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UK Government To Terminate File Sharers' Net Access
An anonymous reader writes "New plans published by the UK Govt show that they hope to terminate internet access for people suspected of breaching copyright by file sharing. Under the proposed new laws ISPs who fail to enforce the policy will face prosecution in the courts. Users falling foul of the new law will be subject to a three strike policy: First suspected instance of illegal file sharing they would receive a warning, at the second — a suspension, and at the third they will have their Internet connection terminated. It isn't clear whether users will be prevented from ever using the internet again, or whether simply subscribing to a new ISP will reset the process."
Encrypt your file sharing. Does anything else really need to be said?
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http://www.zombieapocalypse.tv/
My ISP, Pipex, has already blocked me from using BitTorrent. At first I thought it was just a problem with the server, but when I couldn't download a single Linux distribution I started getting suspicious.
I've fixed it now, but I'm not impressed that Pipex see BitTorrent as a cancer that needs to be cut out, and if anything innocent goes with it, then that's OK because it's for the greater good.
Summation 2
Does anyone here REALLY think that this whole story will end any other way? There are tens of thousands of people employed making digital content, in a huge industry that pays its taxes and keeps people employed. Are governments really going to say "tough shit" and encourage people to just pirate content?
Like it or not 99% of the content on p2p services is copyrighted.
Like it or not, no business can compete with free, and still pay its staff.
People I know who work in the sector are worried about future prospects and already looking at getting out into a 'bricks and mortar' style trade where they know they will get paid and not ripped off.
I have no sympathy with anyone who gets caught with this. Everyone pirating content is just leeching off the honest people who don't mind paying for their entertainment. It's fair to nobody, and unsustainable.
And to anyone saying "it wont work 100%". No it won't. Nor does locking my door work against a determined burglar, but it will help deter casual piracy, and its the mass casual piracy that is really hurting.
First suspected instance of illegal file sharing they would receive a warning, at the second -- a suspension, and at the third they will have their Internet connection terminated
Nice to see that they're not even going for proven guilt in this case. So what happens when some poor Brit has his internet connection pulled for downloading Ubuntu ISO's or WOW updates via BitTorrent... or the media companies just screw up and finger the wrong IP as infringing.
I'm not up on British law, but don't you guys have a way to get rid of of bad lawmakers? You do have elections right?
Yeah, yeah I know, George Bush. But this shit would never fly over here. Surely you've heard about the hot water Comcast is in over here?
There is a war going on for your mind.
it's just a proposal. Anyone know the chances of it becoming law?
Mever nind the typos.
Final proof the government is working against the citizenry, doesn't trust or respect us or have any fucking idea about either technolo9gy or freedom.
Enforcing this would require constant monitoring of all communication over the net. I'm not suprised our government doesn't see any issue with this as they are totally morally bankrupt. One tenth of the population is doing this and the first thought is surveillance and punishment. Good going.
I hadn't realised how much they were in the pocket of the **AA/BPI etc though.
This is a civil matter, for civil courts that should decide a reasonable fine and that be the end of it.
that while the U.K. is enacting all sorts of draconian laws which curtail the freedoms of their citizens it is the U.S. that is actually the police state!
EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY - T.H. White
As the article says, they can't check every individual packet, so how do they know what's what?
I've gotta hand it to my country, my digital rights are being trodden over very quickly. First we have the fact that my cryptography keys can be demanded to be handed over with the threat of a sentence in prison, even though this law carries many loopholes. Ie if the sentence I'm accused of has a longer prison term than 5 years then just refuse to hand my keys over. Now I'm being told that my ISP will more aggressively filter my data and check for copyright material, which gives the media companies a black box on my net connection. This law will achieve nothing but to make the net more paranoid and open up new loopholes that can be exploited on this apparent 'war on terror'.
Instead of using P2P from home, just do it from a rented server overseas and FTP the stuff from it.
Fortunately for every stupid law there's a fairly easy technical solution, and it will be this way at least until the current generation of legislators retire and is replaced with people with basic understanding of technology.
I don't think that's how it works. Not the actual file is being encrypted with a known key, but the peer to peer connection is.
If the file was being encrypted with a known key, the ISP can simply filter that data and it doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not.
If the connection between peers is encrypted, it's not obvious what is being done. Could be ftp-ing legal stuff, could be torrenting the latest blockbuster.
I think the trend is toward traffic analysis based on timing between packages or something like that. Ftp has a different footprint than bittorrent, and it doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not. Then again, the evil hackers will come up with a way to obfuscate any kind of traffic pulses.
In the end, we'll all be using Tor.
"New plans published by the UK Govt show that they hope to terminate internet access for people suspected of breaching copyright by file sharing."
So in the new UK police state you'll no longer need to be proven guilty of something, but merely suspected of it to be put into electronic prison?
It hardly seems worthwhile to have won the war against Germany. The police state has won anyway.
Find a neighbor you don't like too much
Discover he has an open WIFI AP
??????
Entertain yourself
"Does anyone here REALLY think that this whole story will end any other way?"
It has in other places, your incredulity at that fact doesn't make it untrue though. Look at Canada, Spain, Germany etc.
"Are governments really going to say "tough shit" and encourage people to just pirate content?"
Some are imposing a tax, others are investigating just completely legalising p2p. Yes, remember that democracy is about the interests of the population, not just IP "owners".
"Like it or not 99% of the content on p2p services is copyrighted."
Irrelevant
"Like it or not, no business can compete with free, and still pay its staff."
Also false. Many people both download and buy an awful lot of media. On average it has been found the "pirates" buy more media than other folks. Many use p2p as a way of sampling things before deciding. Some don't, but you also make the fallacious assumption that each download is a lost sale.
"People I know who work in the sector are worried about future prospects and already looking at getting out into a 'bricks and mortar' style trade where they know they will get paid and not ripped off."
An awful lot of what's out there at the moment is lowest-common-denominator BULLSHIT. That's why it's failing.
"I have no sympathy with anyone who gets caught with this. Everyone pirating content is just leeching off the honest people who don't mind paying for their entertainment. It's fair to nobody, and unsustainable."
What is this "fair"? It seems perfectly sustainable to me.
"And to anyone saying "it wont work 100%". No it won't. Nor does locking my door work against a determined burglar, but it will help deter casual piracy, and its the mass casual piracy that is really hurting."
And someone releases a product with the crypto built in and "mass casual" piracy is back on the air.
In summary: FAIL.
the law thinks it can control file sharing. it can't. but they aren't smart enough to realize that they just drive the practice further underground. napster was wipe open. shut off one server, it all goes down. so progressive iterations of file sharing software became headless, obfuscated ips, etc. now we will get encryption
all of these legal efforts, all they do is drive the creation of more robust software. what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. thank you, uk government, for making file sharing software stronger
one would hope one day that the people making the laws get a clue, or at least a vaguely web savvy advisor. they probably think somebody who writes a blog is web savvy. what a joke
intellectual property is dead. the laws that people write about intellectual property is completely out of synch with the technology intellectual property exists on. the reality we live in has train cunductors writing the laws that govern the legal management of animal husbandry. what do train conductors know about animal husbandry? i don't know, but neither do the people writing the laws of ip know anything about the file sharing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So how do they propose that my two flatmates who do fileshare are cut off, whereas the remaing two flatmates who don't fileshare retain internet access?
Oh wait, no-one's proposing that. They just expect me (internet is in my name) to police my flatmates computers for them. Bottom-up stazi citizenry for your future police state here we come.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
When encryption is used, the ISPs cannot directly monitor what data is coming across the network. Would they then assume that any BitTorrent connection must be something illegal? Would they have to depend on the content overlords to make claims from their own spies in the sharing?
Should the encryption be "in the stream" like HTTPS, SSL, and SSH does? Or should it be IPsec? Or both?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
It's cliche, but armchair moping about it on Slashdot isn't going to affect the outcome of any vote in this legislation.
Write, phone, or email your MP. I'm doing it, are you?
I believe the UK is even less of a democracy than the States.
Since the legal hurdle to invoke this penalty is merely "suspicion," encryption is no protection. Using an encrypted link to a suspect site or using an anonymizing service can be enough evidence in and of itself.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
traffic going in and out from their DSL lines, then what?.
Horray for 800 GB of encrypted traffic.
Now I'm sure this attack will be useless before it reaches my country.
I suppose it will be through encryption but it's not important. We all know this is not going to stop anything, just bother some British people for a short while.
Fortunately they keep applying those attacks to civilized countries first, so they become obsolete before reaching the people who lives in countries who wouldn't be able to respond so fast.
Otherwise, they wouldn't be suspects, would they?
What about all the people falsely accused? Are they going to have to go to court and prove they DIDN'T do anything illegal just to get internet access back?
A sad day for the UK, and an unfortunate precedent that I'm sure the U.S. and others will soon follow.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
What a sad state of affairs it is when corporations say "jump" and the British government asks "how high".
