Japanese ISPs To Cut Net Access For File Sharers

modemac writes "Four major Japanese telecom organizations, which represent 'about 1,000 major and smaller' domestic ISPs, have agreed to forcibly cut the Internet connection of filesharers. They're specifically targeting users of the 'Winny' program, trading copied gaming software and music. The article states that a new set of ISP guidelines will be drawn up on how to cut off users who 'leak illegally copied material onto the Net.'"

Comments

Lets hope this really happens

[SmallFurryCreature]

Lets hope this really happens, let hope that ISP's in Japan really are this stupid and the Japanese citizens do the only thing that is logical. Cancel their service since it is no longer of any use to them so that ISP after ISP goes tits up.

At least in holland a lot of ISP's are happy to advertise with 'download music fast' without having any music service whatsoever. Copyright infringement is one major reason to get one of the more expensive subscriptions, if everyone just went with the cheapest most minimal subscription, you know the one that is plenty for email, the web, gaming etc etc, then ISP's will really feel it in their revenue.

On the longer term, lets hope the japanese ISP's learn very quickly that they opened the flood gates. If they can monitor this, expect everyone to come out. Just block winny? Don't count on it, every P2P program will be on it, and why just P2P, why not home run MMORPG servers, why not material that the goverment doesn't want you to host. Why not check every email for illegal material? Congrats, the ISP's in japan just become the enforcer for everyone with a gripe about the internet. There is reason the old telecoms never ever wished to do that with telephone services and they claim they have to keep a line open unless they get an outside complaint even if it is bloody obvious a phone line is only used for criminal activity. You do NOT want to become the police of your customers.

Lets hope that this turns sour for the Japanese ISP's very quickly, because if this doesn't go totally wrong for the ISP's in question, we will get it elsewhere.

Re:Lets hope this really happens

[macslas'hole]

The problem is winny users But is that any business of the ISPs'?

Re:Lets hope this really happens

[Anonymous Coward]

As a content creator, yes I hope it DOES happen. Because I'm sick of self righteous pricks helping themselves to the fruits of my hard work and paying fuck all in return. Especially the pompous ones that come onto slashdot and try and define stealing hollywood movies as some kind of fucking civil rights issue.
grow up. As someone who believes in copyright, you sir are a disgrace to it, need to grow up, and get a real job.
You want money? Sell your art. Want more? Make more art and sell it too.
Not enough money? Get a better job. You don't hear anyone crying over the walmart worker for not making millions due to their career choice.

Copyright specifically says your work of art belongs to the public to further the arts and sciences.
Those works of art belong to us, after a short time. Until that short time is up, we will keep hold of what is owed to us, since we clearly can not trust you to hold up your end of the deal anymore.
DRM, trying to claim and define 'limited' as 70 years after you die, are all proof positive you have no intention of keeping your end of the copyright deal in good faith. Don't bitch when we don't either.

Deal with it

Re:Lets hope this really happens

[kklein]

Um, yeah. You haven't lived here in Japan have you? People don't push back. They let companies plow them over and say nothing. There are no consumer rights in Japan. If they really do this and I lose my net access, that's it. I just lost my net access.

I'm already really throttled. I DL US TV slower now that I have FTTH than I did on ADSL. I have 83Mbit, but it only seems to work when I downloading something from a website or something.

This is going to do nothing to subscription rates. People get the fast service because it isn't much more expensive than the slow, and because the guys from SMAP are in the commercials. It has nothing to do with the speed, because, honestly, most Japanese people can barely even type.

This is not a good development for me...

Re:Lets hope this really happens

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately that is par for the course here. That's why people making commercial software, games, media, movies, don't aim them at the slashdot / digg generation any more. Who wants to entertain people who are whining, thieving pains in the ass?
I work in the media. We long since gave up giving a shit what teenagers want from TV. The marketplace is the 30+ viewer who isn't scared of buying the DVD.
It's not that the media doesn't understand the youth. its that the youth get what they pay for, ie: fuck all.

Re:Lets hope this really happens

[Anonymous Coward]

What a fucking shock. The person who actually creates something is modded as a troll, and the person who's whining about how it's his god-given right to copy anything he possibly can gets called insightful.

I didn't say it was my god given right. I said it was my legal right, and it is.

Personally I question how someone can be an artist, and yet know so little correct information about the laws that protect your trade.

Either way however, yes, your post is a troll. You were being spiteful, mean, insulting, and injecting no useful information into the conversation, and your statements are factually incorrect (possibly lies, depending)

Where as MY info however is reflected in US law, and also quite insightful as some of these 'artists' clearly are trying to 'steal' from me (DRM serves no other purpose.)
[* Steal used in the same sense you were using the word, not in the legal, moral, or dictionary sense of the word.]

I admit, my 'get a job' comment, while true, was a tad of a flame. But that was about it.

Finally, it is Quite hard to form a perfectly insightful non-flame non-troll reply to someone who is being irrational in their posts. I seriously would love to debate the issue, but I want my words to not fall on deaf ears, and by the tone of your post I don't believe you even care to discuss this rationally, only to push your agenda. If I come off as a troll at all, it is out of my frustration at that fact.

But I will try anyway. Please read this before blowing it off as BS, or hitting reply.
If you still after reading it through disagree with me, then I will leave you to it...

The only reason you or any artist is granted copyright, is NOT just for profit. Profit is a side benefit.
Copyright in its first forms was 100% a control method used by kings and rulers to silence those that would say bad things against them. I'm not claiming you are, but if you were to try to argue for that style of copyright again, you will have no friends here, or in any first world nation for that matter.
Afterwards, copyright became a tool to better man kind with science and art. This was the last version of it before now.
That is to say, if your work of art could not benefit man kind at all, there is no point in offering you a copyright at all. I also highly doubt you are arguing for that, as then you would have no recourse what so ever, nor anything to complain about anyway.

