can't refuse, but parliamentary questions keep the investigation going. It is possible that the government simply wanted to find out what we knew. Then someone in IMRO's London counterpart panics and - lo and behold! - it is revealed that Shay Hennessy, chair of IMRO, HAD STOLEN HUNDREDS OF COPYRIGHTS AND WAS USING IMRO TO PERPETUATE THE THEFT. Quis cutodies cutodiet? AS it happens, the police investigation was aborted with a leak to the papers http://www.politics.ie/forum/current-affairs/36672-corruption-dpps-office.html Hennessy was the main advisor on the copyright act that has caused this snafu; http://www.allbusiness.com/retail-trade/miscellaneous-retail-retail-stores-not/4602230-1.html It is important to remember that, when referring to Ireland 1997-2011, we are not talking about a modern democracy; it is a third world country, with the prime minister paying a fortune of taxpayers' money to promote the musical and other "artistic" careers of his daughters and their partners, including the horrible "PS I love you". U2, among many others, took advantage of the artists destroyers' exemption, which allowed them trade with dissolved companies and steal at will from far better musicians than them (see Dave M's site). You all would do us Irish people a favour if you boycotted us while we sort out our country. No more bailouts, please
