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Belgian ISP Forced To Block P2P Traffic
An anonymous reader lets us know of developments in a case in Belgium that has been under litigation since 2004. The Belgian copyright watchdog SABAM has forced an ISP to begin filtering P2P traffic (PDF). According to the PDF on the SABAM site: "The Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM) has just won an important legal battle within the context of the dispute that opposes it to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Tiscali, which has become Scarlet Extended Ltd. In its sentence of June 29, 2007, the Court of First Instance of Brussels is demanding from the access provider that it adopts one of the technical measures put forward by the expert in order to prevent Internet users from illegally downloading SABAM's musical repertoire via P2P software." The rumor is that Scarlet will be forced to deploy the same software as MySpace uses (Audible Magic) to filter illegal P2P traffic from the legal.
For Relakks.com to start marketing their services to these ISP customers.
FYI, here's what Relakks does:
"- You'll exchange the IP-number you get from your ISP to an anonymous IP-number .
- You get a safe/encrypted connection between your computer and the Internet. "
How could the ISP filter or block VPN traffic without annoying the rest of the professionals who rely on corporate VPN access?
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Is it just me or is this trivial to circumvent by encrypting traffic?
Let the RIAA finish building its wall around its music so the rest of us can avoid that chaff and more easily enjoy the independent music whose musicians wish to freely share it.
Aw, Belgium, man! Belgium!
It'll be interesting if they'll be able to sue for damages once P2P customers take their buisness elsewhere since this is being selective applied to them and not their competitors for now. Note that this is for a specific ISP so it's really making them uncompetitive. If it were applied to all ISPs then it wouldn't make a difference for the company but if their the odd one out you'd imagine they'll lose a lot of customers since in the reality of this situation a lot of people like to spend all day downloading stuff. Legally if this was applied it should be in a law that affects all isps to keep the market fair. Whether any law banning P2P which has legitimate users also is good in the first place is another question.
Take that America! Belgium rules!
I think that our Belgian friends could simply bypass this using protocol encryption for bitorrent. Since bittorrent can work on any port, portblocking filters are useless. Packet sniffers would have a tough time detecting encrypted traffic. The major bittorrent clients all support protocol encryption. For a guide on how to get it working with your client check out:
TorrentFreak's guide to protocol encrpytion
According to SABAM, if all Belgian Internet access providers would adopt the technical measures proposed by the expert so that P2P software could no longer be used for exchanging copyright works, this would put an end to the illegal traffic as Belgium is concerned.
But what about the LEGAL P2P traffic, like Linux Distros and patches for various apps and games that are out there, as well as artists who promote and encourage the sharing of their works?
I hope that this isn't dragged over here to the States by the RIAA or MPAA.
Speedy thing goes in; speedy thing comes out.
I get the impression an SSL standard for packet encryption is going to get put together for torrent fairly soon...
Either that or a couple of the bigger ones are going to get updates/patches/plugings so when sharing with the same client they will be encrypted...
$_="Slashdotter";$syn="OTT";s;..;;;sub _{print shift||$_};s!ash!Perl !;s=$syn=ack=i;tr+LLEd+BLAH+;_"Just Another ";_
That the "experts" think methods like these (filtering) work when it comes to stopping and slowing piracy when history shows that they do not. In fact, pretty much any shutdown/slowdown ever achieved created or accelerated development of newer, stealthier, more robust methods of piracy and distribution. At best it seems a scam to sell filtering software.
And thus does the internet come crashing down...
I will repeat what I say on this cases, and also about censorship and network neutrality issues:
The only way to assure net neutrality is to encrypt every packet and randomize the ports on all new network protocols. This is true right now for some P2P and skype.
Given the current European policy on data retention, we should do it even for mail and instant messaging. Of course you should use sftp instead of ftp and ssh instead of telnet, and your SMTP sessions should go encrypted, but that is not enough. We should rewrite every protocol and make it look like IPSEC.
This way we would avoid the following problems without the need for regulation:
- Government censorship (the China firewall becomes less efficient)
- Traffic Shaping (ISPs shouldn't have the right to decide what protocols can you use).
- Multi tier pricing (the ISP could discriminate by IP, but not by service)
- Traffic analysis (for example the European Data Retention policy. If all packets look the same it becomes much more difficult)
A technical solution is always better than a political one.
In this case, the "expert" wouldn't have suggested the filtering solution if all of the p2p protocols where encrypted, like some bittorrent variants.
