Submitted by jaymz on Thu, 07/24/2008 - 16:47.
It would appear that 'the big 6' ISP's in the UK are agreeing with proposed government policy to punish file sharers. They're going to identify repeat offenders by IP address and so on and so on ad nauseum. There's loads of detail about this not least on the BBC, Slashdot, ZDnet, The Register.

What I'm more interested (or I should say annoyed) about is the brigade of people that compare bittorrent to actual physical theft. If you read the Have Your Say (BBC) page on the topic its split between people saying it is not theft, its copyright infringement and the others that say 'would you walk into Tesco, take what you want and walk out?'.
Now no matter what your opinion of people downloading movies, tv shows, music, games, whatever for free is, what it is not is theft. We have laws, laws like 'dont murder' and so on and the law says its not theft. People don't seem to understand that. It makes for circular arguments on those sort of discussion forums and I can only read so many pages before I start to go crazy but a few weeks ago one of the BBC's own editors put out a blog post on the Technology section of the site comparing file sharing to theft. When people pointed out in the comments that this isn't legally/technically correct he still proceeded to say:
UPDATE: A few people have questioned my use of the word stealing. Arguing that it is copyright infringement and not stealing. There may be a point here but to my mind this is semantics. It's a bit like breaking into a car, driving it around and then abandoing it. I believe it's called Taking Without Consent in legal parlance. Stealing to everybody else.
No Defence for Stealing Music.
The 'in my mind this is semantics' bit is what annoyed me the most, so much so I actually bothered to complain to the BBC:
Dear BBC,
As much as I find the reporting across the BBC excellent this particular post angered me so much as to write in and express my grievance with which the manner of this particular blog post came across.
There are numerous comments below the article in question that refute the central message of Darren Waters piece but it is his shear ill-informedness that is so perplexing for someone supposedly clued into how technology and presumably law as it applies to the area works.
His comment that, despite the many arguments to the contrary, the notion that copyright infringement and stealing are merely 'a question of semantics' is ridiculous. It is these sort of statements that create mass-confusion with regards to this area. If anything, it is rather irresponsible for someone high-up within the BBC's technology team to have such a warped view of what is legal reality.
I expect to find this sort of rhetoric on a BPI funded blog, not a public service broadcaster.
Thank you for your time in reading this,
Regards,
James
I got a reply a few days later saying it had been noted and added to the pages of internal feedback that gets passed around.
There's this fallacy amongst the people that argue that it's theft that is perfectly demonstrated in Waters' explanation. He compares downloading music illegally to taking a car, driving around a bit and then leaving it as is. There is a problem with that argument though and that is that you're taking a physical possession. When you steal/borrow the car the rightful owner has been deprived of their resource. File sharing on the other hand involves no deprivation to the creator of the work in that sense. That's why its copyright infringement and not stealing. I haven't taken anything from the producer of the media, I'm playing their music unlicensed. Comparing it to taking a physical car is stupid.
What you could compare it to is walking up to your friends car with some sort of replicator device they had in Red Dwarf and make an exact copy with your own materials. In the case of music piracy the materials are the magnetic tracks of your hard drive that when you arrange in a certain order happen to be the same as some crappy bands new album in MP3 format. The only person I'm physically depriving is myself, of bandwidth and disk space...
Note I am not talking about the loss of revenue here, I'm talking about the actual MP3 file itself. This is the problem with people that compare file sharing to full on ram raiding a supermarket. In any case I wouldn't have a problem if file sharing was classed as theft in law, but its not, so don't compare it to nicking a car.