Broadband Service as P2P Distro Experiment

Not another doctor wrote to mention a PC Doctor article about the Sky by Broadband service. In addition to providing access to the internet, the service also helpfully downloads and installs the Kontiki P2P service. From the article: "What this really means is that Sky in all their advertising are making out that you are downloading content directly from them rather than other users. Also, the P2P link continues to run in the background after you've shut down the main application, eating up bandwidth by allowing others to download the files from your PC. Kontiki also collects and sends back to Sky a lot of information about your PC. There is no mention as to how this data is protected from unauthorized access, however, initial examination with Ethereal seems to show that all data is at least encrypted during transmission."

Comments

Has Sky broken the law?

[BrianUofR]

Sky is smart for using a P2P architecture, a cool solution to an engineering problem. I have serious concerns about the partial uninstallation issue though.

Was the broken uninstaller a mistake or a "feature"? They have something to gain from using your computer as a P2P host. If, say, an investigation produced emails showing it was in the design spec, has a fraud been comitted? Deceiving someone to profit at their expense (resources--bandwith, CPU, etc) sounds like fraud. Have they broken the law?

Can anyone familiar with UK law comment?

Re:Has Sky broken the law?

[kt0157]

Computer laws are pretty out-of-date in the UK (e.g. they are only just considering DoS being an offence). But there is an "unauthorised" use law, which might cover this. And generic fraud laws ("attempting to obtain pecuniary advantage by deception"). The term "deception" might well cover incomprehensible and unfair click-through terms.

Would have to be tested in court, and you'd have to get the Crown Prosecution Service to take the case to get a criminal prosecution. Very unlikely, especially given the malign hold over the Government by Rupert Murdoch.

More likely to succeed is a civil case for damages.

K.

Re:Has Sky broken the law?

[ardle]

I reckon that if they knowingly shipped software whose p2p component fails to uninstall, then they have betrayed their customers to a greater extent than Sony did with their rootkit; Sony's transgression could possibly lead to a victm's bandwidth being used by zombie processes such as spam, Sky's will result in the victim's bandwidth being used to distribute content on Sky's behalf. In terms of money, it's clear that Sky is ripping off their customers (even those customers who only try the service for a while). I think legal systems can easily identify lawbreakers when they can identify who is taking whose money, and for what ;-)

Why would Sky treat their customers - and internet users in general - so badly? Because they are not really an ISP, they are a content distribution company and in the world of content distribution the customer is the enemy.

As far as I can make out, there is no cost to customers at the moment (service is only available to customers who have signed up to full movie or sport TV packages) but I'd imagine that this is likely to change in the future. Sky would do well to appreciate that if they are not actually distributing the content that they are selling, then they are not actually selling content but merely licences to view that content and to reflect this in their pricing.

Sky Has Suckered All Its Subscribers Anyway...

[pandrijeczko]

Sorry, call me old fashioned but I thought the idea was you paid for your TV service and got no advertisements OR you got free TV service with adverts every 10 minutes. All credit to Sky's marketing in that they seem to have combined the two into one great big ripoff.

Kontiki is Sky realising they've got away with one ripoff and are now embarking on a second to leech even more money from their customers - no different than just about every other big corporation that we the cattle masses have allowed to get too big for it's own damn good.

Wake up and smell the coffee people! If you don't like how a corporation is screwing you then don't buy their products, it really is THAT SIMPLE. The more people that do that, the more they have to take notice and stop treating their customers like mindless cattle.

And as for Sky, don't bother with them. Wait a year or two and all those nice TV programs you want to see get released in a handy DVD box set that you can probably buy for less than a month's subscription to Sky anyway.