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ISPs Dragged Into Swedish File Sharing Battle
paulraps writes "Swedish internet service providers may soon be required by law to take greater responsibility for unlawful file-sharing. Although rejecting the ludicrous idea of an overarching broadband fee which would be shared out among copyright holders, a government report published on Monday called for internet providers to be 'bound to contribute to bringing all copyright infringement to an end'. Under the proposal, copyright holders whose material is being shared illegally would be entitled to compensation from ISPs which did not ban users. Needless to say, the country's ISPs are not happy."
making roads take more responsibility for drunk drivers?
Seems rather absurd way to deal with the problem to me. Why not make telephone companies responsible for policing wire fraud crimes then?!
Making ISPs more "responsible" means increasing their costs, which can only result in higher prices for internet services that all of their customers will have to pay, including those who (e.g. out of respect for the law) would never engage in non-authorized "file sharing".
I don't personally like the idea of copyright fees for media, but I wouldn't call it ludicrous.. People as diverse as RMS and corporate folk have suggested it as a workable solution..
It's kind of sad to see people attach spit words to anything they disagree with, without telling us why...
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
So if ISPs will contribute one closed user account per year in order to bring copyright infringement to an end, will them overlords be happy? Why is it always that government reports do not use operational definitions. At one time in the report, the author talks about blocking "the subscriptions of people who use the internet to share copyright-protected material on a large scale." What does that mean, large scale? One song? Thousands of songs? One MB? Thousand MB? If you as author of a report talk about copyright infringement being a problem, without providing metrics, your report basically says nothing.
Now that we'll soon see the post office being held liable for every mail bomb delivered.
Hey, why not? It's exactly the same. They mustn't look what's inside and are liable for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Who couldn't see this coming after the Social Democrats were kicked out by the theocra..., erm, fasci... I mean, centre right coalition?
This is very dangerous for freedom on the 'net. The only way to "ban P2P traffic" effectively is to ban all traffic that can not be verified to be something else.
This means for example that ISPs would have to restrict ssh remote login to hosts on a whitelist.
Encryption, my friends. Govt can't censor what they can't read. And personally I believe it's ridiculous to equate a downloaded file to a lost sale - many of them wouldn't be sales, anyway. (Also check my manifesto for a more revolutionary opinion)
It's obviously a debate that is bound to generate some buzz, but how realistic is it? In my opinion, it is not a realistic plan.
- For starters, where do you draw the line? Is downloading one song enough?
- Who is going to pay for all the incredible amount of data processing?
- How often can one be 100% certain that it is in fact piracy?
- How are they going to disprove that an ISP isn't doing what's expected?
- How are the ISP:s expected to keep up with the fast pace of anti-anti piracy prevention methods?
- Why is the ISP supposed to police its customers, when it is clearly the police dep's job?
- How is this filter going to work and how will they make sure that the customer's privacy rights are preserved?
Good luck. It's probably a media stunt by some lawyer with a fat paycheck from RIAA.
Full Tilt
If so then all email must, by law be shut down. Now there is a solution to spam.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Oh yeah, they are just "indexing" the material not actually doing anything like making it available or anything. Right.
Yes, exactly right. That is all they are doing: they don't host the offending files. If you want to control what they are indexing, well, now you're talking censorship to one degree or another. In some countries that would be fine, in others it will run into trouble. Google is an index, and it points to a lot of content that many would find objectionable: at what point do you decide to tell Google, "Sorry, you can't index this stuff." That's already happening in places like China, and frankly I don't want to see it happen here.
You decide which is worse: copyright infringement or the loss of the greatest medium for communication ever invented. Because that's where this is going.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
But what is ludicrous is to charge copyright fees on media and at the same time forbid making copies of copyrighted material onto those media. What exactly do I pay for, then?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
.....given that driving is in most areas a harmful vanity (compare with public transit) and society is better served when people don't drive.....
That's why many who feel like that, would like nothing better than to herd EVERYONE as much as possible into the large, crowded ghettos otherwise known as big cities. There it is much easier to make people utterly dependent on Government. Try having a decent vegetable garden when living in a high rise of a large city. Of course, there it is also possible to force people to be dependent on public transit, which is cost effective in such places.
All theory is gray
> copyright holders are paid
You meant **IA and its ilk will be paid; thousands of independent artists won't, and their own artists will almost not.
Bad idea, if only that the wrong people get the money.