Banning Pirates: Mission Impossible

Imagine the legislative passing a law proposing that people who illegally download films and music will be cut off from the internet. Now imagine GMA owning up to her transgressions against the republic and stepping down effective immediately. Hah! We can always dream right? These are two very different scenarios with sadly no chance of happening in the near future, or June 2010 in the latter case.

There are several reasons why proposal number 1 won’t work as things stand now. Principally, this proposal is totally and completely unworkable in the real world. ISPs will not accept liability for the contents of packets (nor should they), and it would be impossible for them to open and check if every single download and upload was legal or not without the entire Internet grinding to halt. This isn’t in the best interests of the government, the ISPs or the voters. Banning customers and exposing yourself to billions in liability isn’t a good business strategy. Criminalizing the few pirates and inconveniencing the rest is not a vote winner.

Also, it would be impossible to tell the difference between illegal downloading and legal activities such as downloading software patches, using torrents to share stuff legally, playing online video games, using VoIP, photo sharing, telecommuting, and many others. The resistance from the private sector would be as strong as it would from the general public.

Another reason for its unfeasibility is that WiFi piggybacking and encrypted packets make it impossible to tell who is downloading what in the first place. An unsecured network in a densely populated area is a virtual free for all invitation to anyone with an internet capable wireless device.

This idea makes as much sense as trying to ban people from singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to each other over the telephone network, or burning down libraries to protect the publishing industry. Before there is any more discussion about this, the music and film companies need to definitively prove illegal downloads cost them millions of pesos in lost revenues. They can provide data showing that CD sales are falling because nobody uses them anymore or that the film industry is in rude health because of the pirates. (Pirates have to be blamed for the music and film industries’ decrease in revenue. After all, it could not be for the simple reason that the music and movies being released are mediocre at best. I don’t even think that the latest Filipino movies are being uploaded for public consumption in the net. I have only seen torrents for older Pinoy movies.) There should be no more talk about changing laws and spending tax payer’s money on this ‘problem’ until someone proves there really is one.