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BPI Requests ISPs Suspend Suspected Filesharers
MartinJW writes "The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has written to two of the UKs larger ISPs, Tiscali and Cable & Wireless, asking them to suspend the accounts of 59 users they have identified as 'illegal file sharers.' The BPI says they have 'unequivocal evidence' of IP addresses that were used to upload 'significant quantities' of music. Although the IP addresses were used to identify the ISPs involved, the providers are the only people able to identify the exact individuals responsible. This marks a significant change in the BPI's tactics; previously they have targeted individuals but it seems that they are now taking it one step further and requesting the ISPs take decisive action to uphold the terms in their own 'acceptable use policies.'"
so I will download the content I have paid to "pirate"
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Tiscali heeft 1 nieuwsserver, namelijk news.tiscali.nl. Deze nieuwsserver geeft alleen tekst bestanden weer en ondersteunt dus geen binaries. Tiscali heeft hier bewust voor gekozen omdat binarie servers veelal gebruikt worden voor het illegaal downloaden van auteursrechtelijke bestanden. Tiscali stimuleert juist de legale verspreiding van auteursrechtelijke bestanden via tiscali.music en tiscali.video.
In dutch but I doubt it will be different for the english branch.
Sadly at the moment it ain't my choice to use them. It ain't my connection and for 1 year getting a second line installed is to expensive but I can't wait to get my xs4all account back.
Oh and did anyone else notice that if this happens then people are being punished without ever having seen a judge or even a police officer. No sworn in official will be involved just people from two companies. Welcome to the justice system of the 21st century.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
ISPs have very strict AUPs, and will probably kill the cheap accounts rather than risk a lawsuit. Realistically speaking, if I were running an ISP, I'd do the same thing.
It's worth noting that the users may not be intentionally violating the (civil) law, it may just be open proxies or misconfigured P2P clients, in which case the accounts can be re-established later (after reasonable assurance that the problem's been 'fixed').
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The BPI have sued some people in the UK for copyright infringement, it's at the bottom of the FA.
"BPI has taken legal action in 139 filesharing cases. The four that have gone to court have produced verdicts in BPI's favour, while 111 individuals have settled out of court."
Remember, the RIAA and BPI are just the legal mouthpieces of the major international record labels. Anything they do, they do at the behest of:
* Universal Music Group ($7 billion revenue), which includes A&M, Decca/London, Deutsche Grammophon, Geffen, Interscope, Island Def Jam, Motown, Philips, Rampagge, Universal, and others;
* Sony BMG Music Entertainment ($5 billion), which includes: Arista, (American) Columbia, Epic, J, Jive, LaFace, Ravenous, RCA and others;
* EMI Group ($4 billion), which includes Angel, Blue Note, Capitol, European Columbia, Elektrola, Odeon, Parlophone, Pathé Marconi, Positiva, Virgin and others;
* Warner Music Group (a.k.a. WEA) ($2.5 billion), which includes Asylum, Atlantic, Elektra, Erato, Heiress, Reprise, Rhino, Rykodisc, Sire, Sub Pop (49% Warner ownership), and others.
Let this inform your music purchasing choices appropriately.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
The way this works, the BPI is asking the ISP's to enforce their Acceptable Use Policies. Since the AUP's UK users agree to are pretty draconian in order to get internet access, the ISP has the right to terminate our accounts at any time based upon breach of them. Of course, the ISP's don't actually monitor the traffic as such, because then they might be expected to catch all of the dodgy traffic going across their wires.
So in effect, the BPI are doing the same thing that anti-spammers do; ask the ISP to enforce their existing contract terms with the user, and terminate it for 'abuse'.
Once the contract is terminated, then the ISP is done. No further action would be taken by the ISP, so the courts don't get involved. Of course, the customer could start a civil suit against the ISP for breach of contract (good luck with that!), or breach of EU data privacy laws if the ISP handed personally identfying info over the BPI without a court-order. Note, I'm not a solicitor, so the previous paragraph could be complete rubbish, but it's how I understand it.
The BPI are a trade organisation, like the RIAA; no government powers at all. They have to go to court to pursue civil cases, or ask the police to investigate criminal cases, just like everyone else. This however is just one company asking another to enforce their contract against a 3rd party, i.e. the users. No doubt the ISP's will jump through hoops to do it though, they've not got a great history of standing up for their users against accusations that may or may not be true.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
What these kind of organisations would say if pirating were to totally dissappear and they still kept "losing" money.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Now, in this case, they do appear to be going after the offenders and so good luck to them. I believe they do have a right to protect their copyright but I don't believe it should be at the expense of everyone, just those who are offending.
