Wired have just announced a proposal from the Australian Government to search music devices for pirated music when you travel through the airport.
This has so many levels of stupid I’m struggling to even pick my top gripes with it but I’ll try.
- It already takes three hours to get through customs, etc because the rent-a-cops need to keep me “safe” by taking away my water, perfume, toothpaste and lip balm. (As an aside, I got into a 20 minute argument that lip balm is a solid and not a liquid but ended up giving up in frustration).
- I have come back from Vietnam and Thailand before with hundreds of pirated CDs and DVDs and fake jeans (I probably shouldn’t admit that in writing but whatever). Nobody had any problems with them coming back in through customs.
- How are they going to identify pirated music on my ipod? How can they tell if I bought the CD in Sydney, bought a pirated CD in Bangkok, legally downloaded it, or illegally downloaded it?
- Honestly, shouldn’t they be actually catching criminals instead of busting some uni students for downloading a couple of tracks? You read newspaper reports everywhere of airports failing security screening tests and letting bombs through. I’d rather sit next to someone with pirated music than a bomb.
- If I ever miss a plane because some fat rent-a-cop is trying to determine if my music is legitimate (after taking away my water, toothpaste etc) then there will be hell to pay
- Who does the government work for, us or the record industry? Oh yeah, us. They work for us… so why are they taking the side of an industry, especially such a greedy corpulent sluggish one. Go and fix the airport so planes leave on time, we don’t have to line up for an hour for a taxi and it doesn’t cost us $20 to take the train there. The record industry has to figure this one out on its own!
I’m not going to go into the whole issue of pirating - yes people know it’s bad and yes people are going to keep doing it no matter what. The record industry needs to actually work out a better system than punishing their users because they haven’t evolved. They have had ten years to deal with pirated music and they haven’t changed a single thing except to punish legitimate music purchasers. I don’t buy CDs anymore because of all the crippling DRM.
It’s like that stupid ad every time I rent a DVD (which incidently I wouldn’t have to sit through if I had downloaded the movie) - “You wouldn’t steal a car… stealing movies is stealing”. They’re right, I wouldn’t steal a car. But if a friend bought a new car and said “want me to make you a copy for free?” then hell yeah I’d take it and I’d make my friends a copy too.
This post is tagged under: Usability, random thoughts
I saw this on NDM, but somehow managed to glance past the fact that it’s Australia implementing this insanity.
I’ll be taking a little over 50GB of music with me through customs at Melbourne International in a couple of months, I look forward to the heated discussion that ensues if they attempt to declare any of my music pirated.
What no one has covered is HOW they intend on determining what is pirated. Lets say you download some MP3s, along with their embedded ID3 data. You drop it in iTunes, which then proceeds to butcher/append to the ID3 data… you play it a few times, star rate it etc, adding even more ID3 “noise” to the original imprint. Finally, you add it to your iPod. I’m assuming the only way they could hope to tell it’s pirated music is if the ID3 data matches ID3 data from known pirated copies (ie: torrents) — but, if both you and the pirate used the Gracenote database or a similar service to automatically add ID3 data to your MP3 file, such a system would cause so many false positives it would surely be deemed unworkable even by our Government’s standards?!
/rant