A continent full of criminals (BBC Technology news page)

Last Tuesday, in committee room A3G-3 of the Altiero Spinelli building of the European Parliament, just across the road from Gare Leopold in Brussels, a group of MEPs and administrators gathered to hear Janelly Fourtou argue that I should be sent to prison.

Of course, they didn’t mention me by name, but Ms Fourtou, an MEP and the driving force behind the European Intellectual Property Enforcement Directive, wants to make a criminal of anyone who uses peer-to-peer networking software to share unlicensed copies of music, movies and other products of the entertainment industry.

Since I’ve got KaZaA on my laptop, and have been known both to download remixes of the White Stripes or old Velvet Underground numbers (please don’t judge me too harshly – it’s my age), and to share the occasional file that might be lying on my hard drive, that means me.

It probably means you as well, if you’re a regular internet user who has realised that there is a lot of old music out there that you simply can’t find in record stores, but is easily available over one or other of the P2P networks.

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