PLANS to cut-off the internet connections of people who share films and music have been branded an attack on the basic right to steal other people’s property.
As Peter Mandelson unveiled legislation which would make it a crime to just help yourself whenever you damn well pleased, internet service providers said the new laws were an unfair restriction on their ability to give broadband connections to thieves.
A spokesman for TalkTalk said: “Why should parents be penalised just because they’re unlucky enough to raise a criminal who can get them a free download of Gran Torino?”
Emma Bradford, 17, from Grantham, said: “I went into Reg Vardy’s intending to drive off in a Ford Focus, but the guy refused to give me the keys and pointed to this sign saying that all the cars have to be paid for, like they were someone’s property or something.”
She added: “People don’t own cars. Cars just exist. They’re in the ether. They’re like the air that we breathe. I suppose you want to charge me for breathing cars now?”
Stephen Malley, an 18 year-old thief from Hatfield, said: “I don’t have the balls for shoplifting which means I am forced to help myself in the privacy of my own bedroom.
“When will the government realise that no-one owns music, with the possible exception of the people who wrote it and the people who then the paid the people who wrote an agreed sum of monies?
“But what gives them the right – enshrined in legislation, mind you – to recoup those monies from me just because I want to have a permanent copy of it that I can listen to whenever I want?”
He added: “I’ve just realised – I am exactly the same as Gandhi.”