Real crimes are constantly on the rise but instead on focusing to fight them and making a safer environment for the citizens, the government decides to start creating new laws against fictive crimes.
What a nightmare it will be for the ISPs to start controlling there customers and in the worst case to cut them off (and thus loosing their money).
Overall a big boo from me!
This is a nice way to make loads of network techs and customer service reps unemployed :D
It would be neat if this law would affect pass through traffic from other countries?
That's around 10% of the UK's population - a pretty large amount!
I think that number is even an underestimate as I recall seeing a statement that over 6million people in the UK download movies via peer to peer back in 2004, if that statement was true back then I'd imagine that figure has increased, but is also even large again when you factor in peer to peer sharing of music and other content as well as just movies.
Nobody copies more copyrighted files than those attempting to police enforcement. Every file viewed must be copied. Every file with any name must be downloaded and viewed *before* copyright can even begun to be attempted to be determined.
"From DNA to P2P, we are all Copycats now. Go Go Copycat Power! Copycat Powers activate! Form of, a Copycat." --monxrtr
It's not particularly well-known, but prior to World War II there were a significant number of people in England who were actually sympathetic to the Nazi cause. I guess the bastards must have produced offspring, because this story makes it pretty clear the mind-set is alive and well, and carried on by English legislators.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I seem to recall an arguement implying that if an ISP filters their traffic, they're not being neutral about which data they allow, and this may cause some legal problems. I can't seem to find the article about it though, and I'm not sure what its called. What kind of problems might happen with this? Could a publisher sue a UK ISP for blocking/banning or even reducing speed (through QoS, etc) of his software because it favours other methods?
Dug
It's not just the current Labour goverment. The Conservatives have made similar suggestions in the past also and are backing these current proposals.
I mention this because people need to be made aware that voting Conservatives in will change nothing, if we're going to solve this problem through elections people need to be looking for a party that really will make a difference - the Lib Dems or even the Greens!
According to TFAs, a consultation paper will be published (BBC says "shortly", Times says "within months"). (These are Government papers to seek out opinions, which anyone can respond to.)
Perhaps if a few thousand people respond to that as well as complaining on the Internet, it may help stop such laws (not that the Government is obliged to listen to consultation responses, but it's one possible way of opposing new laws, and makes it harder for the Government to claim there is public support).
I would have liked to seen them use this kind of policy for people whose machines get hacked and then used to send spam.
"Everyone pirating content is just leeching off the honest people "
Well, perhaps they're leaching, but certainly not from honest people. Perhaps you missed this story:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/12/0317238
Which says amongst other things: "The Tolkien Trust says that New Line paid them only $62,500 to make 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy of films -- instead of the agreed-upon 7.5 percent of gross receipts of all film-related revenue."
Perhaps I'm judging too quickly though.
Oh wait:
"http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/27/business/media/27movie.html?_r=1&oref=slogin"
No, I guess I'm not. Honestly is apparently not the policy at the film studios.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
if technological progress is fair. go ask horseshoe blacksmiths, chimney sweeps, and steamship engineers
or, refuse to adapt to change and obsolescence, and fight bravely agains tthe dying of the light. go ahead, pass more laws against file sharing. go ahead, hire 10x more pit bull lawyers. go for it dude
as if it will actually matter
accept reality, or don't, i don't care. whatever you think is right or wrong doesn't mean reality is going to necessarily reflect that. you can't realistically enforce your beliefs. so your beliefs will not be reality. sorry, but that's the truth. there is in fact naturalistic morality, and beleiving in real moral right and wrong. i'm sorry to break this to you, but intellectual property is not naturally moral. and os it is a completely articifial construct, and, when unable to be enforced, ceases to be respected. you can't reason or argue with a teenager as to why they must pay bertelsmann $10 because they want to listen to michael jackson. there is natural, moral compelling reason for them to respect intelelctual property. it's a fucking joke
furthermore, the real losers of this game is the distributors, not the artists. they already screw the artists with hilarious contracts. go look up "monkey points" on wikipedia and tell me again about how pirates are hurting artists. they aren't hurting artists at all, they are hurting distributors. distributors are screwing you, and have been screwing you long before the internet even existed
if distributors are removed, i think maybe 1/10th of the money involved goes away. but as before artists saw only 1/1,000th of the money in play, now they will see 900% of the money in play. so artists make out better for the destruction of distributors
so pirates are good for artists, by destroying the people that really screw you
you, like many people, mistake disrespect for a defunct distribution model as disrespect for artists
wake up
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Here I have access to two municipal networks, and a bunch of unsecured networks. Who is going to disconnect me from them? Are they going to put tin foil around my apartment?
unenforceable, except via the most draconian measures, which makes everyone, pirates and nonpirates, severely hampered in their online efforts, putting everyone in an uproar
you don't simply dramatically retard the internet in a democracy without serious repercussions
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Ok so we have Britain proposing the monitoring of the entire internet, Australia is proposing an ISP-level filter, US cable companies are doing their own selective torrent throttling and various countries such as China already have expansive firewalls and filters in place. Even if this proposal falls through, or is modified somehow, I think we're going to have to accept that governments are in the pockets of the media companies and service providers will target users of p2p because, in their opinion, they aren't making as big a profit as they might like.
The next step is to ask what we, as the science, engineering and computer-loving community who have been using BitTorrent and various other protocols for legitimate uses before all the kids figured out they could score Amy Winehouse albums for free, can do to either circumvent the policies initiated by the above various groups or to bypass them completely.
Napster, Limewire and the first generation p2p clients collapsed so BitTorrent was designed and users flocked to it. Now it appears that BitTorrent is going to suffer the same fate (if not now than definitely in the near future - the increasing pressure put on ISP's and governments around the world by copyright holders is going to see to that).
We can't afford to fight fire with fire. Invasive laws and techniques used by companies such as Comcast may be un-Constitutional, or against the terms of service but the average p2p-user can't afford to launch a civil case against one of the biggest corporations in the USA. My suggestion is for a new protocol to be established, with the emphasis on sharing legitimate files such as patches, Linux ISO's, videos, game demo's etc. Inevitably the first people to jump onto the new system will be the true geeks (By this I mean your average Slashdotter) and by doing so, they can utilise it to its full extent (Something like the early days of BitTorrent) whilst the MPAA/RIAA flog a dead horse.
Of course it's only a matter of time before pirates jump onto the new protocol and then we watch the whole show unfold again. However p2p-users have proven resourceful and it's only a matter of time before yet another protocol is developed and the cycle continues. But the advantage lies with us. The cost to the developer of something like BitTorrent is minutely small when compared to the hundreds of millions of dollars MAFIAA throws away in its attempt to stop piracy. If we keep it up long enough we might finally get the message across that p2p != piracy, or we might simply bleed them dry.
How could this realistically be implemented, and what defences are available? Obviously packet-scanning for signatures is fraught with difficulties and easily defeatable by encrypting the data in transit (do current BitTorrent clients do this?)
The simplest way I can see this happening is automated infringement notices, generated by *AA-run bots which join torrents with names similar to the intellectual property being defended, and send said notices after downloading enough to confirm it matches a signature.
Can you defend against that? I don't see how you can download without giving out your IP to peers. Possibly with enough information you could blacklist subnets known to contain such bots, but they could easily move around.
I'm seeing more people using Usenet atm... Maybe even Freenet will take off properly one day.
Which organisation do I throw my cash at?
Don't share, just download :)
:) IMO, that practice is unfair because you can get disconnected even if not prooved guilty on court (i.e. the government will probably rely on MPAA/RIAA and such sources, which can of course be faked or just incorrect). OTOH, maybe it's better to just be disconnected than to pay a court penalty and be listed as a criminal just because of some worthless media that's available anywhere, anyway.
So, governments seem to finally have a 'brilliant' idea on how to stop file sharing
Good, albeit slower, solution is also to use anonymous services (like Tor) or proxies. I don't doubt that there will be commercial proxies offering data encryption, located in other countries for connecting to P2P networks, and private trackers will probably become very popular in the UK and France. So if you are careful enough, you might never even get a warning.
Let me say right off that I think the proposed measures are almost certainly the wrong way to address the piracy problem. However, that is not to say that piracy is not a problem and should not be dealt with in some more reasonable way. (If you're about to object to the term "piracy", please save your fingers and go read an etymological dictionary instead.)
It has in other places, your incredulity at that fact doesn't make it untrue though. Look at Canada, Spain, Germany etc.
You think measures like imposing a levy on all blank media (aka a tax on back-ups) are fairer?
Some are imposing a tax, others are investigating just completely legalising p2p. Yes, remember that democracy is about the interests of the population, not just IP "owners".
It doesn't even seem to occur to you that the IP framework in general might also be in the interests of the population. Sure, it's easy to say that the people want the content when someone has already made it, but you have to think about a sustainable policy. If you screw the content providers now, who will provide new content in future? You certainly aren't going to get as much or as high quality if you just rely on charity, as we've established robustly in many previous Slashdot discussions.
