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Don't forget FACT, which is (sort of) our MPAA equivalent.

Depends where you are in the world. F.A.C.T. The Federation Against Copyright Theft preach that it is actually theft in the UK, and they're on TV ads, DVD ads, Cinema ads... but most people take the ads off the pirated DVDs ;)

Here in the UK the people who are likely to be involved in the clampdown are the British Video Association http://www.bva.org.uk/ and in particular the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT) http://www.fact-uk.org.uk/ though most of there work is stopping the production of illegal copies of DVDs for sale.

This is really encouraging to see the the public service broadcasters 'getting' open source and trying to contribute to the community. If this could take off it could be a great boost to the entire copyleft/open-source ideas.

However I would warn that in the UK the content industry is sharpening its knives over The BBC Creative Archive. I attended a conference given at Westminster Media Forum where the representatives of the content industry where rabid about copyright and patent law and extremely hysterical about 'idea theft' as it was colourfully termed. When they heard about the Creative Archive plan... Phew! Some scary people were there... And they are not impressed with Creative Commons - who were shouted at, verbally attacked and generally given a very very frosty reception...

Strangest contribution (and it was a difficult choice considering the crazy assertions and unsubstantiated nonsense spoken) has to be the Arlene McCarthy MEP linking copyright, patent and 'idea' theft with 'Organised Crime', 'Paedophilia', 'Pornography', 'Terrorism' and 'Paramilitary Organisations'... She was truly loopy, and more worryingly serious!

John Naughton was fantastic castigating the dangers from 'slavish legislaters' (she didn't like that!) and gave a really excellent and balanced presentation calling for caution against listening to only the interests of the media corporations and content industry.

Most scary person (again a difficult choice) was Lavinia Carey, Director of FACT who told us that '65% of people didn't think it was a problem to share stuff' and that 'consumers have to be protected from themselves' and those who didn't were 'gonna get a shock'. To get a feeling for the balanced tone see the campaign to link copyright 'theft' and terrorism... Scary!

I mean, how high do you have to be to think that copying your legal CD to your iPod or watching a movie on your TV (God forbid!) is "terrorism"

Seriously, I think that's a really good idea. I hate the warnings they give. They don't stop the people they're supposed to, and make the rest of us feel like we're being treated as criminals. They make me want to get out a comcorder at that point just in spite.

I really would love to see a showing of a film (any film) where when the FACT warning screen comes up, over three-quarters of the audience immedately get out camcorders.
It'd be funny if nothing else.

Federation Against Copyright Theft.

Speaking as a UK academic sysadmin, transparent bandwidth control is something I also do. Our academic link to the net is only 2Mbit at present and all it takes is a few bandwidth hogs trying to download warez or using P2P applcations to really slow down access for legitimate users.

One thing I have done is limit bandwidth according to MIME type - download HTML and it runs at top speed. Download binary files from certain segments on the network and your bandwidth is limited. This I implemented after finding someone downloading a 600Mb RAR file (OfficeXP.rar - go figure - The only thing that is puzzling me is exactly what he was going to do with it - he didnt have access to a burner and so had no way of getting the data off the box.)

As for P2P applications, there is no way I would (or could) allow these things to run otherwise I'd be opening us up to all kinds of problems along with having FACT on my back. These guys visit me from time to time and ask what I'm doing to stop copyright infringement(!). Exactly how legal this is I'm not sure however if they suspect something they can arrange a search by the police which obviously could cause problems.

Quite frankly I'm surprised that UCI allow P2P at all, and suspect that in the near future this sort of thing will be getting blocked from the peer or be a condition of bandwidth provision.

Speaking as a UK academic sysadmin, transparent bandwidth control is something I also do. Our academic link to the net is only 2Mbit at present and all it takes is a few bandwidth hogs trying to download warez or using P2P applcations to really slow down access for legitimate users.

One thing I have done is limit bandwidth according to MIME type - download HTML and it runs at top speed. Download binary files from certain segments on the network and your bandwidth is limited. This I implemented after finding someone downloading a 600Mb RAR file (OfficeXP.rar - go figure - The only thing that is puzzling me is exactly what he was going to do with it - he didnt have access to a burner and so had no way of getting the data off the box.)

As for P2P applications, there is no way I would (or could) allow these things to run otherwise I'd be opening us up to all kinds of problems along with having FACT on my back. These guys visit me from time to time and ask what I'm doing to stop copyright infringement(!). Exactly how legal this is I'm not sure however if they suspect something they can arrange a search by the police which obviously could cause problems.

Quite frankly I'm surprised that UCI allow P2P at all, and suspect that in the near future this sort of thing will be getting blocked from the peer or be a condition of bandwidth provision.