Cory Doctorow on 3 Strikes and you're out, the Olivennes proposal, and the IFPI - ISP going-ons

Cory Doctorow has a great response to the IFPI's ongoing quest of getting the ISPs to threaten their users with disconnection if they go off the deep end and fileshare anything: Cory thinks the labels and industry organizations should be the ones disconnected if they send wrongful notices more than 3 times. Here are some high-lights (gotta love the irony:), interspersed with some audio comments by yours truly.

"Having been disconnected, your customers can only find out about your product offerings by ringing you up and asking, or by requesting a printed brochure. Perhaps you could give all your salespeople fax machines so they can fax urgent information up and down the supply chain. And there's always the phone – just make sure you've got a bunch of phone books in the office, because you'll never Google another phone number"

"They're not even proposing that this punishment should be reserved for convicted infringers. Proving infringement is slow and expensive .. (in the past) the trade association argued that they should never have to prove infringement to collect damages, since proof is so hard to come by. I mean, it's not as though internet access is something important right? ... The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It's only vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day)..."

"This trivial bit of kit is so unimportant that it's only natural that we equip the companies that brought us Police Academy 11, Windows Vista, Milli Vanilli and Celebrity Dancing With the Stars with wire-cutters that allow them to disconnect anyone in the country on their own say-so, without proving a solitary act of wrongdoing. But if that magic wire is indeed so trivial, they won't mind if we hold them to the same standard, right? The sloppy, trigger-happy litigants who sue dead people and children, who accused a laser printer of downloading the new Indiana Jones movie, who say that proof of wrongdoing is too much to ask for – if these firms believe that being disconnected from the internet is such a trivial annoyance, they should be willing to put up with the same minor irritation at corporate HQ and the satellite offices, right?"

Update: the BBC has a good report on Virgin Media's position on this