So, clearly, the only reason you get a copyright on your work at all is to benefit man kind. This used to be a deal struck between the people and the artists. The people give up some rights so the artist can gain, and at the same time, the artist loses some rights so the people can gain. This deal was, the people lose for a few years the right to copy that work, so the artist gains a monopoly on distribution to recoup their costs. In exchange, the artist loses the right to 'own' that work for ever, and the people gain the right to do with that work as they please.
Yes, that second part comes after the first, thus the 'limited time' part of copyright.

The problem here is, artists are not paying their end of the deal. They are NOT giving up the full rights to their work to better man kind. When I say 'they' I don't mean ALL of them of course. But they tend to use things like DRM which is effectively (assuming it would work at all) a lock that keeps it from the public once you stop caring about it. It's a little like writing a bad check, post-dated, but knowing it won't be good at that time.

So the reaction happens. Similarly, once you write a person bad checks enough, they will simply stop accepting them. If you try to pay with credit that never gets repaid, they start demanding their stuff back (repo.)
What we are doing now is not accepting your bad check type payments any longer, thus not honoring your copyright.

Granted, there are artists that have NOT screwed the public at all, and yes they are being harmed by the actions of

Nothing new

[Carbon016]

According to the new agreement, copyright organizations would notify providers of Internet protocol addresses used by those who repeatedly make copies illegally, using special detection software. The providers would then send warning e-mails to the users based on the IP addresses of the computers used to connect to the Internet. If contacted users did not then stop their illegal copying, the providers would temporarily disconnect them from the Internet for a specified period of time or cancel their service-provision contracts.

This is pretty much what companies in the U.S. do too. People that seed a bunch of copyrighted files often get cease and desists from their ISPs and if it keeps happening the ISP will sometimes (not always, as it's beneficial for the ISP to keep them around) cut their service off. TFA seems to claim that the majority of this is going to focus on "leakers" of copyrighted material: this means mass-seeders and probably scene groups. It's doubtful that the ISPs are going to end up cutting off many _downloaders_ of the material, but mostly focus on the _distributors_: which is pretty much precedent for ISPs at least in the U.S. and I would assume globally.

Now according to Wiki, Winny is intrinsically anonymous, and the only way the police were able to track those sharing the files was by them boasting on the Winny forums of their upload. So we probably would have heard about this earlier had Winny not been built to be as anonymous as it is now - it seems that the issue has been prompting arrests and controversy for five years or more.

Also, expect 2ch to go bananas over this in the next couple of weeks.

Re:That will only work...

[rucs_hack]

I personally think that 99.99999% of the reason ISP's are coming round to the idea of punishing file sharers is that doing so will cut their costs, thus extending the profitable lifetime of their current levels of infrastructure. After all, they need to make room for this new media on demand thing.

I don't for a second think it's because they are concerned about copyrights. I doubt they'd admit this though.

Re:Filesharers

[eiapoce]

"under my umbrella" - Now you are guilty of downloading lyrics. Your connection will be terminated soon. (This is the world we are gonna live if we don't educate the masses on the risks of corporations messing with laws)

Re:That will only work...

[CRCulver]

I personally think that 99.99999% of the reason ISP's are coming round to the idea of punishing file sharers is that doing so will cut their costs

Some ISPs in Eastern Europe solve this problem by setting up a DC++ server for their subscribers. When subscribers can share music and films with people from their own city, there's less burden on the connection to the wider Internet.

For the unenlightened..

[icyisamu]

The main target for this act is to stop a file sharing program / network called Winny. Winny is one of the top File sharing program / network in Japan.

Many Japanese anime fansub groups get their original copy of the show via this network. I am sure there are tons of other stuff being shared on Winny, judging from the fact that they have a Software Download board where copyrighted materials are shared.

The creator is facing similar claims to that of the Bittorrent creator, where he has created a tool that can be used to share files with the advantage of being anonymous.

Interesting bits from the article

[jonaskoelker]

For those of you who don't RTFA (yeah, that's you!), here are some interesting points:

The Internet provider organizations have, however, judged it possible to disconnect specific users [...] if they are identified as particularly flagrant transgressors in cooperation with copyright-related organizations. We all know how inexact the RIAA and MPAA members are in determining infringers. Why should we expect the Japanese to be different?

the measure would become the first countermeasure against Winny-using rights-violators Notice the slant? They label Winny users as rights-violators. "Those people are rights-violators. They are bad people. If someone violated your rights, you would want something done about it, right?"

most of the files exchanged using the software [are] believed to be illegal copies. Notice the word most. Not all. The ISPs will have to distinguish between legal and illegal to make a correct decision. Whether they'll do that or not, time will tell. Perhaps we can use history as a guess?

Also, aside question: how can a copy be illegal? I get that it can be illegal to create and to posses, but how can the copy itself be illegal? If it's made on a USB stick and then thrown out (ownership of the copy has ceased), the copy by virtue of not having changed is still illegal. Who do you sue, the USB stick?

(I figure they mean illegally possessed copies, but imprecise language like this bugs me a bit.)

Two years ago, a major Internet provider tried to introduce a measure to disconnect users from the Internet whenever the company detected the use of Winny or other file-sharing software.

However, the provider abandoned the idea after receiving a warning from the Internal Affairs and Communications Ministry that such an approach was regarded as Internet snooping and might violate the right to privacy in communications.

According to the new agreement, copyright organizations would notify providers of Internet protocol addresses used by those who repeatedly make copies illegally, using special detection software. I can't imagine how "special detection software" might reliable determine whether copyright infringement is going on without looking at the transmitted data. Isn't it then obvious that the copyright organizations are doing "Internet snooping and might violate the right to privacy in communications"?