Irrelevant
If you start by taking the view that the law is irrelevant, you aren't going to convince many people that your intentions are anything but self-serving.
Many people both download and buy an awful lot of media. On average it has been found the "pirates" buy more media than other folks. Many use p2p as a way of sampling things before deciding. Some don't, but you also make the fallacious assumption that each download is a lost sale.
I'm afraid you're the one with the bad logic here, not the GP. The assumption is not that every download represents a lost sale, merely that some downloads represent lost sales. I don't see how you can credibly argue that this is not the case.
There is an interesting question about whether more of them ultimately generate additional sales. I suspect the jury is still out on that one, but in any case, it doesn't really matter. If that is the case then content providers who aggressively pursue infringing downloaders are shooting themselves in the foot and those who choose to allow downloading will ultimately win through market forces. Nothing in the copyright framework we have today prevents a copyright holder from permitting this. But right now, the law makes it their choice.
An awful lot of what's out there at the moment is lowest-common-denominator BULLSHIT. That's why it's failing.
If that's what it is, then why are so many people downloading it, when so few download "good" material? For a guy so concerned about the interests of the population, you sure don't know much about what the population seems to want.
What is this "fair"? It seems perfectly sustainable to me.
It seems to me that the problem with your argument is exactly that it is not sustainable. If you disagree, perhaps you could provide an argument — preferably one that isn't as hopelessly naive economically as most we see on Slashdot — about what will reliably motivate future content production and distribution on the same or larger scale as we have today and of the same or better quality than we see today?
And someone releases a product with the crypto built in and "mass casual" piracy is back on the air.
And the government declares such tools to be accessories to copyright infringement, starts fining anyone who appears to be using encrypted traffic for any purpose on the assumption that they are infringing someone's copyright, and now collective punishment catching many innocent people along the way and undermining tools with legitimate, legal uses is back on the air.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The Pirate Bay is under attack: http://uk.news.yahoo.com/rtrs/20080131/tot-uk-piratebay-charge-b86c26b_1.html AT&T is talking of filtering file sharing: http://www.out-law.com/page-8804 There is some hope of sanity from the Swedish: http://sigfrid.wordpress.com/2008/01/07/decriminalize-file-sharing/ Mark Pesce (co-inventor of VRML) is talking sense too: http://www.mindjack.com/feature/piracy051305.html The momentum seams to be slowly building on both sides. Personally, I loved the AllOfMp3.com model. Cheap enough and good enough service I was prepared to pay, it wasn't worth copying. It had me spending money on music in what I thought was a legal way, for the first time in a long time. The existing model is to expensive and how can it be justified to charged what you would for a cd for something where the manufacture and distribution costs are pretty much zero? As long as we can record video and sound, we can copy and copy and copy and copy. Best work with the technology not against it. Make it cheap enough and good enough we can't be bothered to copy most of the time. What you would lose on individual sales, you gain on bulk, plus you can make money from advertising. If there is a big clamp down, what really worries me is the politics of it. International big business wins out over the people. Surely this is what governments are for? We vote a government in that fosters a society we want to live in. But, in the UK at least, I can't see any party picking up this issue. Which is crazy, because as more and more of the internet generation comes to voting age it's an issue close to their hearts! 10 years time could it be an election winner?
I have e-mailed both Labour and the Conservatives about their anti-p2p stance.
Unfortunately they simply responded to tell me that p2p destroys the creative industries, is responsible for terrorism and organised crime and that it must be stopped at all costs.
Of course, this ignored every legitimate point I put across to them and when I replied back asking if they could instead answer my points and how they can justify their decision when my points are taken into account I simply didn't get a response.
Writing to people with counter-points whose minds are already made up seems rather futile no matter how many people tell them they're wrong. Of course, I wont be voting for either of these parties but still I'm convinced stronger action such as protests, civil disobedience of the laws and so forth are required. Hopefully some people will take it as far as hijacking wireless of prominent people such as MPs to get them cut off so they can experience the problems first hand.
When you can no longer trust your government to look after the interests of the people, then it is time for the people to go underground.
At the rate at which the UK is spiraling down into a combined police state, nanny state, and corporation-controlled state, it won't be long before the online population decides to make itself cryptographically invisible to the corrupted "guardians" as the only strong defense available.
Encryption of normal communications never gained a strong hold in the west simply because there was little need outside of web login and payment transactions, for most people, so almost everything else was left in the clear. But when the government starts branding a large chunk of the population as criminal instead of supporting them as part of an evolving community, then the need becomes obvious.
I bet that the next generation of totally opaque file sharing systems is already in the works now --- anonymized, undetectable, untraceable, decentralized, and with all content cryptographically fragmented and bitwise-distributed across all darknet participants. Obtaining a particular shared file won't be distinguishable from obtaining any other, because the gathering and reassembly from a cryptographically dispersed image will be done by your client with N:M mapping, and no two clients will do it the same way. What's more, as the individual dispersed fragments become tinier they also become generic, ie. belonging to millions of different files, not just one, so individual files will not be detectable anywhere in their dispersed storage across the net.
None of this is too hard, and it's probably already in place in regions with evil governments. It's just a pity that some governments in the west, the UK in particular, have gone so bad that they are forcing it to happen here now as well.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Here in the UK, we are forced to pay a tax to the BBC if we watch any TV. Will we be disconnected for downloading content we've already paid for?
(Yes, the BBC is doing fairly well at introducing content online, but AFAIK that's still got DRM, only available for a certain period etc, and it's a hassle to install new software.)
Another problem is that the TV market is not anywhere near as a free market as say music, in that consumers are restricted by what their TV/cable/satellite company offers. For example, Virgin Media and Sky had a petty squabble, so VM suddenly cancelled the Sky channels on its service (3p a day per customer was too expensive for VM to pay to Sky). I'm sure people would gladly pay the 3p a day themselves if they could, but the only options are to not watch, or download.
If this really was costing billions, wouldn't they have worked out their petty squabbles?
Not to mention, it would help if UK shows weren't shown months after the US - even if it's going to be legally available on your TV, people don't want to watch it months after everyone else, risk being spoilered and so on. Imagine if music CDs were released months later in some countries?
You round up the bastards, and I'll bring the tar and feathers.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
You post blogs criticizing the police state the UK has become... hmmm how long does it take for you to become a "suspected" file sharer and lose your access?
At least, before they got bought out. They've had this policy in the US for quite a while now. Believe me. I know. Unless, of course, the UK means "suspected" as in "we have a feeling you're doing something wrong." In my case (both strikes) they had names of files I was sharing etc etc. Must have been in the swarm.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
All this crap about how P2P is destroying the industry and how governments and ISPs should face the burden of fixing it is really getting...well annoying to start. Something needs to be done now to correct this. How can something be called illegal or immoral when the majority of the US has at one point or other taken part in it? Let's show ISPs, Governments and whoever else wants to restrict P2P just how many of us out there use it...after all, Democracy SHOULD be about doing what the majority wants, right? Why not have a day...I say March 15(the Ides of March) and hammer ISPs with as much Bittorrent, Limewire and other P2P traffic as possible. March 15 is a day associated in history with the overthrow of tyranny in Roman times, why not use it as a day to take a stand in modern times also? I'm not saying anything illegal should be done...there are plenty of massive files on P2P that are completely legal and would be excellent for hammering all possible bandwidth. This isn't something that can be just brushed to the side either, as those with shared connections(cable especially), will be extremely angry at the fact that their connections are being impeded, hopefully to the point that they will see the reason behind it and will understand our cause(and hopefully even join it). Many will see this as the equivalent of vandalism, but it goes much deeper than that. This is a way of taking a stance against the world's system of how only the money truly speaks in democracy. Mod me down, call me an idiot, I don't care. I'm just throwing it out there.
Pay 5 Euros a month and do your p2p via a VPN to Relakks (or similar). The day they start snooping on encrypted VPN connections is the day we have bigger worries than just p2p.
The next stage in filesharing will be totally encrypted and anonymous networks like Freenet.
Freenet has increased dramatically in performance, size and user-friendliness over the past year and there are now several thousand regular users. Movies, software and music albums are regularly shared and there is a good filesharing community there. Speeds are slower than a direct download but comparable to a slow torrent. With a good set of peers and a high amount of bandwidth dedicated to Freenet you can transfer 100MB albums in a couple of hours.
All Freenet traffic is over UDP and is encrypted, and it is virtually impossible for an observer to know who is uploading or downloading a file from the network. The content is stored in a distributed and encrypted fashion on the disks of the people in Freenet. Uploads and downloads are routed through several nodes so it is unfeasible to work out if one of your peers is requesting a file themselves or just routing it for someone else.
An outside observer like an ISP will just see encrypted UDP traffic.
An attacker with multiple nodes on Freenet can see the information flowing to and from their direct peers but they can't tell if it is just being routed, so you have plausible deniability.
