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."

Comments

The solution is obvious

[wiredog]

Block downloading of all music, films, and other content that might be illegal.

Yes, this is essentially a shutdown of the WWW in the UK. So? It's what the Gov wants, right?

Re:The solution is obvious

[zappepcs]

It't not what the government wants, it's what the **AA wants.

This is one of those things that will come to a head very quickly and when the egg lands, it won't be on the faces of users or ISPs. It will be on the faces of those who enacted the law.

The trouble, as we all know, is that there is no way to determine what is illegal and what is not. There will be far too many false positives, and far too many obviously innocent people will be caught by filters and such. It will go as far as MPs will let it go. Perhaps there is a manner in which people in the UK can force MPs to download LEGAL files to show them how easy it is to be caught, and perhaps demonstrate in real life how difficult it is to find the illegal stuff by asking them to PAY for additional filtering equipment/systems for businesses, schools, hospitals etc.

There are lots of people that want to help filter out illegal content, unfortunately, they also want to get paid.

Once you get buy-in on the government paying the costs for such systems, turn to appendix F and show them how these systems will be worked around in something like 24 hours of implementation.

Or perhaps you can all chip in and buy them a whack-a-mole game for the parliamentary house restaurant?

Re:The solution is obvious

[moderatorrater]

Honestly, everything that we see on the internet is copyrighted. Everything. It's not the ISP's responsibility to make sure that the content that's being downloaded doesn't have a copyright, because everything has one when it's created. It's the responsibility of the person doing the distributing to make sure that they aren't distributing goods illegally. This is insanity and it needs to end.

Escalation right around the corner...

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

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.

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?

Re:Escalation right around the corner...

[Scrameustache]

What if P2P users start encrypting their traffic? Then you make private encryption a criminal offense, easy.
Big brother is watching you... you don't have anything to hide, do you?

Re:Escalation right around the corner...

[Anonymous Coward]

I know you're joking/exaggerating, but it's worth pointing out that making encryption illegal would b impossible. It would, for instance, make it illegal to do any kind of secure online commerce or banking. It would basically destroy any company that relies on the Internet.

There are so many legitimate types of encrypted traffic (SSL, SSH, VPN, etc.) that they can't outlaw it. P2P programs can certainly go beyond mere encryption and specifically obfuscate the type of traffic, making it appear as another class (e.g. https) or even use steganography to hide the data in otherwise legitimate-looking data streams.

Re:Escalation right around the corner...

[maxwell demon]

Well, that could easily be solved: Encryption is only allowed with certificates generated and signed by a government agency; ISPs then can get the private keys of their customers from the government and thus read the data streams, while the evil guys can't (because of course the key would never leak from the ISP).

So let it be

[truthsearch]

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.

Re:More than 6 million I'm sure

[alexgieg]

If users could only group together for political power like some are starting to do in Sweden, the course of democracy might be able to break copyright law.

This won't happen, in any country, unless and until government sanctions against file sharing become prevalent enough to affect the majority of Internet users living there. Unfortunately, as long as it only affects one person in a million, no one except those interested in the subject itself will care.

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.

Re:More than 6 million I'm sure

[raddan]

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.

Extraordinary lack of procedural clarity

[Budenny]

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.

Easy answer to this

[Borealis]

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.

Re:If you live in the UK.

[owlnation]

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.

All UK ISPs should shut down for a day!

[erroneus]

Just a single day! I think they'll get the message that they shouldn't try pushing stupid laws on them after that.

Re:If you live in the UK.

[sm62704]

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.

Re:Petition

[sakdoctor]

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.

When will they learn

[blhack]

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.

Re:More than 6 million I'm sure

[sm62704]

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."

Re:6 MILLION!

[MBGMorden]

1. It's not theft. It's not even "basically the same thing". There are tons of people who believe that "intellectual property" is a laughable notion that somehow got twisted into law.

2. Any law that is violated by a sufficiently large percentage of it's population is an unjust law. Governments are supposed to be representative of the people. They have power because we as a whole agreed to let them have some power to enforce ideas that society as a whole sees as worthy of enforcing. If a law reaches a certain point where the majority of the country doesn't support it (say, Prohibition as an example), then it should be repealed.

Re:6 MILLION!

[Shakrai]

Any law that is violated by a sufficiently large percentage of it's population is an unjust law. They have power because we as a whole agreed to let them have some power to enforce ideas that society as a whole sees as worthy of enforcing. If a law reaches a certain point where the majority of the country doesn't support it (say, Prohibition as an example), then it should be repealed.

I don't even think it should require a "majority". If a statistically significant number of people are routinely flaunting the law then we should probably examine that law and find out whether or not it's just.

I won't argue in favor of limitless copyright infringement (even the Founding Fathers recognized the value of limited IP protection and included it in the Constitution), but off the top of my head I could mention marijuana prohibition as a policy that should probably be examined.

The outcome of this will be...

[QJimbo]

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.

Where does the government's authority come from?

[cuantar]

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.

Sweden's Pirate Party

[Russ Nelson]

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.

Re:6 MILLION!

[TapeCutter]

Yep, that's why the punishment for speeding often varies with the degree of mania. Example...

1-5km over the limit - nobody cares. 5+km over, a speed camera will get upset - $50 fine, 1 demerit point. 15+km over, a cop gets upset - $150 fine, 2 demerit points. 30+km over, a judge gets upset - $500 fine, licence torn up.