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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
Instead of re-writing every protocol to look like IPSEC, couldn't we add a layer to the network stack between the transport layer and the IP layer to encrypt the IP payload? Then we wouldn't have to re-write all our old apps, wouldn't need to implement encryption in every app, and wouldn't need to try to hide the port numbers. If only there were such an IP-layer SECurity service...
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.
The ISP wouldn't necessarily be in trouble. They'd just have to adjust their TOS to say "No encrypted P2P traffic allowed" and call upon their contract agreement with the client saying that the TOS can change at any time, and that the user is free to cancel their service if they disagree with the new TOS. After that, they can just block it - legitimate or not.
Yes, that may lose them some customers - probably less than the current order will cost them.. and even that will be puny in comparison to the total number of customers they have. Heck, they'll be free of the leechers. Maybe they'll secretly be happy about it.
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.
The deep packet inspection boxes that ISPs buy can thoroughly block encrypted Bittorrent traffic because it examines the "pattern" of connections (BIttorrent's are unique), not the actual content.
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.
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.
But which is more expensive: the deep-inspection boxen, or the amount of bandwidth being used by encrypted BitTorrent? I would probably guess the inspection box is, but that's just me.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
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...