Freenet operates in two modes: Opennet and Darknet. Opennet is like traditional p2p networks in that you connect automatically to random people, who are possibly malicious, and can see your traffic to and from them. Darknet is where you restrict your direct peers to only people you trust. This is slightly more secure but less convenient. You choose which one suits you: they are both part of the same network, and you can even use a hybrid if you want.
If you guys know politicians, you'd realise this is just a load of hot air, to give the impression they are doing something about the problem, without actually doing anything. The govt. have been saying for years they will improve police / schools / hospitals / crime, and have achieved very little. Dont worry about it, it will disappear soon enough, when they offload the responsibility onto someone else.
So the movie makers, musicians, writers, software developers and game designers should all go do a basic course in plumbing and carpentry?
Are those the only options? Is it any wonder that some people don't give a shit about IP "owners" who disdainfully think that the rest of society is comprised of troglodytes?
Plumbers would like to fix someone's leaky faucet and get paid a royalty for the next 70 years but they can't. Carpenters would like it if they got a small percentage from everyone who sat on a chair they made, but oddly it doesn't work that way. They have to go to work the next day, and so, must charge an accurate up front materials and labor cost. The real question should be: Is what movie makers, musicians, writers, software developers and game designers do worth enough to society that they can get paid a salary or for labor like everyone else? Or can they only make a living by extorting payments out of consumers, in cahoots with our lawmakers, in such a bold and shameless fashion that would make a mob protection racket blush?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Thanks to the RIP act if we encrypt the government will request the keys for the encryption and if you refuse to hand these over you get 10 years in prison.
An interesting addendum to this argument is reported here on The Register. Essentially, the ISPs are saying to the Copyright Cartels "OK, We'll randomly pull people off the net. However, when we get it wrong, they will sue. And for lots. If you're willing to foot the bill for legals costs, AND settlements when it goes wrong, then we have a deal.".
Once the Copyright Cartels realise that they are going to have to deal with the realities of their situation (and spend money), methinks they'll think twice. If not, I wonder how many likely looking bits of music and video will be doing the rounds.. And how many of those will NOT be copyright.. And once accounts are pulled, how fast the coffers of the Cartels start emptying until they scream "Enough", and put everything back as it once was.
Heres the deal : the ISPs don't care about piracy at the moment because they are not losing money from it. When the next wave of on-demand media distribution begins in earnest it will no doubt rely on the ISPs (e.g. caching files), and they will likely take a cut of movie rental payments etc. When (/if) that happens then I think the ISPs will start to aggressively care about media piracy.
jesus, not this old horseshit again.
People who choose to work on an investment + royalty return model DO NOT GET PAID WHEN THEY ARE PRODUCING THE THING.
If you have some 'ethical' problem with that, then you better abandon capitalism entirely, because its the basis of venture capitalism too, or is all entrepreneurship teh evil' too?
Why do people trot out this same bullshit each time, its totally nonsensical.
If you want to whine like a child that some people earn royalties, you better find a way to pay them for when they are working on the content in the first place. And if its such a fucking gravy train, why aren't YOU doing it?
I'm not arguing here that copyright infringement is acceptable.
Since the content producers aren't exactly hurting, so how can one it be argued that the status quo (i.e. rampant file sharing) is unsustainable? Especially in light of it being sustained right now and over the past several years.
My old hosting provider, Lunarpages, did this to me. I distribute FREE DVD's of RC Helicopters, via bittorrent, that I shot and produced myself. All content and copyrights belong to me and yet no matter how many times I explained it to my "former" provider, or who I explained it to, they told me my account would be shut down if I continued to distribute the DVD.
I spoke with my money and canceled my account that I had had for the last 5 years.
The UK folks should fight this now because any "questionable" content will end up being "on the list". FIGHT NOW!!!"In summary: FAIL."
I agree with your assessment of your post. Apart from completely ignoring GP's points, you ran off on several tangents, and even managed to dismiss an argument that you should have addressed, but didn't have a rebuttal for.
Ii agree, you FAILed badly.
First they came for the file sharers, I remained silent; I was not a file sharer. When they locked up the porn downloaders, I remained silent; I was not a porn downloader. When they came for the political satirists, I remained silent; I was not a political satirist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out. Apologies to Pastor Martin Niemöller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
Just to clarify what I understand the situation to be (esp. for non-UK readers) as steps removed from legal reality;
- this is a leaked document
- the document in question is a "Green Paper", ie it is a *consultation* document.
- the proposals contained within *may* result in a "White Paper" being published
- the White Paper *may* get approved by Parliament and the House of Lords
- then it is the law
However, yes, this is the time for UK voters to write to their MPs !!
"File Sharing" is not illegal. Copyright infringement is illegal. Even the articles that the headline links to get it right by calling them "illegal downloads." This may seem piddly, but those of us who have ready 1984 understand that it is possible to manipulate semantics to change the connotation of a word. If we keep interchanging "file sharing" with "copyright infringement" then the next thing you know people will be trying to make FTP illegal. I don't want to have to explain to our congresspeople what the difference is, so stop blurring the meanings.
and completely free distribution: media will evolve into nothing more than getting your name out there
that's not some wacky technoanarchist idea of mine, that's what is going to be reality
not because i say so, not because i'm going to do anything to create this reality, but because that's where things are naturally evolving
inevitability. understand the idea?
i'm not going to argue with you, because there is nothing to argue with. i see a lot of bitterness, but absolutely no understanding of what is happening
dude: you're on the titanic, and you're complaining about the room service. wake the fuck up, your boat is going down, and nothing will save you
adapt and face the reality of your situation, or die. currently, looks like you prefer to die
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unfortunately, our own Naboléon, the abominable Sarkonazi the first, is going to try to give us this same bullcrap. He appointed his big business buddy to head a commission which crapped out this three strikes nonsense. The commission was very democratic, it had representatives of the music industry, the cinema industry, the ISP business and the consumer electronics vendors. Notice something missing? Oh yeah, the people. Who cares about them?
... In the end there will be arguments in court over whether the user truely believed he was downloading something legit, not much of a stretch. But not something that can be decided without a court of law.
Anyway, this plan is technically and legally doomed. Technically, because basic encryption will defeat it.
And legally, for a host of reasons. Let's say I'm downloading MP3s. How am I supposed to know a particular one is illegal? What if someone tells me this is Free music, while it's not. Who's liable? The user who believes he is? OR the person who claimed it is? Who's most likely very anonymous anyway
And anyway, considering there's already quite a lot of legitimate sources of ad-supported digital music, it will be more and more difficult to decipher who's legit or not. Should the user be blamed for picking the wrong download site? What about something like allofmp3.com, are the users -- who've paid -- supposed to guess it's not considered legit?
Then there is the question, mentioned in the original article, of someone using your connection without your knowledge. With the number of compromised machines and Wifi routers out there, this is going to be a serious problem. But not a technical one; because honestly, this is a problem that will NEVER be solved completely, as anyone with a modicum of computer security experience knows too well.
It's not a technical question, indeed, because there is no technical solution to this. What are they gonna do about it? Put fines on people with insecure PCs or routers? That won't even solve it. This hasn't been that much of a problem so far because computer "crime" was not defined too broadly yet; but now if merely download Britney Spear's latest barf-fest fits the definition of "crime," you've got a completely different ballpark.
It's not just the odd suspected paedo, whom, we can only hope, would be convicted on more than just his internet usage. Now you've got hundred of thousands of users who are going to complain, many of which will be of the usual RIAA gaffe type, like the disabled granny accused of pirating 50 cents or Metallica.
And that's going to be a LOT of pissed off grannies. And younger people too. Many people NEED their internet connection for work. They will be really pissed off, even more so if they feel they've been wrongly accused. And you know what happens when people are not even THAT much pissed off around here?
and by the end of your words, you wind up fleshing out my depiction of reality. so you agree with me in spirit, but you are hesitant to to vocally agree with me. your mind understands me, but you haven't yet thought out all the implications of your realizations: ip law is unenforceable. doesn't matte rhow right or how wrong it is, and it snot liek stabbing someone. someone actually gets hurt when they are stabbed. all we are tlaking about here is gutting a defunct business model
do we complain if debeers loses its monopoly on diamonds? no. they have no right to be a monopoly, no matter how long they've done it. so where exactly is all of the sympathy for distributors who spent all their time screwing artists over come from? who is the victim here if ip goes bust? i don't see any victims, i see victors: us, and artists. the middleman loses. good, fuck him
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If mere suspicion triggers it, this will lead to a LOT of people being pissed off, and outrage will quickly win over the usual democratic boredom at the next election.
an entrepreuner looks at the technical landscape ahead, and makes his bet based on what he expects to happen on down the road, reaping profits if he chose right, going broke if he chose wrong
now: look at the technical landscape ahead. looks like a business model you've relied upon for a long time is going bye bye. so you've made the wrong bet entrepreneur. now you lose your shirt. don't come crying to me because you didn't see reality. you're the one who is championing entrepreneurship. do you understand what entrepreunership really is? an entrepreuner doesnt depend upon the rules never changing, an entrepreuner looks to capitalize on how the rules are changing
do you understand how the rules are changing? doesn't look so. looks like your exortion racket is going away to me. and you conjure the image of yourself as an entrepreuner?