When his defense asked, "Which computer has Jon Johansen trespassed upon?" the answer was: "His own."
other than the fact that it was occupied by Germany in WWII and that a tasty waffle type is named after it. :-)
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Usenet and IRC are next, guys. All it takes is one person to show some jackass ignorant lawmaker a pie chart of bandwidth used for piracy compared to bandwidth used for information exchange.
:'(!
What is happening to our intertubes?!
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
As an investor I'm not betting the media corporations. They are doomed since ISPs and Telcos move around a lot more money than they do.
Also, traditional telcos trying to provide differentiated services instead of just a pipe to the internet are doomed unless they adapt.
That's what I predict, and I live on predictions... let's hope I'm right, since I also have some money on it.
Of course they live on their business, and know no other way of doing so, so I understand their struggle.
Azureus has supported RC4 stream cipher for a long time.
It's not as strong as SSL could be, but for the purpose at hand it's perfect.
how will the block http traffic on port80? sites where you can upload very large files and get a download ticket in return
$5/month or $50/12-month period
..not sure how that became an excuse for "so I'll just get it cheaper illicitly" instead of "so I'll just wait 2 months and pick it up out of the bargain bin", but alright. )
Wasn't the whole point of the P2P stuff this court ruling targets that people don't want to pay for the content?
( Yes, I know.. "people are willing to pay for the content, but not as much as the copyright holders are asking"
It's insane that my provider can happily support my P2P traffic, get paid for it then turn around and rat me out all the while being immune from those very same lawsuits. If people want to see changes in the P2P laws then you will have to make the carriers bleed.
It's only hard to block P2P if you guys keep assuming that the people running the ISP are incapable of thinking. They can hire people just as smart as any hacker or zealous P2P user and with all the knowledge.
So, while it's not insanely easy I think it's wishful thinking to assume that any current P2P is not capable of being blocked. On the other hand P2P will spend less money and time to adapt methods to get around blocking than ISP's will spend to invent new ways to identity and block their streams. For many a end user however it could result in the majority of peoples P2P client not working if a law like this was applied to most of the world. I don't think any popular P2P client's even come with encryption or random ports turned on.
Blocking P2P to prevent piracy would be like shutting down an interstate that known drug smugglers have been known to take. It hurts legit users. Why don't they tackle the root cause of piracy instead of battling it like this?
This is bad news for us Belgians. We have but 3 major ISP's in the country and Scarlet is one of them. Soon, SABAM could attack the other two. Scarlet was the best choice to start, as it is the smallest of the three.
Wouldn't they be able to change ports until they find one that conflicts with another?
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
No, this isn't the 'p2p' is legal in Canadialand response. It's the "Canadian ISPs do this without being lobbied".
Rogers Cable throttle _all_ encrypted traffic now, as people were encrypting to get around bittorrent throttling. Your 7Meg line will get about 10KB down on a fully seeded torrent (Linux ISOs or whatever).
No worries, you'd think, in a nice open market you can just go to the competition, except that there is none. If your local copper is incapabable of decent DSL speeds, chances are Rogers are your Only option for broadband.
Go the 'free' market.
Another somebody gets paid for implementing a technology that definitely does not offer any real solution to the piracy problem and probably makes life for the law-abiding end-user a little more difficult.
Just like those fantastic copy-protected CDs that were so safe that pirates managed to copy them instantly, while many CD players failed to read them (not to mention the reduction in sound quality)!
Instead of paying all these experts to come up with the solution, maybe prices for digital products should be lowered so much that it would no longer be worthwhile to download a pirated version.
I for one welcome our new Belgian overlords.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but on Audible Magic's "CopySense Appliance" website (what I'm thinking this is all about), it lists how it can also block child pornography -- kind of setting their sites a little high there, aren't they? Would it just be searching for some kind of file name, or what?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
Let's see how SABAM holds up against the Foreign University and College Kids Exchanging Music group (FUCKEM).
stuff |
Many people have been commenting that acoustic fingerprinting is how ISPs can differentiate between legal and illegal traffic. What I'm confused by, though, is why files that match are automatically determined to be illegal traffic. Are MP3 files I ripped myself from CDs I purchased and still own considered to be illegal? If not, how can an ISP know whether a particular transfer is between me and some random P2P person, or between me and another machine under my control? If the transfer is between two machines I control, is that actually an illegal transfer?
The problem is that there is no way to know, simply by inspecting packets or analysing traffic flow, whether the users involved have the appropriate licenses to perform the action they're performing.
