Tonight, for once, I took time out to watch the telly for a change and focused on watching an episode of the famous Panorama on BBC1, a show which looks at various issues occurring in the world today, like Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe programme except far less amusing nor containing any swear words for added effect.

But once more I felt the nerd rage build inside me, even prompting me to enter a blog entry for the first time in a while, for this programme was about the “net police” coming to get you for ripping off material you didn’t pay for,, due to a new digital rights bill moving through parliament right now.

The show mainly focused on the music industry, you know, those lovable rogues that fuel the wages of many mainstream artists and of course brought us the likes of Simon Cowell. Yeah, them lot. Already we’re not on their side.

Because I prefer to comment on such things that actually doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, here was a comment I left with them, of course if it got published on the site, I’d be amazed:

I absolutely laughed at some of the comments being made and also could not believe how much was left out.

For example, the level of profits the music industry is enjoying was something which was not reported on, something that can found with a two second search on Google using music industry profits.

Of course, maybe I’m biased and can just about come up with anything when trying to prove a point, but I feel that this episode of Panorama did not even attempt to scratch the surface of the argument being put forward, nor even question any of the figures being put to them.

When you had Stephan Timms on, he equated using broadband to using electricity, and just like using electricity lawfully you use broadband lawfully.

Please can he clarify on the fact that if you use a lot of electric you have to pay for it, and also, can you use electricity illegally these days? I swear I’ve never tried to run a nuclear power plant from a 4 way adapter.

He also seemed to not want to do anything about this whole situation as clearly it appears they don’t care about the issue nor know what it’s about really, except maybe for the fact that huge amounts of money are involved.

You did to be fair try to bring over both sides of the argument, and I agree, that there has to be more done for people to pay for quality content. There is a danger that more and more, the high quality content we all want to replace endless bang bang noise will be cut back by the mainstream sources, replaced by cheaper rubbish and there is a lot of people we don’t see who may even lose jobs as a result. That, in this climate, is a sobering thought.

However in concentrating on just the music industry, and not even really highlighting anything on the TV industry, where waste also reins as much as in music, Video game piracy or some of the solutions being put forward to see where habits could be changed for instance, like Spotify to any great detail, nor even think about the reasons why people do it for free (focusing on students or kids, it’s not exactly difficult to see why they do it.) it feels a great disservice has been done by only covering a tiny portion of the overall situation and something like this, would need a lot more air time to look at everything.

Perhaps the portion with Stephan Timms MP could have been better articulated really….By them, I did infer the government, however the point has probably gotten lost by now.

To be honest, I felt like I could have made a better programme using cling film and a vomiting dog, and for god’s sake, please stop showing us the Pirate Bay on these programmes, there are countless others as well but I suspect the researchers on these lovely jollies never bother looking at anything else.

A bit more research, questioning and perhaps not try to cram everything in a 27 minute film would perhaps go further for the legal cause than what this did tonight.