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
good one
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The possibilities for denial of service are endless. Don't like someone on the net? Does his IP address resolve to a UK ISP? Send them an e-mail claiming he's illegally downloading files from your server.
You can be compelled to give up your keys in the UK; but encryption is not illegal. The thing is, IIRC an SSL connection is supposed to have forward secrecy, i.e. you can't decrypt it after the fact if the two hosts have properly disposed of the random numbers they used. That's not true of PGP mail messages, which are supposed to be decryptable after they've been transmitted; the difference here is that the two parties are not in real time, bidirectional communication.
So you can be forced to open your mail, but they can't force you to open your SSL communication if they have recorded the encrypted traffic, because there's nothing you can do about it anyway.
"You think measures like imposing a levy on all blank media (aka a tax on back-ups) are fairer?"
Didn't say that, just that there are other ways and a government crackdown on its own citizens is not inevitable, as the OP implied.
"It doesn't even seem to occur to you that the IP framework in general might also be in the interests of the population."
Did I say it wasn't? I think it is a good thing to have a framework and the nature of the framework could be a source of some good, honest, serious debate on the nature of ideas, property and ownership alongside how best to encourage a creative society.
"If you screw the content providers now, who will provide new content in future?"
Who said I was in favour of screwing anyone? I was pointing out the fallacies in the OP, his weak assumptions and stupid conclusions. I tried not to state anything that could be construed as my own position (with the exception that I think a lot of media is shite). Re-read my post.
"If you start by taking the view that the law is irrelevant, you aren't going to convince many people that your intentions are anything but self-serving."
You should always start by taking the view that the law is irrelevant. The law should spring from conclusions, not be taken as some self-evident fact. We should constantly re-evaluate it from base principles. The fact we don't is one of the major problems in western society, IMHO.
"I'm afraid you're the one with the bad logic here, not the GP. The assumption is not that every download represents a lost sale, merely that some downloads represent lost sales. I don't see how you can credibly argue that this is not the case."
He says noone can compete with free, implying that free downloads are directly competing with sales. There's little to no evidence supporting that. My logic stands.
"If that's what it is, then why are so many people downloading it, when so few download "good" material? For a guy so concerned about the interests of the population, you sure don't know much about what the population seems to want."
The OP doesn't say who/what the people he knows produce. It may not be what people are downloading. There is more media produced now than at any other time in history. 99% of it will fail anyway, because it's rubbish or doesn't attractr attention.
The OP was using another oft used fallacy - "muh business is failing, it must be them pirates stealing our stuff!!". It's perfectly possible that, even where there are many many pirates around, that your business is failing because (like 99% of media) it's either godawful or just not popular.
Also, IMHO, "the population" are a bunch of imbeciles. That doesn't detract from their right to self determination and representative government, nor to re-evaluation of the balance of rights between the general public and the rights of individual creators of works.
"It seems to me that the problem with your argument is exactly that it is not sustainable."
Which argument? That the OP was talking shit? That it seems sustainable because hollywood and other places are still raking in plenty of cash? That the decline of sales is not necessarily linked to piracy?
I have no idea if the movie/music studios themselves are sustainable. We'll see. But that's not what I was on about and it's a fallacy to assume that their misfortune is solely or substantially down to piracy.
"And the government declares such tools to be accessories to copyright infringement, starts fining anyone who appears to be using encrypted traffic for any purpose on the assumption that they are infringing someone's copyright, and now collective punishment catching many innocent people along the way and undermining tools with legitimate, legal uses is back on the air."
Yup. Welcome to the 21st century, where governments are at war with large sections of their own people. Ain't democracy grand? It died the minute those in power decided they knew what was best for us.
'They are going to have to do it again'
Greenpeace are suing the government again over the second consultation.
Original Defeat for Govt: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6366725.stm
Second Consultation described as sham: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7171821.stm
http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/browns-pollsters-exposed-for-fixing-public-nuclear-consultation-20070919
Government finally admits to real consultation figures, which were negative by a big margin: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/06/20/public_opposes_id_cards_govt/
The entire idea and practice of globalization, that is so well loved and practiced by big business, is the ability to produce cheap copies. Cheap copies of a manufactured product, or cheap copies of an hour of labor. Business moves a factory that was employing a lot of people over to-someplace else, where they can make their product cheaper. If it is too inconvenient or impractical to move the business, they might import people where their labor-copy is cheaper than the existent local status quo of copies of the labor-hour (legal or not, it appears they can flaunt any sort of moving the labor around laws they want to with no repercussions, wink wink, nudge nudge, not P2P but B2B "labor-hour pirating").
Big business (and their sock puppets big government that they own completely and control now in the modern corporacracy (which is what are governments are now mostly) care not a whit how many "little people" are hurt economically, as long as their "cheap copy" business model stays intact. they promise and insist this is the "best method" possible for the modern economy.
We are told by our business and governmental leaders that this is the new plan of the 21st century, that to be efficient, we need the cheapest copies of a good or labor-hour as possible, with the tradeoffs to those disposed of their previous employment that they will receive-cheaper copies of whatever-else, could be the same exact thing they used to make, and frequently is. Lather rinse repeat across the board in the employment world.
The official rule now is, you accept globalization, take your day to day chances with your job, in exchange, big business and big government are promising "cheap copies" for you as a consumer. Of everything, no exceptions, the cheapest copies possible.
OK, fair enough! That is the economic "deal" they have created for everyone to enjoy. Globalization rules! Cheap copies of everything for everyone!
But...wait a minute..something isn't quite right here yet... exactly where are the "cheap copies" of digital bits "for sale" legally?
We have this "cheap copy" replicator technology now that shows us the cost of making the cheap copies of digital bits is pretty low, amazingly low. But the business world insists on "legal" copies that are vastly higher in end user retail price than what their own globalization cheap copy models suggest should be the actual true "tradeoff price" according to their "you must accept globalization no matter what, it is the new law and practice" rules.
Critics of that might say "you are leaving out the costs of producing the original in the first place, someone has to pay for that as well!". True enough as a criticism on the surface level, but let us go just *one* step below that and look at it.
When big business, with big governments help and permission, moves non-digital bits copy manufacturing to the "cheaper to make copies" place, they are *also* sidestepping why this new move becomes cheaper. A primary reason is they can completely sidestep a series of societally imposed environmental regulations, or actual costs of production...they can "make more profit" by *not* paying their previously worked out societal "bill" or "cost of original production" of being a little more respective of our commons, the environment. They usually also-at the same new "cheaper to make copies" place- can get to use and exploit the "cheap copy" of lower cost per hour labor by being allowed to support local near-slave drivers tied to repressive regimes who can seriously exploit their own labor force slaves in complete avoidance-avoiding a previous production cost- to what they previously had to include in the cost of making copies, by ignoring such things as child labor laws, workplace safety, and so on. But see, that doesn't matter, as long as a "cheap copy" can then be resold back to "the consumer". That's the globalization trade structure we are under now.
So that counter
Voting in the blues rather than the reds will achieve very little, much like the situation on the other side of the atlantic (IMHO).
Real change, unfortunately, is very difficult to achieve. Most of the public seem to like to think in terms of only two factions, right or wrong, total opposites, for us or against us....
Damn shame.
The last time we had that on the law books was in pre-roman times. In fact, I think we've not had it in any law books anywhere at any time, procedures like that have always been the mark of unlawful governments.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And if it works for him.........
Since when is the RIAA/MPAA or any other cartel Judge, Jury and Executioner together?
...
For a long time, I thought there were laws and rights inbetween
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Here is what I understood about their plan in France:
- A sort of monitoring group is created.
- This group aims to detect file sharing activity for the top songs or movies.
- It uses standard ISP access (i.e: no blacklist possible)
- They use standard file sharing tools and websites
- They identify which French user illegally download or distribute files.
- They notify the ISP and someone who is NOT a judge.
- The ISP notifies the user (and eventually terminates his net access after the 2nd time).
Sounds like a good starting plan, except that at this point the user should only be suspected of illegal file sharing and that there was no trial or anything involving a judge.
The problem is heavy P2P users who actually understand the behind-the-scenes goings on are a very small minority. Nothing will stop until the general public a) becomes informed about these issues and b) cares enough about them to have an opinion of their own, then act on that opinion. It's possible.
Here in Germany Nokia recently decided to move production to Poland, where labor is much cheaper, shutting down a large factory in Dortmund where 3000 people are employed. 3000 people out of 80+ million is a very tiny fraction, one that could be waved off with a casual "Well that really sucks for them, but that's business." attitude. Yet this decision cause a huge public reaction. For the past 3 years Nokia has been making very healthy profits, and was even being subsidized several million Euro by the government to keep their production in Germany after they threatened to pull out 3 years ago. They happily obliged, until this January when that subsidy contract expired. They decided then that they would leave after all.
