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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."
There were no specifics in the text of two articles of how they are going to detect file sharing. I bet they will just go by known services from their list, known torrent sites, etc. So, the encryption won't help.
Opening emails or data packets is illegal if you simple extend the law about snail-mail. If they stepped into this, they are making their unconstitutional (well, it's UK, so substitute whatever you have for constitution) rules, which makes it pretty much irrelevant whether you encrypt your uploads or not.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I believe the UK is even less of a democracy than the States.
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.
You ISP can prove that you communicated with a bank using SSL. That's enough information to find you guilty of "suspicion of conducting financial transactions". SSL does not help in any way.
Though it is nearly impossible to control sharing, sharing may not be the only or even the main motivation behind the law. Consider that pretty much anyone can be accused of file sharing, irrespective of whether the person actually engaged in it. How would you defend yourself? It is your word against theirs.
In short, if approved, this law provides an excuse to deny any citizen Internet access. In particular, it can be used to deny access to people engaged in exposing lies and other activities deemed to be subversive. That may the secondary or even main motivation.
There is no British law - Scotland has its own system, which I haven't seen made mention of yet as to how this proposal affects us.
You need to appreciate the sheer volume of ludicrous laws that have been implemented in the UK since Tony Blair's New Labour were voted into power. There are a lot of things that have been made illegal that people don't even know about. This looks to be another of those scenarios where someone has been lobbying the government who have been in discussion with industry members without any public transparency or debate and are about to introduce some sweeping, ill-conceived and ill informed draconian law.
People in the UK need to wake the fuck up and stop paying so much attention to all the bullshit that the news tries to make us focus on and face up to the real issues. Look at the effect of islamic terrorism post media coverage - the UK was subjected to terrorist attacks from Irish Republicans for over 30 years which people accepted and lived with effectively, now the media has created a focussed paranoia which is impacting settled British families of Asian decent.
This may sound extreme but there are parralels as to how many dictators have drawn attention from there real interests by blaming a group of people. In this cas the recession is the issue but we can just blame p2p users.
A thistle is a fat salad for an ass's mouth...
The political system here is totally ossified - Westminister is basically a little bubble universe, completley detached from the rest of the population. Most of the political class is upper class Oxbridge graduates, and because of that those that aren't are middle class ambitious social climbers who devote themselves to petty political advancement from the age of about twelve.
Both elements are completely disconnected from any and all forms of popular culture (and embarrass themselves when they pretend otherwise) and are, considering their educational advantages, remarkably limited intellectually - little grasp of political theory of any kind (they just go by what they take to be 'common sense' when not being outright self-serving), little grasp of economics (they go by what they are advised, with said advice invariably coming business interests/the city of london) and are as far away from representative of the British people as you could get.
You get the odd bright spark entering into Parliament, but it has a suffocating political culture that will quickly integrate them - you'll never see MPs reform the system themselves. Any potential change would have to come from outside Parliament (like the Chartist movement in the nineteenth century) but it's here that the media makes its contribution to the status quo: as far as it is concerned, politics stops at the Westminster gates. So-called 'extra-parliamentary' politics is all but invisible.
The result of all this is that there is no real popular input to lawmaking - rather so-called 'Public Affairs' (ie. lobby) groups, pretty much part of the political class itself, will lunch with MPs and aides who they often know socially (for example, they both went to Cambridge together) and apply persuasion and pressure that often translates quite directly into legislation favourable to the interest lobbying - for example the anti-filesharing lobby. Thus we get various acts progressively reducing what we can do with the internet.
The best comparison to this is the Enclosure movement - when various laws were passed for influential landlords that closed off common land and forcibly cleared away of peasants for nascent capitalist agriculture. Said peasants, separated from any means of subsisting themselves and thus totally dependant, were forced to become the industrial working class. A similar process is happening today - our freedom of action on the internet is progressively reduced, creating a class of dependant 'users' who must browse in the way the state and business want and only what the state and business want, or be excluded from the internet altogether.
It states several times "customers suspected of making illegal downloads."
I'll add some facts here ...
The way this works is like this: IFPI (or more likely some contracted-out company) will connect to "Teeney_Spears_best_of.torrent" bittorrent, and will note down the time and IP address of all the other machines in the swarm. Any which belong to a UK ISP will result in a notification being sent to the ISP who will forward it along to the customer. Three srikes etc.
The ISPs won't be monitoring connections, because (surprisingly) that is illegal interception and can only be done under carefully controlled conditions as specified in the RIP Act. Oh actually, it can be done by everyone and their dog in local government, but that is a separate issue.
Encryption and suspicion don't really come into this. Plausible deniability, neighbours and visitors using your wifi connection, challenges over the chain of evidence, compromised machine, etc. are all possible, assuming any of these cases ever makes it to court. The whole point of the voluntary agreement is to avoid cases coming to court and needing solid evidence.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
I dunno, I did not read the article.. however if the synopsis is correct (which it rarely is...), the mere suspicion of file sharing could result in account termination. I imagine we could turn this into a new denial of service attack.. forge p2p traffic from someone you do not like.. until the ISP kills off their account...
That being said.. I am sure there are probably protections in place to prevent abuse... heh.. okay maybe not...
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
It's not so much the initial misidentification that bothers me, it's that they employee front line support who shouldn't be allowed to play with Big Boy Scissors, let alone to deal with technical issues.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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?
