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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.
Is it just me or is this trivial to circumvent by encrypting traffic?
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.
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.
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.
How could the ISP filter or block VPN traffic without annoying the rest of the professionals who rely on corporate VPN access?
They don't need to. They just need to block traffic to Relakks, then all other legit traffic can continue.
The internet will route around this breakage.
Just give it time to adapt.
monk.e.boy
Open source, flash charts
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."
ou are right but to that one could reply that:
- There is no evidence that Relakks customers are involved in illegal activities (unlike P2P whose unecnrypted packets you can monitor). I for instance happen to use Relakks more for Hotspot access than anything else.
- What happens if Relakks has some sort of DynDns VPN server address? The ISP could not reference this address in their DNS servers but then agin those subscribing to Relakks are savy enough to use OpenDNS as well.
What happens then?
FYI, countries like China and Saudi Arabia have been trying real hard to prevent all sorts of traffic: HTTP, P2P, VOIP etc.
None of these protections can hold up more than a few hours. VPNs are he easiest way to defeat these kind of protections.
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
This is the problem with the Music/Movie companies. They want to maximize their profits. So they ran their numbers through some computer, and discovered that movies should cost $X and that CDs should cost $Y. These prices have nothing to do with the cost of producing the CD/DVD, because the cost of those is effectively $0. Instead they try to figure out how many people they can get to buy the product at a certain price in order to make the highest profit. However, these calculations were done a long time ago, long before P2P was widespread. People were willing to pay more for stuff when there was no other way to get it. However, now that people have another way to get it, legal or otherwise, they should lower their prices in order to compete with piracy. Piracy shouldn't be an issue. If you like a song, it should be so cheap to buy it that you won't even think twice and will just get it right away. Currently, people have to look at the price, think it over, leave the store, and then maybe go back to the store (virtual or brink and mortar) and make a conscious descision to purchase music. However, if they made CDs $5, and DVDs similar, and downloaded songs around 10-25 cents, people wouldn't even think about whether or not they should buy it, or if it was worth pirating, they would just pay for it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
trust me, it wouldn't be difficult. If you can find it easily, then they can block it easily. Matters not if you use a different name service.
people generally don't send raw binary data these days; they send things encapsulated in ftp or http or whatever. those are easy to recognize, since routers can keep track of the whole tcp stream (aka eavesdrop) and look inside to see what's going on. so, even if you're downloading an image, you first had to do an http get. some encrypted protocols are obvious (ie, start with a handshake that is easy to recognize), and others are not, but hey, isp's control the routers, so can do whatever they want.
:)
some of them might just slow down any protocol they don't recognize; as far as what sorts of specific evilnesses go on in the harsh reality of routing packets, well, i don't know
i'm mainly just saying it's possible. of course, i think isp's oughtn't waste their precious clock cycles reading what's in the payload of ip packets, though they certainly can and do. i am of the opinion that a router ought to simply figure out what paths are clear and send incoming packets to the correct place, and any prioritizing of packets should be done using only information at or below the ip layer, which should be more than enough information to stop abusers.
the privacy of one's mind is important.
you do have something to hide.