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Encrypted Torrents Growing Fast In the UK
angryphase writes "The British Phonographic Institute (the UK's RIAA) has noticed a significant increase in the amount of encrypted torrents — from 4% of torrent traffic a year ago to 40% today. Whether it follows a trend for hiding suspicious activities or an increased awareness of personal privacy is up for (weak) debate. Either way, this change of attitude is catching the eye of ISPs, music industry officials, and enforcement agencies. Matt Phillips, spokesman for the UK record industry trade association explains, 'Our internet investigations team, internet service providers and the police are well aware of encryption technology: it's been around for a long time and is commonplace in other areas of internet crime. It should come as no surprise that if people think they can hide illegal activity they will attempt to.'"
Maybe it's because all the more recent clients are supporting encryption by default?
Life, the Universe, and Everything... in my image.
Maybe its because they aren't doing anything illegal yet they are being prosecuted?
why anyone thinks the encryption will be effective? Since the RIAA (for example) catches torrenters by downloading the file from them in order to prove that they were 'making copyrighted content available', it doesn't really seem to matter whether or not it's encrypted. You're sending the RIAA a file that won't be encrypted on their end....
... or is this yet another hit on the use of privacy-protecting encryption?
I use encryption all day long in a very legal, legitimate form. (ssl/ssh/mcrypt) It's a core part of my operating principles - I don't even allow unencrypted connections to my production systems - EVERYTHING IS SSL ENCRYPTED.
So it really annoys me when the case is made that (encryption == criminal). Yes it can be used for illegal purposes. So can cars, guns, and tennis rackets. It's not the tool that identifies the crime, it's the crime that identifies the crime.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
If Comcast is going to disrupt Bittorrent traffic, all users will see benefit from using encrypted Bittorrent, just to keep Comcast's systems from sending the RSTs to them. Even a UK user, talking to an American system. Legitimate traffic or otherwise.
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Why why why why is it automatically assumed that encryption by non-government entities is in actual fact an attempt to cover up illegal activity?
I believe that in general, western societies have set up laws that generally respect the rights of an individual to whisper a secret in the ear of a friend and not be forced to reveal the message to anyone else. If I choose to encrypt email and torrent files, there is no reason that I should be thought guilty of some crime... fscking idiots.
It would entertain me greatly for them to find out that these illegal encrypted downloads were in fact, a Linux distribution.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
They are trying to avoid packet-shaping?
you know how antibiotics have a huge downside, in that the infection can evolve and become resistant? There's a similar downside to the RIAA's tactics with regard to torrents- now that everything is heading towards being encrypted, it's going to create a (somewhat) safe haven for child pornography to skip through undetected. If the traffic can't be monitored at all, then people you really are trafficking something terrible are going to be able to do it more easily.
I'd just like to point out that "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide" does not hold up. Apart from the myriad of things which, while not wrong, any sane person would want to hide, we need to keep it clear in judges minds that hiding something does not mean one was performing illegal activities. The comment by Matt Phillips hints at a worrying application of just that principle, and I can quite easily imagine the BPI or RIAA suing someone who they think was sharing copyrighted material, and using an encrypted torrent (which could contain anything) as evidence of that activity.
Nobody has enough resources to monitor everyone, all the time. Cracking down on public P2P networks resulted in encrypted, invitation-only networks. If the pressure is still on, pretty soon we'll have office "potlucks" where everyone brings their music and movies to swap. Once people get completely pissed off about DRM, they will not mind analog copying with microphones and camcorders to get around it. If nothing else, it is possible to simply exchange movie discs or even portable players without even necessarily breaking the law. The end result is the same though - only one person in 10 will actually pay for the content they are viewing.
The solution? Unencumbered, reasonably priced, possibly watermarked legal product. Even Radiohead strategy yields 1/3 of the downloaders paying.
This reminds me of an old quote,
"The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it."
Recording Industry associations: You are now being routed around. Congratulations.
Paul Anderson
"I drank WHAT?!" -- Socrates
"Somebody should create a file sharing program that has the user create a small copyrightable piece of art, and encrypt it along with the data to be transfered. Any attempt to decrypt the data is also (illegally) decrypting your copyrighted art."
Stuff like that's been tried. I recall somebody writing a script to ROT13 song names in P2P indexes. This was in the days of Kazaa or even the original Napster, if I recall. The reason was the equally bogus claim that undoing the ROT13 violated the DMCA.
Some time ago I ran a pretty popular site exposing Make Money Fast letters and their writers. A popular claim at the time was that if you called your chain letter a "recipe exchange" or added the words "please add me to your mailing list" when you sent your money, you were actually paying for a service. Like your decryption idea, these served solely as panaceas to make the participant think they were getting one over on the powers that be. That is all.
Putting it another way: courts have something called "the laugh test" and this would not pass it. A false hope that somehow you can sue a record label for decrypting your artwork might get you some sympathy from the uninformed masses (the same legal geniuses who've marked your post "Insightful"), but will do you not one bit of good when the record company takes your house.
Sitting in my day care, the art is decopainted.
> The real world security breaches have shown the need.
I don't know if it's "security breaches" per se. After all, encrypting the torrent does NOTHING to prevent anyone who knows that that torrent contains copyrighted material from finding your IP from the tracker and going after you legally.
The ONLY thing it does is bypass some ISP-level throttling aimed at BitTorrent traffic. In other words, the ONLY reason people use it is because it makes the torrents go faster, rather than being stuck at low speeds.
That said, more people are probably doing it because it's on by default. And the reason it's on by default in more clients is because it's faster.
So yeah, the spokesman here is an idiot. Encrypted torrents will NOT help you evade responsibility for sharing copyrighted materials. Not even a little bit. This guy is a dumbass.