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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?
>>> 'bound to contribute to bringing all copyright infringement to an end'.
Does this mean they can donate to organisations that want to end copyright altogether ?
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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".
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.
Here in Belgium Scarlet telecom has recently lost a lawsuit issued by the belgian RIAA (SABAM). The judge has ruled that the ISP should ban P2P traffic, needless to say Scarlet has appealed against this bs decision. All other Belgian ISP's have received a letter treathening to sue them too if the don't cut off P2P traffic.
I'm sorry for my poor knowledge of English and i am currently fortifying my house out of fear for the grammar nazi's.
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)
Actually, an overarching broadband fee which would be shared out among copyright holders
might be the most sensible way to deal with this whole mess. And not just in sweden.
Why not put in systems that measure, based on statistical sampling at some representative
routers, a rough idea of the number of copies of content item x,y, or z that are making their
way across the net at any given moment, then average that out over a week, say, and use
that figure to determine the weekly share of the copyright tax.
This is essentially a financial reward for providing popular content to the masses.
We may have to get over our high-minded view of our cultural tastes, when we see how
much of the take is going to the pr0nographers, but if that's the way it is, then that's
the way it is. Let's just hope the artists are being compensated fairly, and middle-persons
aren't taking the lion's share of the loot.
I think a system like this could support artists of all kinds quite well, without the need for
a corporate distribution channel, and it could also end the
police takedowns of 12 year old copy-criminal-masterminds.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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.
You certainly have a small mind. If I were you, I'd open it up a little and look at the damage the media companies and their lawyers are doing to individuals and legal systems around the world. In the case of the United States alone, they're helping to destroy an economy that employs hundreds of millions of people, and ruining the chances of all of us having a decent standard of living in the future. I'll not shed a tear for the demise of the current entertainment industry ... it deserves no respect.
... it's time those responsible got dealt with. It's just not the people that you seem to think it is.
So you're right
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I think this is a fantastic idea. They should be very careful to spell out the terms, but provided that it's not an exhorbitant amount per person (say, 5 cents per month), think about the flip side of that deal: for say 5 cents per person per month (or whatever nominal fee they work out), copyright holders are paid. That means that all people are free to copy as much music as they want. No more need for sites like pirate bay to operate in the shadows.
I mean, surely the copyright holders don't want to be paid and give nothing in return at all. Right? Guys? ...guys?
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
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.
.....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
How exactly is that ludicrous? If you paid a 15-20% surcharge on your ISP fee to download anything and everything anytime and the money went to artists on a straight popularity basis (easily monitored at the network level), all kinds of good things would happen.
The devil is in the details. A good system would render record labels and TV networks obsolete so they would fight it. But it's a great solution.
The EFF has suggested something similar, a $5/month Voluntary Collective Licensing Fee. Making it voluntary is fantasy (and I say that as one of a handful of people who actually gave money to FairTunes each time I made an MP3 for friends). Making it a percentage of broadband cost (so someone on DSL pays less than broadband, and dial-up less still) is fairer than the subscription model Rick Rubin proposes in the NYTimes article, and making it compulsory makes DRM irrelevant.
=S