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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?
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
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.
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
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?
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!
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.
"intellectual property is dead"
So the movie makers, musicians, writers, software developers and game designers should all go do a basic course in plumbing and carpentry?
I don't know about you, but I need to pay the bills. You are basically saying that thanks to selfish leeches who think everyone owes them free entertainment for life, our entire collective digital industries are now dead and buried, to be pursued only by hobbyists at the weekends?
Personally, I'd rather it didn't come to that, and if that means using the law to crack down on people blatantly and repeatedly infringing copyright, then good. Someone copying a mates Cd was never the issue. Its people who leave servers on 24/7 distributing tens of thousands of files that were only released yesterday that is the problem.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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...
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
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.
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.
If that is the case, how do you explain the masses of Free Software?
How do you explain the rich culture and works that were created before copyrights were even invented?
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?
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?
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.
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