Nice to see that they're not even going for proven guilt in this case.
Actually what I read is worse than this. Anything they do not like will be turned into "suspected" illegal file sharing. Blog the wrong thing? Suspected illegal file sharing. Visit an unapproved website? Suspected illegal file sharing. Have an ISP connection with my competitor? Suspected illegal file sharing.
Don't think it will happen? Obviously you don't understand human nature too well.
I regret that I only have one mod point to give per post.
You seem to try and imply that copyright, or more specifically, the collection of royalty payment for each copy, is the primary driver for the creation of content.
No. I suggest that it is one driver for the creation of content. Clearly other mechanisms from live performance to altruism also serve as effective motivators to varying degrees.
I have suggested before that the biggest single advantage of a copyright-style framework over any other method I've seen proposed is that it provides a credible mechanism for creators to make expensive works and each of many consumers to contribute a small share of the cost. In other words, it encourages the widest possible distribution of the works that take the most time and effort to produce, rather than charging higher amounts by making enjoyment of such works a scarce commodity (commissioned work, limited ticket sales at concerts, etc.).
If that is the case, how do you explain the masses of Free Software?
Free Software is a terrible example to use if you're trying to show a better way than copyright. The amount of useful, high quality commercial software developed via copyright absolutely dwarfs the amount of useful, high quality software developed under a Free Software model. Even flagship Free Software titles are often not as good as the commercial equivalents. And of course, this particular argument ignores the fact that commercial software development pays the rent for a large proportion of the people who contribute to Free Software in their spare time.
How do you explain the rich culture and works that were created before copyrights were even invented?
Again, this one is easy: far less work was produced, and far fewer people enjoyed it because it wasn't as widely available.
How do you explain the fact that publishers struggled to be the ones to get to publish the 9/11 Commission Report, even though they could not get a copyright on it, and even though any other publisher could publish it as well? How do you explain that this report made quite a buck for the publisher that published it anyhow?
Because even a thin margin is useful if someone else is paying for the original work to be done?
If indeed copyright drives quality content (which I believe it does not), is it really worth the extra laws that have to imposed on all citizens? Is it worth the trouble of policing information?
Copyright is no different to any other law. It should simply codify an accepted convention that informed people will respect without any need to police them, and provide a means for penalising the few who refuse to play by the same rules as everyone else. The fact that this is not the case today is indeed a damning indictment of the current copyright regime, which I believe is primarily down to poor public understanding of the economics involved and allowing the megacorp middlemen to have all the power when it should be the artists and the consumers who are the important groups. But fixing the ignore and the power imbalance are relatively easy, and do not require removing the entire copyright system.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
No. I suggest that it is one driver for the creation of content. Clearly other mechanisms from live performance to altruism also serve as effective motivators to varying degrees.
I believe the main driver is the free market.
I have suggested before that the biggest single advantage of a copyright-style framework over any other method I've seen proposed is that it provides a credible mechanism for creators to make expensive works and each of many consumers to contribute a small share of the cost. In other words, it encourages the widest possible distribution of the works that take the most time and effort to produce, rather than charging higher amounts by making enjoyment of such works a scarce commodity (commissioned work, limited ticket sales at concerts, etc.).
It most certainly does not encourage the widest possible distribution, by placing artificial scarcity on the distribution. Limited ticket sales at concerts do not pose any limit whatsoever on the distribution of recordings of such concerts. That maximizes distribution, copyright does not.
Free Software is a terrible example to use if you're trying to show a better way than copyright. The amount of useful, high quality commercial software developed via copyright absolutely dwarfs the amount of useful, high quality software developed under a Free Software model. Even flagship Free Software titles are often not as good as the commercial equivalents. And of course, this particular argument ignores the fact that commercial software development pays the rent for a large proportion of the people who contribute to Free Software in their spare time.
Firstly, you are confusing "commercial" with closed-source (as many open-source products are commercial).
I believe Free Software is a great example. Copyright makes it possible to highly increase the funding of software projects, and yet Free Software can still compete and often beat the quality of closed-source software whose distribution is artificially scarce. This is significant evidence that the Free Software model works better and more efficiently. It creates higher-quality software for a fraction of the price.
It is true that many open-source developers are funded by closed-source work. However, I believe that if copyrights are abolished, closed-source software will cease to exist, and the free market will summon the creation of open-source work. A lot more people will get paid to do open source work than they are today.
About your claim about the quality, the only such package I know of such claim is Photoshop. Lets see some Free Software vs Closed Software comparisons from various times, and see if you can get a concensus about your quality statement:
In my opinion, much software progress was made up to the darkness of the 80's, when software was still being researched and developed in the open (the creation of Lisp, C, UNIX, Smalltalk, TCP/IP and many more).
Once software copyrights took hold, "closed-source" de-facto standards such as (.DOC, WinAPI, etc) took hold. The Windows line became standard (A huge step back from Unix). Visual Basic was created. This is the contribution copyrights to the world of software. The amount of man-years wasted on reverse-engineering or reimplementing basic features in the closed-source world is staggering.
Again, this one is easy: far less work was produced, and far fewer people enjoyed it because it wasn't as widely available.
The fact fewer people enjoyed it is not due to the lack of copyright, it is due to the lack of distribution technologies. It was as widely a
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