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Spain Outlaws P2P File-Sharing
Section_Ei8ht writes "Spanish Congress has made it a civil offense to download anything via p2p networks, and a criminal offense for ISP's to allow users to file-share, even if the use is fair. There is also to be a tax on all forms of blank media, including flash memory drives. I guess the move towards distributing films legally via BitTorrent is a no go in Spain." Here is our coverage of the tax portion of this law.
Isn't WoW patching done via P2P?
Also if you want to really push the boat out they've now made it illegal to play online games, since they work in a way you could argue is P2P in some cases.
I like muppets.
How can a country be so progressive (at least on paper) on some things, and so idiotic on this?
This just in -- Spain is being a tool.
This seems like not only a bypassable law (encrypted ssh tunnels, etc...), an uninforceable law (what're they gonna do? punish the MILLIONS of people who fileshare?), but also a VERY STUPID LAW (legal file sharing is now a "no no"? why the FUCK was that even proposed, let alone passed!). For shame, Spain, for shame.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
These guys got it all! Now they just need to ban internet and computers, even if your use of it is fair, this way there will be no more piracy.
In other news, arresting 100 persons is still a good thing provided that one of them is guilty.
You just got troll'd!
They have done something far worse than simply ban unauthorized p2p sharing.. they have made it a criminal offense for ISP's to merely allow it.
since every protocol on the internet can be used for unauthorized p2p sharing ISP owners must now either cease all service or go to prison.
This is a subtle but radical difference from what other nations have done, and it spells doom for all spanish ISP's
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I believe the law only applies to copyrighted materials that you aren't entitled to copy;
Ummm, wasn't copyright infringment already a civil offence in Spain? So you're saying that they passed a law to make the civil offence of copyright infringment into a civil offence?
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
A button in P2P to be able to pay wouldn't help. The brain damaged RIAA&friends refuse to accept payment for MP3s.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
I think you missed the part where ISP's are obligated to block P2P traffic. Since an ISP cannot differentiate between authorized and unauthorized P2P traffic, they have no choice but to block the entire technology (or make a best case effort at least).
"Internet service provider" can also be extended to cover torrent sites and trackers because they provide an internet service. Then they can be liable for damages. Enjoy http://www.descargasweb.net/ while you still can!! Be carefull though to give a fake ID because the logs can be use against you..
There are two types of sources in bittorrent:
* Peers are people who are both downloading and uploading.
* Seeders are people who have already downloaded the entire file and are uploading it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Peers will continually kill the connections with the worst download/upload ratio, meaning you will get virtually nothing from peers if you don't upload.
Seeders upload to anybody, though they _may_ be clever by avoiding uploading the same parts of the file more than once during a limited amount of time in order to maximize the amount of data that can be distributed between peers.
So in other words, if trhere are a lot of seeders you will get ok download speeds without uploading.
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
Together with a random port there should be no way to detect and thus affect the traffic.
The traffic analysis necessary to detect BitTorrent traffic is trivial; nothing else opens a large number of connections and starts sending data the way that BitTorrent does. Encryption has worked with some ISPs because they've only made a half-hearted effort to traffic-shape. As it currently stands, many users have a choice of broadband providers and will switch if their carrier is too aggressive, and in most cases it's easier to simply cap all of an heavy user's bandwidth than to waste the cycles trying to find the BT traffic in particular.
But rest assured, the traffic analysis is child's play. If ISPs want to stop BT traffic, encryption won't present any impediments.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
....like say anyone who uses South Africa's sole monopoly telecom provider, Telkom.
Why has this happened? Oh well you see Telkom likes to save bandwidth because they're cheap. So they force every international connection through a cache server. Slashdot has deemed the cache server an "abusive" IP, so it's banned from posting on the site. But you can't NOT submit from that IP, because it's forced by the only internet provider in the country. So basically 45 million people can't post thanks to lazy site administrators.
Have I submitted this to the appropriate channels? Of course, countless times, and never recieve any reply. I've even submitted it as news. I've asked about it as an ask slashdot.(both rejected of course). Nobody seems to care.
After all, I'm sure it's just so easy for everyone to VNC into a machine in the US like I'm doing so they can struggle with laggy shaped international connections just to submit text to a website. It's our fault for living in a third world country with a government that artificially maintains a monopoly now that it's no longer "official" since half of the government still has stock in it, right?
