Shadow Minister of Culture & Creative Industries at the Conservative Party, Ed Vaizey, has posed a question on business networking site LinkedIn: “What is the best way for an incoming government to address the issue of online piracy?”

At time of writing there are already over 70 thought provoking responses and unsurprisingly there’s no a cry from people demanding the Government forces ISPs to cut off suspected filesharers! Some of the highlights include:

Peter Shaw (a senior solutions architect) says: “If the government are going to address this, then one of the first things they need to do is be willing to spend the money on a accurate detection system, and not just go after a person beacuse the name of an Illegal song turned up attached to their IP address, or beacuse someone thinks they use too much data.”

John Stevens (sales and marketing consultant) adds: “I would like to see an incoming government not get dragged down the route of making ISP’s responsible for policing this problem. There will never be enough certainty to ensure that someone’s connection is not being illegally “hijacked”, and the cost of authorities policing the situation is just a financial non-starter.”

Jeremy Silver (Acting-CEO at Featured Artists’ Coalition) says: “My personal belief is that legislating for technical measures on the internet is like asking a snail to act as a line judge at a football match. The speed of technological innovation and circumvention means that any preventative measures can at best be speed bumps. ”

Andrew Adams (lecturer at the University of Reading) doesn’t pull any punches: “…you need to require copyright owners to realise that they are no longer the producers of Rolls Royce cars, but the purveyors of MacDonald’s burgers and that the days of “Fruit and Flowers” at EMI headquarters are over. Only when sensible complete back catalogues of existing material are made available at sensible legitimate rates per item (a few pence or a subscription allowing access to the entire catalogue for a few pounds per month) can you make a rreasonable argument that there is not a severe market failure in the creative industries with price gouging, overly strong control and a prior capture of the legislative proces bringing copyright law into disrepute compared to modern life (including both technology and a global cultural market).”

Sarah Dixon (Programme Director & Entrepreneur) argues: “I agree with Graham Hardy – your focus should be tackling child pornography online, not piracy. Online piracy is endemic – try anonymous surveys of 13-30 year olds to discover how many access/download media online without paying for it — do you really want to anger this demographic? Do you really want to prosecute IT illiterate parents for their child’s activities?”

It’s definitely worth reading the whole thread to get the full context of everyone’s comments. We look forward to Ed Vaizey’s response…