"...forced to deploy the same software as MySpace uses (Audible Magic) to filter illegal P2P traffic from the legal." I don't remember P2P ever being illegal in any country. Perhaps trading copyrighted files are, but if I want to share my homemade sex videos or garage rock band tracks via P2P I can do it all day long..
Because it's P2P. By definition. And used to transfer literally all kinds of packages.
Was it Ludacris, or perhaps Snoop Dogg... "Belgium ain't nothin' but a bitch"
Yes, but now the music+movie industry can blame the failure on the ISP, and drag them into further litigation.
I didn't actually RTFA, but if the ruling literally states 'downloading SABAM's musical repertoire', then I guess Scarlet should ask them for a complete and up-to-date copy of their catalog, and of course publish that so their clients know what they can and cannot do. I don't know how the MAFIAA et al do things, but SABAM isn't very willing to disclose the exact contents of their catalog, as we've experienced several times. They want to you cough up for all songs you play at parties, not just the ones that they actually are the representatives for.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
OK, I understand that you filter copyright'd material, that's fine, I guess. But how can you block all P2P traffic? Not all the traffic in P2P networks are of copyright'd software/music/videos/ etc. People also use P2P to share sutff that isn't illegal, you know.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
This is the reality of censorship in the router.
Thanks for giving them the idea, Finkelstein!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I am disappointed by SABAM but not surprised. I live in Brussels and we run a small bar that plays live music. It is typical European - i.e. a small venue. We pay SABAM licensing fees for playing general recorded music and for concerts we host. (And a separate fee for our shop next door's right to play music). Now we could only fit a maximum of 50 people in and yet we still pay the same fees clubs fitting in hundreds would.
When bands come and play their own original music, we have to pay a fee to SABAM for this right...
What upsets me the most is that as far as we know NONE of the bands who fall into that category have received one Euro cent of royalties from SABAM.
I (and many others here) are not impressed with this company. Their business seems more akin to racketeering than ensuring royalties are correctly rewarded to the artists who created the works.
Can anyone let me know if 'Audible Magic' has a tag and rename feature? Can it download album art? I need to know more about this product!!!!!1one
v4sw6PU$hw6ln6pr4F$ck 4/6$ma3+6u7LNS$w2m4l7U$i2e4+7en6a2X h
The comapny I work for sets up separate VPN servers for US, Europe, & China. That makes it impossible to use the company VPN to bypass the Great Firewall of China. I doubt there are enough mobile users in the PRC to justify doing that for bandwidth reasons. And the company web proxy redirects google.com to google.cn. The hotel internet is filtered too.
Boy does it suck. Try booking an airfare on a Taiwanese airline from inside the Great Firewall sometime. Lucky for me I can keep my DSL-connected Linux box running at home, and SSH tunnel to it, or I might still be stuck there for lack of an airline ticket.
Posting AC in case they are watching...
This creates an incentive to create nifty new protocols and ways to circumvent the block.
Kind of like how kids learn all about proxies when their parents use content-blocking software.
...that the powers that be still do not understand illicit software/warez distribution. 95% of the content originates from the newsgroups, P2P is just a convenient way to disseminate the property. All they are doing by blocking P2P is stopping the "n00bs" who don't know where else to get it, and they are hardly the ones to worry about.
This is only the Court of First Instance. Scarlet will appeal, and this may very well drag on for several more years. The decision may be overturned; and I expect it will be.
;-(
What I don't know, IANAL : Is Scarlet already obliged to enforce this ass-hat decision while the case is appealed ?
If so, as a Scarlet customer I will have to figure out a way to subvert Le Filtre P2P until I find another ISP. Sorry Scarlet
Tangentially, it's worth noting that SABAM tries to set a precedent by taking on a small ISP (at the time this case started rolling they were quite small compared to Skynet and Telenet).
I don't see them trying to pull this shit on Skynet/Belgacom. Odds are they'd get crushed like a puppy trying to stop a bus. (Wishful thinking)
they blocked the eff :-(
I've said this many times but I'll repeat once again, this general purpose net connection stack tcp/ip has to go. In its place a large defined set of protocols can allow broadcast style networking for the internet savvy consumer, and if Microsoft had the lead in engineering this, you can be sure that most computers would be compatible, and Microsoft could also sell "Microsoft Gateway" products to let Apple participate.
