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UK ISPs To Face Piracy Deadline
superbrose notes that despite lots of legal difficulties regarding Internet privacy, the UK government is going ahead with plans to punish ISPs for allowing their customers to download illegal music and films. The claim is that there is "rampant piracy" in Britain with more than 6 million broadband users downloading files illegally every year. "The government will on Friday tell internet service providers they will be hit with legal sanctions from April next year unless they take concrete steps to curb illegal downloads of music and films. Britain would be one of the first countries in the world to impose such sanctions. Service providers say what the government wants them to do would be like asking the Royal Mail to monitor the contents of every envelope posted."
Yes, this is essentially a shutdown of the WWW in the UK. So? It's what the Gov wants, right?
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Would that be 10% of the WHOLE population (including oldies, sickies and kiddies)? Sounds like it's time to change the law, not enforce it harder.
It's going to get even worse. Imagine asking the Royal Mail to monitor the contents of every envelope posted, after half of the mail writers get tired of these draconian measures and start sending their messages in code.
What if P2P users start encrypting their traffic? The difficulties involved would be significant, but not insurmountable. Are the ISPs supposed to treat every user transmitting & receiving encrypted data as a criminal?
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6 million people is about 10% of the total population. Maybe if such a large portion of its citizens want to do something it shouldn't be illegal. If the government were obeying the will of the people this shouldn't even be an issue.
Developers: We can use your help.
Surely you don't believe they do so for any other reason than the price is zero. Some may, but I imagine the majority think more about the price than any righteous belief that "information wants to be free."
On the other hand, this British law, if enacted, might become the fire that will trigger that reaction. Just wait and see the growth in the amount of people pissed by false positives, or just pissed, for things to start to change.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Not only that, but, the UK has a total population of about 60 million people. So 10% of the population is engaging in piracy. Within the age bracket you mention, that's probably pretty much everybody. I have a feeling this is going to turn out like Prohibition did. Despite the fact that it gets banned, everybody still does it, the authorities are powerless to stop it, and in the end, the authorities who puts those laws in place get moved aside by those who want those laws repealed.
Stuff like this makes me wonder just how much invasion/erosion of privacy will be tolerated in the UK before people rise up and flood into the streets in protest. Of course, I wonder how far the same thing will go in the US before a similar reaction too! But it seems that our friends in the UK are farther along this particular curve than the US.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
It is extraordinary how little clarity there is about procedures. The industry tells your ISP they suspect illegal behaviour. What is the standard of proof? What's the process for deciding if the evidence is convincing? How is it to be challenged? Disclosed?
Then your ISP writes to you. You say the allegations are false and libellous. What happens next? Do you get to cross examine the industry spokesperson who made the allegations?
Then three strikes, they disconnect you. You sue them. Who is liable? Them? The industry body?
Its not so much iniquitous as unworkable in its present form. You basically cannot do this without all the expense of the courts, which is what they're trying to avoid.
The easiest way to combat this is to then monitor the traffic of politicians and their families first. Obviously any piracy problem is most serious when practiced by a member of the parliament or their families, so careful monitoring of all communications from politicians is obviously a priority. After that, monitor traffic from anybody employed by the recording industry and their families. Then the families of the owners of all major industries. After that, ensure that no members of the police force are secretly pirating. If you get through that list without a repeal of the directive then you can monitor the rest of the populace, but I suspect that'll be a short lived initiative.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
I can write to them, but since my MP is a member of the New Labour Regime, I'm far from convinced he is able to read.
Just a single day! I think they'll get the message that they shouldn't try pushing stupid laws on them after that.
It seems that your country and mine are in some sort of contest to see who can write the stupidest, citizen-hostile, corporate-friendly laws. And here I thought my (and I use the word "my" lightly here) country was the only one that was bought and paid for by the corporations.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Every single on of those that I've signed has reached critical mass, causing me to receive a piece of government propaganda telling me why I'm wrong.
For example:
Me: "I don't want an ID card. Police states are not good"
Reply: "Dear terrorist, having an ID card is good. It will keep you safe"
I'm not going to sign this one because I already know what the reply will be.
To every lawmaker on the planet:
OUR COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE IS GREATER THAN YOUR OWN! We have got hordes of geeks working on ways to circumvent every single way you have ever conceived to censor what we do.
What happened with iTunes DRM? It got owned by qtfairuse.
What happened when you blocked bittorrent? We started encrypting it.
What happened when you blocked the port that bittorrent runs on? We started running it on a different port.
What happened when you throttled NNTP connections? We started using lots and lots of simultaneous connections, each of them throttled, but collectively adding up to our original speed.
What happened when you started blocking NNTP all together? We started running it over port 80 and disguising it as legitimate SSL traffic.
What happened when you started listening to our phone calls? We started using encrypted VOIP.
Every single time there has EVER been ANY attempt at stopping people from doing what they want it has only caused them to grow stronger. Don't challenge us to develop stronger encryption, because we will. Its like spraying a weed with weed killer, eventually you're just going to create stronger weeds.
What you are trying to do in the UK will absolutely fail. History has shown this. Non tech-savvy users will be alienated for a while, until we create yet ANOTHER work around for your idiotic bureaucratic attempt at pleasing your own appetite for money and power.
