Bono attacks downloaders and ISPs

Irish rock legend and U2's frontman Bono, said that file-sharing sites such as notorious Swedish website The Pirate Bay and internet providers turning a blind eye to piracy are a menace to all young up-and-coming artists and songwriters. "A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators - in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can't live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us," he said, listing his top 10 desires for the next decade. Bono called for tougher controls over the spread of intellectual property over the Internet. In particular he attacked Internet providers for allowing music piracy on their services and accused them of benefiting from "reverse Robin Hooding" and pointed out that "the immutable laws of bandwidth" indicate that technology is just a few years from allowing viewers to download entire movies in just a few seconds. "The people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business," he wrote. "We're the post office, they tell us; who knows what's in the brown-paper packages?" "But we know from America's noble effort to stop child pornography, not to mention China's ignoble effort to suppress online dissent, that it's perfectly possible to track content."