Go ahead, mod me offtopic or troll or whatever. I don't give a damn. If you people bothered to read your own damn mail and fix the site I wouldn't have had to spend a year trying to find a solution only to wind up bitching about it in posts!
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
The blank media tax is absurd, simple because you can't tell who gets copied how many times.
So, if every GNU/Linux contributor claims refund... Well, at least they'll make a good DDoS!
Imagine that, a crowd of people, all swinging copies fo their own copyrighted materials...
WYSIWIG, but what you see might not be what you need
Pulling the trigger is actively deciding to kill someone.
Making copyrighted content available on P2P is simply letting people know what you have. If no one else wants anything, nothing is ever going to be downloaded. It's the other person's decision....not yours.
The bullet doesn't make a decision...at least...not yet....so your analogy is piss poor, to say the least.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
Could someone more knowledgable than I explain what ISP side P2P intereference would do to P2P based protocols like Skype?
If Telefonica, not the most efficient or technologically progressive company in the world, were to implement a blanket throttling of P2P traffic, would that destroy my Skype connection? I ask as someone who has had to rely upon Skype telefony for a year now because Telfonica are a bunch of useless gibbons who can't get it together to arrange for my landline to be installed.
A year.
Seriously.
Any insight?
"It's not like there aren't good and honest alternatives out there."
Please name some, I'd like to know.
urd
I'm not sure I buy Rand's quote 100% but its easy to refute some of those points. Government can't declare war with out soldiers, it is a crime not to sign up for selective services. Government can't build roads, fund space programs etc with out forcibly taking taxes, its a crime (you can go to jail) for not paying taxes. The Government is the only "creditor" that can forcibly take your belongings, and your freedom. Is that right or wrong? I'm not saying, but yes government's ability to operate rests largely on its ability to incarcerate people.
It is technically feasible to block P2P apps from functioning properly at people's homes while still allowing _most_ other internet apps to continue.
step 1. only allow tcp packets, or other state-based protocols (meaning, udp and icmp would become invalid protocols in Spain)
step 2. require the ISP to enforce stateful tcp: keep state of SYN/FIN packets and firewall block unauthorized data packets not sent inside an initialized tcp tunnel (after SYN, before FIN between SRC:DEST addresses on port X). This is a no-brainer, 95% of routers already do this, and 100% of firewalls and NAT'ing routers already do this.
step 3. restrict at most N simultaneous tcp tunnels per customer IP. Configure N so that it is a reasonable number of simultaneous socket_pairs for a home user. Perhaps 200 to accomodate roommates NAT'd behind a single IP.
This will prevent _direct_ access to P2P networks without seriously dropping connections, in both directions. If the customer cannot accept new connections after 200, most peer clients would either ban them or prioritize them low. (LowID in eMule). If the customer cannot create new connections, many p2p app would cause problems. Some smart clients (eMule or Azureus) allow you to specify Max#Connections, but when it is a paltry number like 200, compounded with the problem that usually only 1% of the connected peers even transmit any data (and when they do transmit data, it's at 1KB/s), the customer will get horrible bandwidth on their P2P, so little that it makes infinitely more sense to rent a DVD than wait two months for it to download (and that's bandwidth, not just latency).
There are, of course, ways to bypass such restrictions through tunnelling all IP traffic inside a single TCP sockpair. SOCKS5 would accomplish this - however, only outbound connections can be established. Peers will not be able to open connections with you. (If you did have a customized host that allowed such level of port forwarding, the 65535 ports will quickly run out if that socks5 host is NAT'ing 100 or more Spaniards -- and, if each Spaniard is fortunate enough to find his or her own dedicated socks5 server abroad, can we really still call them a "Spaniard"? At that point, with such resources abroad, they'd be much more of a 'global citizen' and hence any domestic law wouldn't properly constrain them). With socks5 and inability to port forward, the topology of the home-based IP will be radically different - no spaniard will be able to directly connect to a fellow spaniard unless within that 200 allocable connections.
An alternate, but similar, solution would be to internationally segregate customer IPs from corporate IPs and prevent any more than 200 connections forming between any given customer IP and other customer IPs. The evolution into corporate apartheid over customers is saddening, but that's the strong trajectory we're on. Even my use of the word "customer" is dating this writing to post-1990. Curiously, is China all that bad, are they not just politically five to ten years ahead of where we are?