In a somewhat surprising quote, a French-only newspaper called LeDevoir has the scoop on the RCMP’s (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) change in tactics as it applies to chasing after music and movie pirates.  Thank goodness for Google’s translate, but thanks to TorrentFreak’s sharp eyes, we’re able to glean the following:

Piracy [music over the Internet or other media] for personal use is no longer targeted,” said in an interview Christmas Hilaire, head of the federal investigations and questions of copyright theft ‘author to the RCMP. Today it is so easy to copy. Everybody was taken by surprise and we do not know how to stop it. “

“In this context, where the illegal downloading of music, usually in MP3 format, has become an overall pattern in society, especially among young Internet users, the RCMP says that the tracking of this type of thief does not appear in ” [his] priorities. It addresses mainly to crimes against intellectual property, which have an impact on the health and safety of consumers [medicines, electrical appliances, and so on.], But also those related to organized crime, said St-Hilaire. Our plate is pretty full with that, and unfortunately, the small, it does not have time to deal with them. “ 

Well, not much more to say than that, other than its nice to hear that in a time of limited resources, the police are prioritizing their time catching thieves, rapists and murderers, and not, say, dear old grandmothers.  Or, worse yet, grandmothers who are already dead.

There’s another debate about ad-blocking software on browsers and what kind of legal ramifications it might have — all of which is silly and futile.  I don’t know what might come out of that debate from a legal point of view, but I can assure everyone one result I *am* certain of:

An increased awareness of ad-blocking software.

While its true that only a small proportion of web surfers actually use ad-blocking software, I’ll also bet that a small proportion of users *also* don’t really use plugins, different themes, or even Firefox (or a non MSIE browser).  

But you know what?  They might now.

And that’s the real sorry and absurd thing about this debate.  The code that exists to circumvent ads on websites exists publicly.  You can bet that people will happily add and change it to reflect any “advances” in ad-serving technology.  And you can bet that the ad-serving po-lice aren’t going to come after individual ad-blocking users.

The only thing the debate is going to do is fuel the awareness of such technologies and the uptake of such technologies — and once the cat’s out of the bag, you’ll never put it back in no matter how absurdly litigious you want to get.

Just ask the RIAA.

[as a post script, I'll assert that ad-blocking technologies are a very good thing: people that use ad-blocking will almost never click or pay attention to those ads anyway, AND they will force advertisers, marketers *and* webmasters to come up with alternative ways to monetize traffic that is actually palatable to said "traffic".  Yes, yes, I know, easier said than done, and no, PayPerPal doesn't work for everyone, so its an opportunity if nothing else :) ]