What JKLM said…

To be really pedantic no, it's not stealing.

Theft is the removal of someone's property with the intention permanently to deprive them of its use. If I copy some data from the Interwebnet, I'm not permanently depriving anyone of anything other than the money they might have gained if I decided I wanted to purchase it. Which of course I might not have.

Sorry, copyright violations are most certainly not theft. They may be wrong, that's another debate, but the one thing they most certainly are not is theft.

Indeed, there's plenty of economic evidence that P2P users purchase more music than average, so the music mafia at the RIAA are shooting themselves in the foot with all this shit anyways.

Also, of course, Virgin Media are gonna be disconnecting people on the basis of a presumption of guilt based on noticing P2P-like traffic from a user.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons a user might be using a P2P client. Innocent until proven guilty is a cornerstone of almost all legal systems; why should Virgin Media get the right to ignore it and assume that anyone using P2P must be breaking the law.

A law they have no need to enforce and no responsibility for their customers breaching.

I'm sorry, but if Virgin Media wanted to retain my Internet service provision, they're going the wrong way about it. They'd lose my television subscription as well, were there a proper non-Murdoch multi-channel alternative.

@Danny

The video footage is from BBC Parliament — a couple of our mySociety guys (notably Étienne and Tomski, with Matthew building the crowd-sourcing stuff) have been working with them for a while now to get this going.

But yes, we're operating on the fringes of the law again. The content is all under Parliamentary Copyright (not Crown Copyright these days) and we're using it subject to the agreement we have with the BBC. Whether we're actually breaking Parliamentary Copyright or not is a matter for some debate; whether this material should be available in the simple, easy-to-find way that we've made it, however, is a much less complicated discussion, I'd suggest.

If anyone wants to know more, leave us a comment on the mySociety blog post about TWFY video (or email me, Danny ;o)

(Disclaimer: I am a director of mySociety Limited and a trustee of UKCOD, the registered charity that runs the mySociety project.)

I got one of these for Christmas (from my fabulous girlfriend, who is also addicted to BoingBoing).

Having Caller-ID on it would be nice, but my only complaint about it would be that not all phones tell it to vibrate with a text message, which would be useful — mine (Nokia N73) doesn't.

Oh, and I can never work out how to resize wrist-worn appliances and have teeny tiny wrists ;o)

But it definitely is pretty cool. And made my fellow geeks at work "ooh" and "aah".

"I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person"

Isn't that why we have recruitment agencies, who *can* identify people with the appropriate skillset for the job?

I can't work out whether I'm more shocked that the CEO of such a large company is evidently that stupid or that this shocks me…