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UK High Court Orders ISPs to Identify File-sharers
securitas writes "The BBC reports that the British High Court has ordered Internet service providers (ISPs) to divulge the identities of 28 customers accused of music file-sharing to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the UK equivalent of the RIAA. The court order issued by Mr Justice Blackburne is a big victory for the BPI and its umbrella oranization, International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), especially after recent setbacks in Canada (CRIA) and the USA. Blackburne is quoted as saying, 'On the face of it this appears to be a powerful case of copyright infringement.' The ISPs have 14 days to comply with the court order. More coverage at the Guardian/Reuters and the Register."
when push comes to shove, will it turn out this way here too? This really changes things if ISPs are going to have to police their users. This should cause ISP rates to go up as well, which is bad for everyone.
CB$#@*(
free ipod and free gmail!
For a moment i thought it was the British Pornographic Industry. If the porn industry starts suing people internet would be obselete for me. :(
"Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much." -Walter Lippmann
There go all the Benny Hill rips from Emule!
Is the new age of file-swapping enforcement a lottery now? Not long until file-traders must obtain draft cards".
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
You know what, you can spare all of your music should be free hippy bullshit, if these were the 14 biggest file sharers out of a population of fifty million plus British internet users, then so be it. It's not like anybody can say that they didn't know it was illegal, that they didn't know they were violating international copyright laws.
Why don't the ISP's just dump all their usage logs to /dev/null ? For the sake of customer privacy.
Can't really expect the ISP's to come up with data that they don't have, can you!?
Meh.
When I signed up for my 512 kb/s ADSL in Kuwait, I asked the ISP salesman specifically if I might have any problems with file sharing.
He said it's perfectly fine with the compnay policies, and even suggested a few P2P clients that he liked!
It seems to me that keeping detailed logs of your users is just a big legal headache.
One of my clients was once interested in installing detailed internet monitoring and logging (so as to see who is wasting time on the web). They lost interest rapidly when I pointed out that they could be compelled to provide it in court should someone sue.
SurfControl and the other Big Brother ware makers never include that in the copy.
Here's what I'd do: You need to keep certain logs so you can know if there is an intrusion, DoS, etc, but program your logs to automatically erase every week. That means that there will never be more than THE CURRENT WEEK's worth of data that could be subpoened.
Of course, I'm sure if ISP's start doing THAT the RIAA will just get Congress to pass laws that make us all retain ALL logs for all time...
Corporatism != Free Market
"They are uploading music on a massive scale, effectively stealing the livelihoods of thousands of artists and the people who invest in them."
Yet they chose Brittany Spears to be the front-person for the anti-pirating campaign. How about paying some of those starving artists to play frontman instead?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you have an open WAN for anonymous people to connect to the internet over, can the owner of the router (and ISP connection) be held responsible for sharing files over said connection?
Compared to the next step, I mean. How do you identify filesharers when they do it secretly and not via some dumbass gnutella/fasttrack/etc that lets everyone in the world know exactly what you're doing?
Well, you don't. You just suspect everyone whose traffic stats look abnormal. Sure, the hell will freeze before ISPs are going to provide this data for free. So what happens? A new law...
seems that Cananda is the only country to have the sense to tell the music industry to shove it...
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
I'm still of the opinion that criminalising your audience is a very dangerous game for the record labels to be getting involved in. And also extremely sad and backwards. I think Steve Job's comment that he treats downloading tracks as his biggest competitor to iTunes Music Store.
In any case, it will further push the record labels one step further away from any claim to believe in the importance of music for music's sake and hopefully open up the eyes of fans to the sheer amount of manipulation these guys now have in terms of creating pre-planned acts, factory stamped songs and shallow, empty and talentless indivduals who want fame more than anything else.
It will be extremely interesting to see how the music press in the UK react - most of them are in the pay of the music business anyway except a few genuine exceptions, Void Magazine for one...
Also I really hope that this will provide more impetus to people experimenting with the copyleft music scene...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
Anyone have the full disposition ? What IP addresses are the BPI asking to divulge the identity of ?
Not that I'm worried or anything.
"The recording industry may not agree, but the U.S. Supreme Court thinks personal privacy is far more important that music piracy," Red Herring reported. "On Tuesday, the high court refused to entertain an appeal of a unanimous 2003 decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals that held that copyright holders cannot force Internet providers to identify file sharers using a mere subpoena.
Industry watchers see this as yet another blow that the recording industry has taken in its fight against online file sharing -- a fight it is slowly losing. The lawsuits in question were between New York's Verizon Internet Services and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), headquartered in Washington, D.C."
From instapundit.com 5 minutes ago, of course. :)
It's his TITLE, not his first name! It's how you address judges in the U.K. "Mr. Justice insert family name here"
The gift of death metal does not smile on the good looking.