Bono under fire on Twitter over illegal downloads
Posted on Monday, January 04, 2010 at 01:30 PM
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Bono is under fire on Twitter after calling for more control on illegal downloads.Listing his top 10 for 2010, Bono argued in The New York Times that online file sharing was killing music and movies.
"The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we're just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of '24' in 24 seconds," he wrote.
"A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators," Bono wrote, "in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can't live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us."
His remarks have sparked a torrent of anti-Bono tweets but I don't think he deserves the abuse on this one. (I wouldn't defend U2's moving to the Netherlands for tax purposes however.)
I think the U2 frontman is right to slam internet service providers as "reverse Robin Hoods."
Like Bono says, the ISPs are mopping up the profits lost to music and print and they're probably poised to do the same to movies.
There's a lot of discussion about so-called "free content" but what about the fact that most of us are already paying $50 a month to access the internet.
Where's that money going to? Is it being used to create content? No, thought not...
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