China’s Experience?
Legendary U2’s Bono had recently wrote in his traditional The New York Times article that it may be useful to use China’s experience on controlling the Internet traffic in order to get rid of the mp3 piracy. According to his opinion such measures should be soon promoted by the representatives of the film making industry because this problem will hit them in the nearest future. Their power and authority over the media may be very helpful in order to press it upon Internet providers. Well, it sounds as if nowadays Bono was trully loosing money over the piracy, and in the meantime he doesn’t really understand that these methods are simply not possible. To make his wish come true it will take away other very important and precious freedoms that Internet users have today. In other words, it shall require strict censorship over the traffic as a whole, and therefore his idea sounds a little bit scary. Surely, Bono did not say something absolutely strange; he added that music piracy is particularly standing on the way of young musicians who cannot make money by selling souvenirs or compiling stadium concerts. “The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files”, he noted. Faster the downloading process, more films will get stolen, and thus movie industry should step in and help out musicians who have experienced some degree of defeat during the last decade. Bono’s opinion is certainly right, but censorship over the Internet sounds slightly scary.