The French are heading the wrong way, the English have already went down the path… many are soon to follow. The path is one let by the Greedy Business ™, consisting primarily of the music industry, led by the Big Four, and the movie industry and their mafia-sides, the RIAA and the MPAA. The path is one, where a household is denied access or have highly reduced access to a resource that the entire world is dependent upon: The Internet. This lifeline to the outside world, which is essential for todays life on terms of work, information search, social access and exhange with the public sector, is being threatened… And for what?

The music industry earns billions upon billions every year – even though they haven’t adapted or at least their business model in more than 60 years. Imagine that in any other industry? Imagine if the hardware producers had done the same. Rejected the Internet outside their control completely. None of their goods were to be sold outside a physical store in their complete control. They would have surely died. Imagine if the authors had sued Amazon out this world for selling tons of their books online and tried to disable the internet because they found a book online that had been made illegally available? Such thoughts are today unimaginable and still the Greedy Business ™ tries to do this. The ridiculous thing about their attempt is that politicians listen to this.

Lets make one thing perfectly clear: I’m against illegal copying of copyrighted or otherwise protected work… but I am not against copying, information freedom, technology advances. File copying is not automatically illegal downloading. Torrents does not equal illegal download, but an excellent technology that could be used in many different contexts. The Internet is way past the hour where we can just start to disable people’s access to it. It is simply a human right. Why do I say that? Well, as long as the Greedy Business ™ sees nothing on the Internet but illegal copies everyone agrees that it isn’t beneficial to keep. However, in the same moment we call out for the “Three strikes and you are out” adaption we also critize China for not allowing its people free access to information through the Internet. Perhaps soon China will come out saying that they are just regulating against illegal copying and everything will be allright then?

The main problem facing the Greedy Business ™ is that they are no longer functioning as a free market, where the forces of the market regulates. If it had been the case then one or more of the Big Four would have adapted to the Internet more than a decade ago and perhaps even sooner than that – offering people an alternative they were clearly asking for. Take a look at how many portable media devices being sold every year. Then try to go out and find a service that can offer them the media they want, regardless of the platform they have at home (Windows, Linux, Mac)? There are none! Then take a look at what the Greedy Business ™ does offer (after being forced to try something)… Complicated stores, filled with forms that needs to be filled out, again and again, slow download times, extremely low bitrates and quality, DRM, DRM and DRM… and for the same price as you can buy the physical alternative! Don’t try to explain those prices! They simply has nothing to do with the cost of production – as it would in a working market.

If you started to see where all the money goes inside the music industry you would be appalled – and they know this. How come a CD costs the same as a DVD? You cannot try tell me that the price of production is the same for making 12 small tracks of music compared to a large Hollywood blockbuster involving several major stars and thousands of people involved. Then comes the price of a downloadable version of an album cost the same – and should I be so stupid that I wanted to pay for a tune for my mobile phone the price would be one fifth of the entire album. Don’t tell me that it is representing the true cost in any way. It represents that too many people needs to earn too much money inside this great pyramid where the musician sits at the bottom… An entire industry build up of managers and lawyers that imagine a world that cannot live without their product and therefore keep claiming that they must be loosing money to illegal downloads because every person on Earth doesn’t buy a CD every month, like they did in the 80′ies. Could they only offer some real proof of this, instead of the lying, bullshitting statistics they publish now and then, which are always shot down immediately as being at least of factor of 3 over the top or outright lies…

Instead of focusing on making music they are now spending their time on two things: suing their customers for illegal downloading without proper evidence and spreading lies about technology they do not understand themselves.

The conclusion is simply, if you think of it. Technology doesn’t stand still – people sometimes do, however. What we have is a disfunctional industry that needs to die and be reborn immediately. Instead of trying to disable people’s access to the Internet we should instead disable the Internet access for the Greedy Business ™. This would solve all the problems. They don’t need the real world to make their statistics anyway. Then when they have come up with something that acutally moves technology and the Internet forward, instead of back into the Dark Ages, they should be allowed back on. Now, all I need is a politician that wants to listen to the people and reason, instead of listening to the money of the Greedy Business ™.