This set of protocols could allow trusted machines to receive properly licensed and authorized content but still filter out other less useful but more dangerous content/extentions like exe's, zips, tar.gz's, bz2, py, and iso's, and additionally any encrypted content, and the major webserver venders would have to outlaw application/octet mime types to regain control of the internet-turned-piracy haven that the thieves like warez groups and gnu have perverted, not to mention all the pornography and child molesting an open internet produces.
Its time to make the net safe again for our families and businesses.
Not that that is much better, but it is not as bad as it looks. At least it is realy directed at copyrighted material, not at the protocol in itself.
b le_magic_letter.htmlb le_magic2.html
Some information on the tool they most likely will be using and the thoughts about that tool
http://www.eff.org/share/audible_magic.php
http://www.eff.org/share/audible_magic.php?f=audi
http://www.eff.org/share/audible_magic.php?f=audi
They claim is that they can filter 70%. That means that can't filter 30%. Let's see how fast that 30% becomes 100% and still have the same amount of download.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This movie is for those who do not understand what paricy is.
It is a pity that those new fangled technowlegees killed the movie industry.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Every business (linux distro producers plus others) that rely on bittorrent as a primary means of distributing their product should join together and sue for anti-competitive practices. If MS can get sued and lose for including a media player in their OS bundle, then certainly a "watchdog group" that forces an ISP to block the primary distribution means of multiple companies can be held liable for lost business.
The music industry does not live in a digital vacuum and the sooner they (and lawmakers) figure out that they are just one medium-sized piece of the digital landscape, the better. Heck, any company that uses the internet should feel threatened that one industry can block use of the internet across the board, because it's only a matter of time before the precedent set here will be used by some other group to shut off, say, TCP-IP because that's how computers communicate to each other to do something or another that is illegal somewhere.
Blizzard belongs to Vivendi-Universal. Universal, as in Universal Music ...
As we migrate to IPv6, we should adopt the approach of developing all new protocols with port randomness and encryption-by-design in mind, then gradually phase out old protocols. Even basic infrastructure protocols could be phased out: think of the day UUCP was replaced by SMTP; both coexisted for a while, but nowadays UUCP is virtually unheard of.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Maybe someone needs to, eh, post some, eh, email or something..
thierry.dachelet@sabam.be
With great power comes great electricity bills.
Bittorrent (or the next generation of P2P, be that whatever) will simply adjust.
I can think offhand of at least two simple ways -
1. Encapsulate bittorrent in SSL over plain port-80 HTTP.
2. Either randomize or approximate flow pattern of any legit application that would be way too painful for any ISP to block.
The sheer scale of false positives, bad vibes, pissed customers and support load an ISP would encounter from any form of selective blocking of high-profile legit customer data will make it totally impractical to do.
-
How many times do we have to go over this? there are only three things in life that are certain: Death, taxes, and the guarantee that teen-age boys will find a way to DL their prOn.
Now that's a battle the government will NEVER win.
d
all language nazi's will burne in heil!
"Heck, they'll be free of the leechers."
Meanwhile, back in the real world, just using the bandwidth that you've paid for is not "leeching".
Please don't tell you me you pay $40/month just to get your web pages downloading more quickly.
"and the notion of piracy being a very bad thing should be inculcated right from school "
Probably not. You haven't submitted a good case why piracy is "a very bad thing". And anyway, I don't think shilling for the RIAA is the proper role of schools.
Tell the truth...you've waited your whole life to use the word "inculcated" and then you look like an ass when you finally use it. Perhaps it would make more sense to teach a class in "getting a clue" or "how to stop being an f'ing tool". Those would serve people well.
You know... your post just made me realize why they don't play full videos on MTV anymore -- god forbid someone tape the audio off their TV. The RIAA was probably all over that one.
Yep, same with a radio edit...the idea and practice has been around for ages.
Here's another thing that snook into TV broadcasting. Yep, it's already here.
And for those of you thinking of recording off your tv better get, while the gettin's good...cuz, ya know, corporate America is going to put a stop to it using their puppets.
AK
(anti-karmawhore)
I am betting on the media corporations instead, and I also invest and live on my investments. I have bet on the media companies because historically, thats the spot on my "prediction matrix" that my cat has most often taken a dump on. I find that if I bet on the company that corresponds to the "prediction matrix sector" that has the highest pile of cat doo doo, I on average do just as well as the sort of investor that I'm replying to. However, my cubical mate who relies on a small monkey who actually flings his feces tends to score a few points higher than me, so I'll ask him and post his opinion on the subject.