A flaw in the plan
The Herald reports:
Your days of illegally downloading Game of Thrones might soon be coming to an end, but not in the way you might think.
At the moment copyright owners hamper Google with take-down requests to have infringing content removed from piracy sites, while also putting pressure on ISPs to give up the personal details of pirates.
However, these efforts are largely reactive and have little to no effect on the piracy landscape.
In order to combat the issue proactively, a new report published by Black Market Watch and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime has detailed an approach just so wild it might actually work.
Rather than trying to combat the issue online, the report suggests there should be mandatory blocking of pirated content on the operating system level.
“Other players that possess the potential ability to limit piracy are the companies that own the major operating systems which control computers and mobile devices such as Apple, Google and Microsoft,” the report reads.
“The producers of operating systems should be encouraged, or regulated, for example, to block downloads of copyright infringing material.”
Two problems with this idea.
- There is no easy way to identify pirated material. How do you distinguish between a home video and a pirated movie?
- If an operating system did block pirated material, then I’d say tens of millions of customers would stop using that operating system and use another.