As a result the German opinion of Nokia's phones has plummetted overnight. Now carrying a Nokia cell phone is all but verboten, even the Nordrhein Westfalen government (the "state" in which Dortmund resides) has cut off all contracts with Nokia and switched to Sony Ericsson cell phones for its employees. I'm sure others will follow suit.
All because of their greedy attitude and the fact that 3000 people will be out of a job.
Nokia is currently "reconsidering" their decision.
P2P needs to find itself a 'Dortmund'. That one example of greed and corporate stupidity that every common Joe can get outraged over.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
The closest EFF equivalent in the UK is the Open Rights Group (ORG).
It has already happened. Cleenfeed was designed to block access to child porn, the UK government seems happy to use the technology which can apply filters to selected IP addresses to block access to articles that are an embarrassment to them. Such as one covering the smoking habbits of Labour party MPs. Cleenfeed is implemented by all the large UK ISPs, over 90% of UK residential access is covered. http://www.ukcia.org/news/shownewsarticle.php?articleid=13189
Dude, take your ritalin and calm down a bit.
How am I supposed to "police my internet connection"? Buy the same filtering kit that my ISP uses in order to detect infringements on my internet connection and expect me to give a shit that my flatmate is downloading Britney Spears? I don't give a shit what my flatmates are doing and they can fuck off if they expect me to police ANYTHING that isn't my data. You're saying I'm responsible for all data going across that network link. You are wrong.
Sorry to so infururiate you with saying "stazi", clearly this completely invalidates my point and means I obviously have an IQ of five or less. In fact, it's a wonder I can even string a sentence together without being aware how to spell the abbreviation of an "invented" word in a language I don't speak. Yeah, I could have googled it, apologies for not realising that such as heinous mistake would result in you suffereing an apoplectic fit.
And, as I'm sure you're aware (being a troll an' all) that copyright infringement is not stealing. Secondly, your "copyright infringement = police state" remark isn't so much a false dichotomy as an apparent complete lack of understanding of my whole point (but, like you say, my point is invalidated because I didn't spell "stasi" - I shudder to think how you'd react if I pointed out that I didn't even capitalise it) - if you REQUIRE every internet connection to be monitored, if you REQUIRE people accessing "unauthorised" content to be denied internet access, if you REQUIRE people to police other peoples computers for fear of being wrongfully accused themselves you have the perfect set of circumstances for implementing a totalitarian regime.
I feel like I should call you a cunt or something so as to tread more down the "Yeah! Ad hominem FTW!" road of things, but your argument is more pitiable than anything else I'm afraid, and I couldn't really insult you with any real conviction.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
if big media, with its deep pockets, political contributions, sponsored legislation, legions of lawyers, etc., can't enforce it, how do you expect some lonely artist to enforce it?
and it's not like before the internet big media was looking out for the lonely artist, they screwed him over every way they could
meanwhile, in a world without any ip, the little artist actually does better, by getting free advertising and distribution, allowing for zero distribution costs, direct communication with fans. then he makes money from gigs and corporate advertising
win for the fans
win for the artists
complete loss for big media
all by completely ignoring ip law. i mean ip law basically protects an imaginary property to begin with, so nothing is lost, an increase in network value is achieved
what's the problem?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/list/open?sort=signers There is a means to petition the Prime Minister. I don't know how effective it actually is, I've signed a few myself in the past, and one or two of them have made headlines. However, I don't even know if the bugger even reads any of them, or even gets to hear about any of them, but it is another outlet for your voice. Personally, I'm actually looking for work overseas, because I've lost all love for my homeland, this legislation is looking to be the final straw and I hate feeling like this.
Doesn't the BBC iPlayer (or whatever it is called) use P2P for its content distribution? Will they cut off access for those people who use iPlayer?
The answer is to build a P2P system that behaves like iPlayer.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
There is no obligation for the elected party to fulfill their manifesto and they are free to introduce new policies at any time - without getting a mandate from the people. Party leaders and therefore the prime-minister can be ousted at any time and new appointees don't need ratification, apart from the non-transparent process that gets them the top job.
But we get to vote once every 5 years, so that makes it a democracy - just like in Iraq
[1] if this conjures up any visual images in your mind, you're probably not far off.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Most of /. would be cheering it on. That's what we call hypocrisy kids.
What will happen instead is that the proposals will be reviewed and amended by the government legal service, so that when the measure comes into force it won't be slapped down by either domestic courts or the ECJ/EHCR. It will be changed to something like this:
The important matters are: 1) legality of any new measure designed to tackle filesharing; and 2) the new measure will be widely broadcast, and the authorities will come down very heavily on perhaps a handful of people at most (wrecking lives and relationships, terminating employment, creating shame, alienation and humiliation with dawn/midnight raids etc.) and this will be widely publicised with the help of the BBC (which has been controlled by F-Branch MI5 since its inception), the Daily Telegraph and other state-controlled media. The rest of the media will further sensationalise and exaggerate the personal aspects of the individual cases. The whole idea will be to create a tense and fearful situation so that even though it will be easy to circumvent any new legal measures to prevent filesharing, people will be too terrorised to do so.
A decade ago, Richard Stallman first published his story, The Right to Read. At the time people laughed and called him an alarmist.
This world is getting closer and closer every day, and laws like this are helping it!
Today we have a world where someone was held without trial for months, for producing software (that was totally legal in the country where it was developed!) that allowed among other things, blind people to read PDFs. J.K. Rowling threatens children with lawsuits over fan sites (well, she did say she wanted to encourage them to read, she didn't say nuffink about enkuraging them to rite!)
I wrote something on this topic after seeing the Lawrence Lessig talk from TED - http://blog.penguinpowered.org/2008/01/29/breaking-the-law/
Looking at the more serious problems with this proposed law, let me pose the following (true) scenarios to you.
I live in the UK as does my grandma. She used to have support from government funded community workers for her shopping, because she isn't mobile they used to collect a shopping list from her weekly and would then go out and get her shopping and bring it back for her. Unfortunately she lives 200 miles away so it's not something we're able to help her with from here. The goverment reduced funding to this scheme such that they no longer support it for her, and when she asked what she was supposed to do she was told they will give her computing tutorials and help with providing internet access for her so she could shop online and have the supermarkets deliver to her, this wasn't as good as the previous scheme but it works in a similar way now she has the hang of it.
So what happens if someone hijacks the wireless that came with her internet access that the goverment recommended and uses it for P2P getting her cut off? Is she supposed to just starve then or something? Another good example is homework, are kids without internet access meant to be at a disadvantage by being unable to perform decent research? I work in IT in the education sector and have recently encountered goverment proposals to get local-goverment supported IT kit and internet access to disadvantaged families so there appears to be a fair bit of evidence the goverment wants every kid to have net access when it comes to education.
The problem is the goverment here in the UK have recently done things that suggest the internet is an essential service like electricity, gas, water, telephone which is great because it can indeed serve as such an important service. After they've gone to such great lengths to recognise it's importance how can they possibly turn around now and suggest it's something that can just be taken away when kids futures and pensioners lives quite literally depend on it?
I'm not aware of any other crime in existence that would take away a service that is essential to both our children's future and our pensioners well being as a result of goverment proposed schemes.
Think back to the original Napster. Centralized. Open. Pretty easy to kill. If the industry had never gone after Napster then P2P technology would never have had any incentive to improve. Necessity is the the mother of invention. So, in the long run, this is actually going to be a good thing. People will develop better P2P clients which serve encrypted files and maybe break them up more in a highly-decentralized manner. The government is actually going to help P2P get better!
That's the point of censorship, isn't it, to crush dissenting opinion and economic competition. The only mistake is thinking this is about anything else.
(1215 Magna Carta)
XXIX. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right. i.e. due process
This is where Doctor House welcomes you all to the beginning of his thought process.
Finally! A sensible approach!
You have to find a middle ground here, we can't allow companies to bankrupt people in revenge for sharing a few songs. On the flip side, we can't have a property-is-theft free for all.
This sounds like a very reasonable option.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
This is not a proposal published by government! It is contained a leaked draft consultation document. That means: a. it may never happen and b. you still have plenty of time to tell your MP/AM/MSP how silly an idea it is (and explain why).
There is more info at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7240234.stm
Anon
Isn't it perfectly clear that the actual freedom that the internet provides is a problem for the government and corporations? Ever since they realized that people started to understand that freedom, they have been trying to shut it down. The problem is that the "democratic" leaders can't say, "Oops, our mistake, we don't really want you people communicating."
The government can't do that right away, so it allows corporations to make the case that "We The People" are a problem to THEIR bottom line and thus "We The People" MUST be stopped for the sake of international copyright treaties and laws. (Cry for the artists!)
This is all so fishy. It is too convenient. We have western governments trying to spy, snoop, eves drop, detain, and torture and make it legal to do so. There are private corporations who have a vested interest in locking down all forms of media and communications, in the name of copyright and royalties. We have ISPs who, while their charter forbids their inference, offer to filter content.
