And yes, telcos and their bloody billing errors. I’ve done my share of finding providers and in the end actually settled for the one providing substandard coverage but excellent service/support and which had good rates to boot.

Honestly, if the local walmart sells their cookies at ten times the price and keep them on the shelves past their best-before date, then even an idiot would grab the recipe and “copy” the cookie batch in his own home.

The exact same reasoning applies to most noncommercial infringements of copyright. It’s not rocket science.

Only problem is that we’ve been stuck with the illogical nonsense called copyright for so long people can’t see the utter lack of common sense inherent in the concept. Human nature, i guess.

If a trend was created mandating everyone to wear ten-pound barbells suspended by alligator clips from their scrotums we’d end up fifty years later with everyone taking that trend for granted. Anyone questioning hanging weights from their testicles would be ostracized – especially by the lobby of “Heavyweight ballsack decorations ltd.”

Next time you look at the ISP bill you’ll find claims from a thousand NGO’s around the world, many of whom started up right after the levy was introduced just to get in to the action.

Bear in mind that these are the companies who implemented a business model consisting of a protection racket involving mass-mailed legal threats based on intimidation without evidence.

As a luminating example of this bear in mind that privacy laws are in effect despite the widespread crimes of murder, drug dealing and arms sales. Now if we only abolished search and seizure restrictions we could probably solve over half of these crimes far faster.

As the Sovjet Union and the DDR amply demonstrated, this is not a good idea.

I.e. it doesn’t really matter how many people indulge in filesharing, it still isn’t an excuse for trying to abolish personal privacy én másse.

Oh, and incidentally, any such attempts will fail anyway as savvy filesharers utilize darknets anyway. So the only people for whom privacy gets abolished will be John Q Doe who believes he has no reason to hide.