Internet Cafe Guilty Of Piracy
from the of-course-they-are dept
Well, the courts in the UK seem to be just about as misguided as the ones here in the US. They’ve now found an internet cafe guilty of piracy because people in the cafe downloaded music and burned songs to CDs. How is this the cafe’s fault? Shouldn’t the music industry be blaming the actual person who did the downloading? As the ruling stands, it sounds like the whole internet is now illegal, since it can be used to facilitate the download of copyrighted materials.
Comments on “Internet Cafe Guilty Of Piracy”
Two different reactions
My first reaction on reading the synopsis here was “what? how can the cafe owners be responsible?” as the only internet cafe I’ve ever visited didn’t allow you to install any software on their PC – you could only use what they provided.
Then I read the article and it talks about how they ‘stoppped doing this a while back, so how can we be liable?’ and then goes on to say that investigators found hundreds of music files on their local network. Suddenly I stopped feeling sorry for them and thought “well, duh, how could you do something like that and complain when you got caught?” That’s like saying “well, I used to rob and mug people, but I’ve stopped doing that and I’m living comfortably on the all the money I stole, so how can think I’m guilty?”