"It Was All Free, I Tell You Kids! Movies, Music, TV, We Didn't Pay For Anything!"

A songwriting association, or lawyers representing publishers who own the rights to musicians' songs, are now making the utterly absurd claim that online music piracy is worse than bankrobberies. The Songwriters' Guild demands the FBI act to reign in these digitally armed criminals. Now.

Ars Technica rounds up the story, but the article concludes with this remarkable checklist from the corporate entertainment giants of how they wish the internet to be controlled, for their benefit, and they're furiously lobbying the White House right now to meet their demands :

• Technologies to detect, monitor (and filter) traffic or specific files based on analysis of information such as protocols, file types, text description, metadata, file size and other “external” information;
• Content recognition technologies such as digital hashes, watermark detection, and fingerprinting technologies;
• Site blocking, redirection with automated warning systems/quarantine of repeat offending sites;
• Bandwidth shaping and throttling;
• Scanning infrastructure (the ability to subscribe to RSS-style data feeds as sites get new postings of content and links (for linking, streaming, and locker sites)

Your grandchildren won't believe the freedoms you once had on the internet. The first decade of the 21st century online will sound like a digital nirvana, where amongst the criminality hundreds of millions people shared their love of music, movies, culture, history, art and literature, all for free.

2000-2010 was the era of free information. No age of humanity shared so much knowledge, so widely, so easily.

Sad to think it is now all but over.

What comes next will be The Age Of Bland.