The Blacklist

05-03-2009


So, as I ranted about a few days ago (or weeks, time is relative) Eircom are about to do something pretty damn stupid by just blindly accepting a list from the music industry of sites to block.

Given that I have ranted about this before the music industry could very well just decide that my site should be blocked because I do not conform to their ideas, add the bauble to this list and Eircom would just block me for no reason. No questions asked, nothing illegal done, just accepted.

But we can fight this wave of stupidity. Go to this page and let loose the dogs of war. Whatever about blocking sites for doing illegal things, just accepting a list is plain retarded.

Technology is constantly evolving people, either keep up or die. If your industry cannot adapt and evolve accordingly then your industry no longer deserves to have a say. The music industries only attempt at solving this piracy problem was DRM (which I won't get into in detail here).

DRM was an attempt to ensure that your music player (be it an iPod or on your computer) played only legal songs. The problem was that it was a clear, desperate, attempt at the music industry to plug the hole quickly. A hole that has been around since roughly 1995 and the plugging was only attempted in late 2007. The end result was music that was legally purchased would delete itself, refuse to play, request the user repeatedly purchase the same song (at a discount of course) if they deleted by mistake.

Then companies that supported DRM music realised how poorly implemented it was and went away from it, leaving a lot of people in limbo because they know had DRM music, legal music, but no way to play it.

A blanket list is not going to fix it. Trying to create a bit of software that destroys a user experience is not going to fix it. It has been said that history repeats itself. This is very true about the Music and Movie industry, this is history repeating itself.

Last time they were this slow to adapt a brand new invention had just come out called VHS tapes.

Multi-billion corporations clearly do no learn from their mistakes.

So don't let them try and pull a Brian Cowen and just force feed a list to your ISP of sites they don't like anymore. A bit of thinking on both their's and Eircom's part is needed to address this problem correctly.

Otherwise we shall all be surfing through the Great Firewall of Ireland.

Blue_jester