Is it me, or is it obvious, it is like one big huge multiheaded monster telling us to do what we are told. Shut up, work harder, buy more stuff.
It has to be stopped!
Does that sound like they're hurting?
Film is highest grossing movie of all time. Sound like screeners are denuding the market?
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 37 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Or did every single one of you miss out on the part where the "offenders" were merely suspects, not convicted of anything.
They're losing their internet capabilities without even being tried. It's just "suspected" downloading of illegal software.
That seems like a rather large loophole.
What is kind of interesting, but really very very bad for a free world is how brazenly corporate interests are now attempting to trample on the rights of everyday citizens.
While internet access is not yet thought of as a basic service such as electricity, having the government mandate such proposed actions based on civil (not criminal) impropriety (leaving aside the whole goddamn issue of the (lack of) morality that is the current copyright morass) seems like a direct bid by corporate interests for more power over citizens (notice - not consumers!).
I can imagine a time when some corporate agency will be able to call upon armed marshals and forcibly invade someone's business or home based on anonymous tips that some civil laws have been violated. Oh wait, that already happens.
Well then, nothing to see here, move along...
This might as well read "UK parliament suggests banning the internet"
It's quite obvious the MP's proposing this don't give a damn about false positives.. they want p2p as a whole wiped out.
The problem is the internet as a whole is p2p. Specifically, it's this characteristic which makes the internet 'revolutionary' and different from previous information delivery services.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
This possible action by the UK government is another threat to our freedom that we must fight. The UK should not be allowed to prevent people from sharing files or anything else. This immediately would open the Internet to blanket dragnet operations if you think about it many things or possibly even anything could be interpreted as potential illegal file sharing. UK is off my list of freedom loving nations if this goes through. I think any action that impedes the general freedom of the Internet should be fought and put a stop to. If need be we should boycott all UK media industry products in protest. I think it is just that serious a threat. I also think the BBC's limiting of some of it's video streams to England-only or UK-only internet users is a terrible misuse of this wonderful globally interconnecting medium. Freedom and interconnectivity is what the internet is all about. My dad and granddad used to share audio tapes of LP records. Sharing is just a part of business you could say a cost but most of those that share wouldn't go buy if they had to as they simply couldn't afford it. The internet is providing all new ways for many many more people to make money with music and videos. Besides I never thought the words "music" and "industry" should go together. Freedom is what life is all about Freedom will win in the end regardless of what the anything goes neo-fascists might otherwise hope. The flow of the river of Freedom can only be impeded for short periods of time.
Interesting, it seems that only client server model applications will be authorized and peer-to-peer, featured in IPv6, will be killed. Beam me up Scotty, their is no intelligent life here...
Please get off your high horse. People are not as irresponsible as you perhaps think - they are not victims - they choose to take drugs or download copyrighted material. Perhaps you are trying to pander to the politician, but if they support the war on drugs then they don't need any ego boost.
It is completely irresponsible to put the blame on to either drug dealers or uploaders, that is also completely and utterly immoral. Did they go out and hurt someone, did they steal anyones property (tangible property, intellectual "property" which is a government license)? No, and if they have done they should be taken to court because of something they have done wrong.
Though, I don't think many bittorrent users will buy into that cheap argument as they upload some too.
need I say more?
of open source software that can take the place of commercial software even now, and this is well over 10 years since RMS said he was going to do it all with free software. Theres no useable office suite, linux is still not useable for non nerds (ie., most of the world), and microsoft continues to define useability enough to where people are glad to fork over the money and put up with activation etc etc just to avoid the mess that is the gpl'ed alternatives. Don't agree? People pay hundreds of dollars for photoshop despite the gimp, and windows vista is wildly outpacing the entirity of the linux download history despite windows vista only existing for a little over a year.
Face it, linux still sucks even now, because people don't believe they should learn emacs just to browse the web, and torvalds even after 10 years cannot produce a kernel that is not root exploitable. And now that gpl version 3 will disallow linux even being used to make money means the tivos of the world will return to closed source thus destroying the little commercial opportunities for free software that the gpl 2 allowed. Case closed.
Those music and movie industry associations are dangerous - they are looking at their doom and fighting to save their gravy train. This attracts lots of attention. But this noise is also part of a larger agenda that's being played out - and something that's much, much more important than P2P sharing.
There are some governments in our world today which are led by frightened men. You can see their fear in their public statements and actions; they'll tell you it's the terrorists, or the communists, or that's the enemy. However, what those leaders are really scared of is the general population of the country they're "leading".
Those "leaders" can and will take whatever steps they can to prevent a popular revolution. They know that if the people are frightened and isolated they won't be forming any significant opposition; any "malcontents" are identified and disappear. One of the tools of an effective police state are laws. Laws that reduce / eliminate any "rights" that the people used to have, laws that make vaguely defined "offenses" punishable with draconian penalties, etc.
So here we are; we wail and gnash as the recording cartels push for ever stronger penalties for increasingly minor offenses. "This isn't right!" we claim in near unison. But our governments are all too willing to enact those laws; to them it's another law to beat up the "enemies of the state" with. Nice and vague, too: since what the internet does is transfer files from one machine to another (that's how you're reading this, you downloaded the html file) then enacting laws against file transfers of any kind is a big step on the slippery slope.
The internet presents those governments with another problem: it allows people to communicate freely across borders. This is dangerous to those paranoid leaders - too many people talking behind their backs, they might - no, probably are - plotting against the government. Anybody notice the recent push to allow the governements to intercept any and all internet traffic? If you're paying attention, these measures are being enacted on a local basis; the proposed monitoring applies to people inside their borders. With positive identification of every citizen (another issue of recent import) and a full record of their online activities, they believe they can find the "bad guys" and deal with them before they cause any problems. They can also make convenient examples out of some citizens - everybody's guilty of at least one crime.
This kind of "government policy" has been tried before; history is littered with examples. They clearly show what the results are likely to be - and in the modern day with computers and databases they can operate so much more efficiently; query the database, print out the resulting list and hand it to the enforcers.
Back to the topic: if you're in the UK and are suspected of "sharing files" then they can cut off your internet access. Sounds good on the surface; save the artists! But wait and see how this law really gets used. Very convenient for the government; outspoken critics can be silenced quickly and effectively. Will they be able to resist the temptation to use the law in this way? Think about it...
So i guess the idea "due process" doesn't apply in the UK. I thought it did. Poor saps.
Because i don't believe in IP rights, I don't support it even if you are tried and convicted, but at least at that point its clear you actually did do something wrong in the eyes of the court.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I can't wait for this type of legislation to snake its way into the country I live in. Why? We come well prepared already. The gov't here has instituted a "voluntary" filter list of "kiddie porn" sites (in quotes because, apparently, a lot of the sites on the list are completely legal porn) for ISPs to block, which they are now talking about extending to also cover gambling sites. So, we're making good progress in defining unwanted on-line activities already. If they additionally start banning people for file-sharing, why stop there? I mean, bad activity is bad activity, right? The logical step is then to also ban anyone who attempts to view the sites on the filter list, whatever they may be in a few years' time. I suspect the media industry won't be satisfied until everyone is banned from the internet, though.
Buying a ship and heading off to sea is starting to sound more and more tempting.
The hell we would. Not on mere suspicion of spamming. With spammers, there's typically a mountain of evidence pointing to the culprit....
Now as to whether we care whether it is legal or illegal spamming, the answer is no, but only because all spamming is abhorrent and annoys the recipient regardless of whether it technically violates the strict letter of a particular body of laws in a particular jurisdiction. The same cannot be reasonably said about all file sharing.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
There has been much discussion here and in other threads about "content distribution system is dead" vs. "kill the evil copyright-infringing leechers". Much profitable comparison with history has been made.
No one as yet seems to have made the point of the economics of the consumer - by this I mean, can the average consumer actually afford the current prices for games/videos etc.?
If you're a single, late 20's early 30's male with a good tech job, then probably yes. If you're a woman in a semi-3rd world country (e.g. Iraq, Albania, Russia) - no. If you're an average (whatever that is...) American (sorry, I'm in the US, so I can give economic examples better)... well let's see....
Years ago, there was an actual middle class - the man worked one job, the woman stayed home and raised the kids (this is not a rant on gender/employment; this is to illustrate one family unit with one (count them: 1) breadwinner). And this was sufficient - you made a good living this way. Today...I'm from a middle-class family. Everyone has to work. Families with a few kids who are younger - both spouses have to work two jobs, the man sometimes 3. And these are not individual cases. Nor are they working minimum wage. Now tell me again how a family that *has* to work 5 jobs between 2 people will afford the "content" provided by the entertainment companies. (by *has* to I specifically mean to afford house mortgage, car mortgage(s), taxes, clothes, college funds, medical bills, etc.. You know: the actually important things in life that you, dear average slashdotter in his parents' basement perhaps have yet to consider). The amount of disposable income has shrunk way down - so maybe, just maybe, the studios are hurting because the economy on which they are built is in deep shit?
