You should be careful what you wish for. With the kinds of laws the music/film industry are trying to get passed a website like this one would be a definite target. There are lots of links of people posting track ids, youtube videos, djing clips and so on. All these things would be an excuse for them to shut down the forum. If the big media companies had their way a lot of our favourite websites would disappear and their operators disappeared into American jails... just like that poor guy from England. I can't believe they extradited him to face trial in the states for that. If I was from the UK I wouldn't have much faith in my government. Its not like he was actually hosting any content... just aggregated links.patrick bateman wrote:and I have NO problem what so ever with sites like Megaupload being taken down, since the majority of their business seems to have been based on illegal software/music/movies. And I'm only happy that quite a lot of other sites have decided to stop their business because they are afraid they might be next.
As for piracy... I don't think that in the long run anything they do will make a real dent in it worldwide. They may be able to get laws passed in western countries that will put more people in jail but in a lot of countries it will really have no effect. Of course in a lot of those poorer countries the people probably don't have the money to take so the media companies probably won't even bother trying to see things enforced there. And take a place like China for instance. I think they are the worlds biggest pirates of electronic goods and its doubtful if their government will ever do anything about it at all.
So the end result is that for every dollar saved from piracy hundreds if not thousands will be spent on monitoring people, tracking them down, prosecuting them and then sending people to prisons. If the media companies want to foot the bill that would be a different story but I don't see why the taxpayers should have to foot the bill appease the interests of big business.
Even still technology will evolve to get around it. I would imagine some form of anonymized, encrypted network will spring up eventually to enable more pirating. Its almost inevitable. It may already exist but its not the dominant form yet. Its like getting worked up about rain... its gonna happen, just deal with it.
Just wait until they start cracking down on DJs for playing tracks in sets when they didn't have it cleared with the producer. I bet you will just love that.