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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?
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Let's see how SABAM holds up against the Foreign University and College Kids Exchanging Music group (FUCKEM).
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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.
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.