I cannot repeat enough that this WILL fail.
The community welcomes your attempt at censoring us. It will only present us with yet another challenge and cause the gap between our skills and your own to grow.
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Solution 1: A solution is implemented which pays lip service to the requirement - something like ISPs poisoning the entries their DNS servers provide on demand of the BPI - or if they're really paranoid, null-routing the IP addresses. This is the kind of thing the ISPs would go for, isn't too onerous and doesn't actually do anything to solve the "problem".
Solution 2: The Great Firewall of Britain. This is what I see the Government doing if the ISPs don't. I doubt it'll be terribly effective because the government will outsource providing appropriate technology to a consultant like EDS (a company that specialises in taking money off UK government departments in exchange for half-baked systems which don't really work properly) and once the technology is ready, ISPs will be obliged to deploy it.
So much for lack of censorship and freedoms.
The media giants have too much power, they just can't face decline. There's a massive amount of music, films and media out there, the demand and supply doesn't always match. I for example don't want much that Hollywood churns out, I don't like a lot of popular media. So am I to be prosecuted because I don't purchase rubbish commercial music and use p2p?
Price is likely hardly an issue for the demographic that's most likely to download copyrighted material. The simple reason is that of convenience, nothing more. It is simply easiest to obtain such content by getting a .torrent file, throwing it into your BitTorrent client of choice, and in a few minutes or hours (depending on the media, connection speed, etc.), you're consuming the content.
If the industry wants to sell more, they should make it more convenient. I'm not talking about using iTunes from your living room or other proprietary means that require huge amounts of personal information to be entered before purchasing media. What ever happened to the anonymity of buying the CD you like with cash at the local record store? I'm sure there's a way it can be done online without some faceless corporation knowing all about your favourite music, the bands you listen to, the stuff you buy. Most importantly, scrap DRM. Having useless protection schemes that are just annoying to anyone, regardless of what they're trying to do, are going to turn away potential honest buyers faster than any sort of "free" alternative is going to take them away. The more the industry tightens their grip and tries to attain control over everything, the more the sales are going to slip through their fingers.
ISPs are not at fault, and I think this legislation is ridiculous. The industry has decided it can't go after everyone who is downloading copyrighted content individually, so they're going to go after the fewer "middlemen", for no other reason than because of greed and the desire for control.
That's what we said about the US marijuana laws back in the 1970s, when it seemed everybody was smoking it and those who didn't didn't care if you were (including the police but excepting the politicians).
Now they have everyone convinced it's addictive (it's habit forming but not addictive), causes cancer (it doesn't, and in fact prevents cancer) and leads to harder drugs (it doesn't; the laws against it do).
Instead of it being legal, now most employers drug-test everyone. There are now people addicted to crack who switched from marijuana when their employer started random drug testing; pot stays in your system a lot longer than cocaine.
Rather than P2P being legalized, expect some nanny-state, anti-freedom, pro-corporation, anti-people asshat like Reagan to come down like a load of bricks on P2P who convinces everybody that P2P leads to cancer, terrorism, and global warming.
Indies give their MP3s away. Share those, ignore the MAFIAA bands. Don't share their music, don't buy their downloads, don't buy their CDs, don't go to their concerts. They are the problem, and if you contribute in any way, whether monetarily or by sharing their music, you are part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Just say "no."
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
1. Piracy will still exist, just obfuscated and encrypted more.
2. ISPs will be more expensive, as Internet service providers will have to relay the costs of scanning all the packets onto their customers.
So basically, this has failed before it has even begun as far as I'm concerned. As per usual for this government, it doesn't benefit the population in any way.
If a significant percentage of the population regularly does something that happens to be illegal, perhaps it's the law that needs to be re-examined, not its implementation.
Legalize it.
Thats not how it works. With that logic, black men and women still shouldn't have any rights. There are WAY more people who go above speed limits than there are file sharers. Should we abolish those? (I know that a significant percentage of Slashdot readers think so, but...).
The government is given (indeed, by its people) the authority to do whats best for the country for the present and the future. Remember, these are not democracies, but democratic republics, or variations of it. Its job is to handle issues that the population might not be able to handle, or understand the implications of. A lot of people who share files illegaly don't even KNOW its against the law... many (including here on Slashdot) are not even knowledgeable of the impact of these laws, going from word to mouth, and crap they see on websites like this one, with absolutely no critical thought put into it (they beleive what they want to beleive). Now, because of that, it is totally pointless to try and have a balanced debate on if these laws are good or not.... Point is: Its not because half a country breaks a law, that its a bad law.
Now, thats cute in theory. In practice governments tend to totally suck at their job. But thats another story altogether. If -THIS- law is a good or bad one, is also a different debate. All i'm trying to say is, saying "If a lot of people break a law its a bad law, because its the people who decide!!!1!1!" is simply not a valid point.
Sweden's Pirate Party points out that the only way to give the "content" industry the protection it needs is to control all speech. Thus, file copying must be permitted not to protect a few thieves, but to protect everyone's freedom of speech.
In other words: Your need to make money isn't going to infringe our freedom of speech.
Figure out a different way to make money.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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