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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."
Let your MP know what a bad idea this is: http://www.writetothem.com/
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.
Don't give them any ideas...
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It's surely more than that. What is the total amount of people in the UK between 15 and 25, for example? Every person I know in the EU in that age bracket downloads most of the media they consume rather than buying authorized copies. P2P is mainstream. 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.
The ISPs died for my sins.
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
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.
In response, a government minister said, "What a great idea! We'll need to get going on that, too!"
I've been wondering about this since the story broke last week, presumably someone will have to keep a definitive blacklist of banned users, otherwise you could just go to another ISP and sign up for another connection.
This makes me wonder, will the address/telephone line be blacklisted or the individual user whose name the line was in?
If the former, then it would suck if you just moved into a place that had been blacklisted. If the latter, what's to stop someone else in the household from signing up for another connection?
I can imagine many student houses with 4 or more people living there, assuming it takes a few months to get noticed and sent you first warning, another couple to get your second and another couple of months to get cut off, you could then sign up again under another name and go for another round...
You can also sign this petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/openinternet/
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.
Just a single day! I think they'll get the message that they shouldn't try pushing stupid laws on them after that.
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?
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.
Well, a young Springfield woman was found dead in her home. Her face had been chewed off by two pit bulls, which were taken to the animal shelter on suspicion of murder, no bail had been set for the dogs.
The coroner says she overdosed on cocaine before getting her face chewed off. Her live-in boyfriend had an airtight alibi- as the Springfield paper reports:So for those of you who are against downloading music, I say SO THERE! =P
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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.
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You insensitive clod. I have just returned from Charlie's funeral. He was a good man, but had a weak heart.
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