You ask: but wait....where is the money going....? Surely, if we're more productive today, and people work more, they out to be producing more value, i.e. have more money. Well, let's see....
There's the federal taxes, that go, for instance, into funding the (Permanent) War on Drugs/Terror/Fluffy Kittens/etc.. Or for funding "failing" content "creators" - New Line studios, for instance http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/08/02/12/0317238.shtml . There's funding the interest on the national debt (this year, it's 250-something billion, if I recall reading the 2009 US budget correctly). There's the medical stuff you have to pay for since the HMO's are screwing you every which way - higher premiums, higher co-payments, less coverage, denied procedures. There's the typical tax raises to fund a bunch of new laws that you resent and don't want in the first place. Oh, and let's not forget the rising prices on everything.
And against this background, let's investigate the prices for entertainment: not too long ago a music CD was $10. I challenge you to find a CD at a store for a new artist for less than $16. A PC game was maybe 30-35 $ (which was a bit on the high side). 5-6 years ago it was 40-50. I don't know what the prices are today - I've stopped playing games. A typical console game will run about 50$, probably more now. And let's not forget printed media (you know - dead trees). Since many of you are or were college students, you know what books cost. If daddy didn't pay for them, you know even more personally. Look up professionally sophisticated books, even on amazon. Any hard-core math/finance/bio/chem/physics books start at $90 and head north so fast they're actually red-shifting. You telling me Elsevier is going out of business any time this week? I don't think so.
Finally, file-sharing or not, the "content" providers want to lock down the way you read/view/enjoy music/film etc - first by technical means, then by legalisms. I doubt the average person knows who Lawrence Lessig is, or is familiar with the eroding public domain argument. But one thing the average bloke does know is when he's getting reamed. And since the reaming is coming f
show me ANY proprietary player which is as flexible as mplayer, vlc, or xine.
the first implementation of bit torrent was FOSS, and the most advanced clients continue to be FOSS
lame is the best mp3 encoder out there, and it is FOSS
firefox is FOSS
ffmpeg and xvid are both superior in rendering and encoding mpeg4 standards than the official divx codec
flac is the standard for true lossless audio
ubuntu loaded on my laptop straight out of the box without a single error, had a quick utility for adding full media support, and had the same functionality in its default install state as a windows machine loaded with 1500 bucks in software. Additionally, the out-of-box xgl/compiz integrated gui environment provides more advanced, more configurable, and zippier eye candy than vista.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The article to which you linked has no mention of any improper use of the 'cleanfeed' system.
What appears to be a more original version of the article at http://cannazine.co.uk/content/view/3501/1585/ also gives no evidence of improper use.
It certainly highlights the potential for abuse. It fails to indicate any specific instances of abuse.
I have very great regard for the Internet Watch Foundation, and welcomed its introduction in the mid 90s. It's helped us avoid Governmental interferance of a lot of 'net content for over a decade. This means that I instinctively distrust anybody that rails against it without further evidence. It also means I'm keen to hear about any relevant evidence, as the IWF does fulfil an important role and one for which it requires a considerable degree of trust.
So, unless these lovers of free speech, the free market and freedom in general can somehow connect "the terrorists" or "the kiddie porn traffickers" with file sharing and scare this legislation into being, this is going absolutely nowhere. The politicians can say they tried, though.
[*Go easy on me, guys! I haven't posted here in ages, so please don't mod this into Hades.]
"The illegal we can do right now; the unconstitutional will take a little longer." --Henry Kissinger
Does the government really think it is possible to filter every single households internet use? They must be complete fools, millions of people have the internet, and many many billion megabytes of data are sent over isps networks each day, how exactly could isps or the government check each packet of data sent to see if it was illegal. The simple answer is it cant be done, and other reasons for not doing it are privacy acts, which basically prevent isps from looking at it anyway. Finally, people will just encrypt their filesharing, or use websites such as rapidshare to host illegal files until the file is reported as illegal.
The holes in reality are coming The cake is a lie... The cake is a lie... The cake is a lie... The cake is a lie..
assuming ip law is just
what if it isn't just?
it is not a law like one against pedophilia, or extortion: something that can be understood from natural morality, something that one can philosophically assert as a fundamental imposition of hurt or pain on someone else
in fact, if there is no ip law, and everyone involved in a transaction benefits: the artist, the fan, what is the point of ip law again?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
"UK Government To Terminate File Sharers' Net Access" implies that something is actually going to happen. It's a misreporting of the situation.
...and that's it.
What's happened is that:
o Andy Burnham, a member of the current government, has said that he is going to publish a green paper next week called "The World's Creative Hub".
o In what seems to be a leak to the Times, the Times has extrapolated a conversation with a minion into a news article. The BBC seems to have no external source as it's saying "The Times suggested...".
It's worth remembering that this is a green paper - "a tentative government report of a proposal without any commitment to action" (that quote stolen from wikipedia because I couldn't define it better myself). It's not a law, nor a proposed law, nor something that is expected to be written up and proposed to become a law.
What happens next is that people either welcome it, or are outraged by it, or a mixture of both. All political parties say they are/are not in favour of idea X depending on whether there are any votes in it. Assuming there is some actual reason to continue (i.e. votes) in this it'll get written up as a white paper. That's an actual intention to do something (which is what a green paper isn't), but it still isn't a proposed law. That stage occurs if and when it gets introduced to parliament as a bill (which will happen if there are still votes in it) and if the government hasn't run out of parliamentary time.
Assuming that the government still has (a) time, (b) a working majority and (c) the will to proceed (still votes in it) it'll pass as a government-sponsored bill.
Of those three, (b) is a given, (a) could be very tricky and (c) is pretty unlikely - this doesn't sound like a votewinner to me.
So what's actually happening then?
o Andy Burnham presumably wants to look busy and useful. The DCMS isn't exactly an "action department", so he has to look like he's doing something if he's to progress up the greasy pole. Making unpopular ideas seem palatable (even if ultimately rejected) is likely to earn him brownie points.
o The Times is from a stable including content producers Fox and Sky and isn't exactly an independent observer, so their spin on the conversation isn't actually surprising. The BBC's a content producer too...
It's not even a new idea - it's stolen from the French:
http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKL2346825720071123?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
Note that there it's not law there either - the nearest it's got to that is being proposed by an industry panel and included in a speech by Nicolas Sarkozy. The Times says "...is implementing..." when describing what they're up to, which could be argued as being correct, but is at the very least misleading. The BBC seems to have missed that bit out of the copy and paste.
Of course, what'll really happen is that next month everyone will forget about it and move on to talking about another daft scheme. In the world of the Internet we may move on from "writing postcards" to "sending letters" instead (which is no bad thing). Content providers will still struggle against new technology, governments will still try and look busy and get votes, and news organisations will still publish what are essentially press releases as "news".
Of course, the real story is that the Government is also in the pockets of the industry reps ("You push for this, you'll get the payoff's, and we're going to take advantage of this to institute a censored society"). They won't say it of course. So the Government is doing this both for these reasons, that the other group gets the payoff for being their loyal lapdog and distracting Joe Public from the forming fascist state (notice how inane music is these days? Almost none of it has any real meaning). "This is for your protection". And remember, Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace, and
Microsoft makes it as expensive as it can to switch to alternatives, in order to strengthen its copyright-powered monopoly. It invests many man years in creating incompatibilities, and secret file formats. It uses dubious and illegal deals with OEM's. .DOC format with non-Microsoft products, which is the success of Microsoft's huge effort to create secret and incompatible standards.
Some switch to Linux, but Microsoft do succeed in hindering the competition. You cannot reliably use the
The value of a software company, under the copyright model of money-per-copy, is bounded by the amount of money all of its customers would have to pay in order to switch to the competition. Once the company is a de-facto monopoly, its not only bounded by that, it also becomes that.
Indeed, the value of Microsoft, is the aggregated cost of all of its customers switching to a competing product. Increasing the quality of its own products to make it expensive to switch is hard, while creating incompatibilities is easy.
This is another reason that copyrights are bad, specifically for software, they create an incentive to create software that is technically poor, not in a way the customer directly feels, but being technically poor is the only way to make software which is hard to be compatible with.
This is why Win32 was so successful (at its goal, of hindering competition) - by being extremely over-complicated and technically poor, it was virtually impossible for other systems, especially open-source ones, to have compatibility.
"Users suspected of wrongly downloading films or music will receive a warning e-mail for the first offence, a suspension for the second infringement and the termination of their internet contract if caught a third time, under the most likely option to emerge from discussions about the new law." (Emphasis added)
Also, one of the discussion posts:
"Who is snooping on me all the time anyway??? How will HE know what I download unless Big Brother is always watching me? That to me is a far more serious threat"
And again, this post:
"So how much would it cost me to get my own laws passed? Or do I have to create a company of a certain size before the government will listen to me?"
'Nuf said.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?