[1] Which (as a side "benefit") means you often cannot use your own legally purchased media in legally/morally accepted ways.
Even though most ISP AUPs prohibit illegal music downloading, most broadband providers know that illicit downloading is one of the primary allures of their service and that a significant portion of their customer base engages in it. Some even advertise the ease of it (albeit circumspectly) in their advertising. If they project the image that they actually enforce their AUPs that may drive customers to competing providers that are more willing to overlook such behavior.
Here in Sweden ISPs have warned and disconnected people accused of copyright infringement.
However in recent time people have been aware of the issue and some ISPs has gone against the practice.
Nowadays ISPs here are reluctant to be known as a party to disconnect you because of those reasons.
Customers simply move away from their services.
I'm really very sympathetic to the cause of file sharing. I only see the file-sharing-universe as the participant that I am. I don't do it all that much but I feel a bit grateful for those that share stuff... whether intentionally or not. (Hehehe... one of my favorite boredom-killing past times is to open a gnutella client and search for p*.jpg or *.doc or *.xls... you might be surprised as what people are stupid enough to share!)
As a rule, if I really want something, I buy it. I would like to assume (and from what I hear it's generally true) that when people fully appreciate something or functionally use it, they buy it. That goes for software, music, movies... whatever... okay, I admit I don't buy porn... but anyway.
But if ever there was a "correct" approach to their handling, this would be it. Their [the clients'] anonymity is preserved. They don't get a criminal record. They don't pay thousands to defend themselves. They don't settle for large amounts of money. And in my guess, the worst they might initially get is an interruption of service as a warning and probably resume connectivity (after turning off sharing) shortly thereafter and lives go generally unharmed.
It's not that bad really.
About 4 years ago, I was working in quite a large company that had many online shops all over the world. We had two connections to BT. One day they did not work anymore, we checked the equipment, all was OK, we phoned BT and they said that we had payd in time and that there was no problem at all. This basically took a lot of our servers down, and we lost a lot of money. The next day, whe phoned BT again and asked what had happened, and they told us that someone had posted a file to a newsgroup, and therefore they disconnected us. (The file in question was a BSD package). So a stupid employee at these companies can really do some damage without a proper legal procedures.
Perhaps in the same way that a fast car ad advertises speeding. What after all is the point of a fast car when you can only drive as fast as everyone else?
ISP's might realize that there intrests are not the interests of the copyright holders. Same as xerox interests are not the interests of book publishers. If xerox made their copiers incapable of copying copyrighted works they might possibly find their entire market share collapsing faster then you can say "cheap chinese clones".
It reminds me a bit of those pay sex phone lines. Nobody likes them, banks hate doing business with porn companies. The phone company hates them because they are a hassle but both the banks and the phone company love the money they bring in. As long as you keep your company "clean" enough to touch they are happy to help you peddle smut.
Same with ISP's, while they would love to be just email and light web browwsing comapnies the momey is in p2p and porn. Nobody is going to need 24/7 super adsl to check their email.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
In the article, it quotes Peter Jamieson, BPI chairman:
Is it really in the interest of ISPs to not turn a blind eye? As I see it, it is potentially against their interest: First of all, ISPs are barely, if it all, affected music piracy. In fact they may even benefit from 'pirates' choosing to use their service because they, for example, don't block P2P ports (although on the flipside, the increased bandwidth usage of P2P may be to their detriment). If I recall correctly, Tiscali attempted to set up a music store of some kind, which was thwarted, presumably by the music industry, so ISPs can't get in the way of effects of piracy, even if they wanted to! I'm fairly confident that piracy having a direct negative impact on the business is not a reason for why it is disallowed in their EULAs (legal requirement, minimisation of legal action against them are probably more likely reasons).
So even if ISPs kindly decided to be altruistic towards their fellow big business, the BPI, and help root out big-time pirates, they would have to go to all the trouble of trawling through all of its paying customer's activity, invading their privacy, handing them in as criminals and then loosing their custom. That seems like a great deal to give up for no gain!
Please don't impinge on the good name of whores
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
There's one major issue here: How does the ISP know the names or numbers it gets are "guilty" in any sense? Who checks what these lobby groups send you? Who verifies that they indeed shared copyrighted material and not something that's perfectly legal to share (say, a Linux .iso)?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org