Slashdot Mirror
Big Six UK ISPs Capitulate To Music Industry
Barence writes "Britain's six leading internet providers have signed a Government-led agreement to stamp out illegal music file sharing. The six providers — BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, Sky and Carphone Warehouse — will implement a series of measures against those found to be file sharing. Offenders may find their internet connection is throttled, or may even have their traffic 'filtered' to prevent media files from being downloaded. The ISPs are reportedly reluctant to impose the BPI's preferred 'three strikes and you're out' approach of cutting off users' broadband connections."
...that surprisingly the ISPs won't distinguish between copyrighted files and independent artists?
No...there's no hidden agenda here from BPI...
This will cause encrypted darknets to flourish which will cause a faster downward spiral due to the whole 'Pedo Menace'.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
But they're not planning to sue anyone, just send them "menacing" letters...
I have to admit to being rather surprised the ISPs have agreed to this - I like The Register's take on why they might have done so.
I say we take-off and slashdot the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure
And then we'll all just use TOR.
[Matrix] What good is an Onion Router Mr. CastrTroy if it can not exit? [/Matrix]
You can bet that if this trend continues they'll be able to cover all the major trunk points and any Tor endpoints that are unchecked at that point will be highly noticeable.
"Bah!" - Dogbert
There will always be a grey market for this sort of stuff. My ISP recently started blocking access to Bittorrent trackers. Solution? I signed up for an $8 per month SSH tunnel account that has a SOCKS proxy, so I just tunnel all my tracker communications through there. If for some reason I need to hit a specific website, then I do the same.
Besides - all it takes is for the issue to be important enough and for 1 ISP to offer the better service, and people will flock there. Once the ISP's realize that though it's smaller on a per payment basis, that the general Internet using public has more money to fling around than the recording industry, then they'll ease up.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
for giving developers a reason to build even hardier file sharing aps
it was easy to shut down napster: cut off the head
you had to poison morpheus, limewire, etc. with phony files
then emule and bittorrent proved immune to being shut down and poisoned. so now you have to go to the carriers and put the burden on them to search for file sharing patterns
the next step in the war is to build apps that obfuscate their activity. make it look like http form requests. make it look like smtp traffic. randomize ips, obfuscate ports, etc.
that's all your effort results in, dear music industry: stronger, hardier weeds that you can never kill
you lose. you just don't know it yet
legions of poor, music hungry teenagers: 3
hired guns of the music industry: 0
you're dying music industry. please just get dead already please
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...the record companies have essentially got the ISP's to do their dirty work for them...
That's probably not the case, at least beyond the face of it.
There seems to be a growing desire on the part of the ISP to stem the tide of locally hosted content on the internet. They can't censor servers they don't control, and would much prefer their customers were consumers, rather than providers (or redistributors), of content.
Guys, seriously, who here still uses one of the big six ISPs by *choice*?!
It's time to switch ISPs
The difference in service is staggering.
I'm gonna be emailing my ISP to thank them for not signing up to this new scheme.
Disclaimer: I don't work for adsl24 or entanet, nor do I get paid for directing you there. I'm just a very happy customer
http://adsl24.co.uk/broadband_home.php - take a look, you won't be disappointed
ISPs need to be reminded that their job is to provide internet service. Once the lines between providing access to the tubes and providing content on those tubes blurred, things were doomed to go downhill.
This isn't about ISPs bending to the will of the various media associations - it's about ISPs trying to position themselves to deliver content and ensure _THEIR_ content is the content being delivered. ISPs should be prohibited from being in any business other than providing internet service because, in becoming content providers as well, they are increasingly acting in anti-competitive ways (if you think illegal p2p traffic is the only traffic they're manipulating, then you haven't been paying attention...).
In fact, Carphone Warehouse (aka TalkTalk) is already doing that. I can get 200-400kB/s on http downloads, but only maybe 1-4kB/s on any traffic on non-standard ports (ssh or p2p etc).
And yes, of course it is just a method to clamp down on customers who actually use the bandwidth they paid for - the "piracy" argument is merely a very convenient justification for the ISPs.
Filtering/inspecting traffic implies taking responsibility implies getting lawsuits directed at ISPs for users' content.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Doesn't this strip them of their "safe harbor" status? Of course, they don't have to fear the media companies that they're trying to help. Technically, the MAFIAA could now sue the ISPs, but in order to get the ISP's assistance in filtering, they've probably offered some sort of covenant not to sue.
However, there must be some business with deep pockets that's taking a loss from unauthorized copying/illegal activity that would love to bite the ISP's hand off now that they're not offering a content-neutral network. Any suggestions?
How about the government sues the ISPs for allowing VoIP calls where terrorism is discussed? Since they're no longer content-neutral, then they should be filtering for and preventing that. And because they're not, bad things costing billions have happened that are directly attributable to the ISP carrying such content...
(Yes, I realize that's not what we'd actually want the ISPs to do. The point is to show the ISP the error of their ways. Once they start filtering certain content, they lose safe harbor, and are liable for not filtering all other sorts of things. Their only viable choice is to return to content neutrality.)
QCompson shows something that some businesses still haven't accepted - there will always be a way around the system. When Napster was taken down, they thought that it was all taken care of but they were wrong, since the use of Guetella shot off the chart. (for you chronologically anal folks, i know development of the listed software is quite not in order, but common use of it and the popularity of it is.) There was Kazaa and the FastTrack network, teh wonderful world of DC++, ed2k, and BitTorrent, which I find to be amazing technology by itself. ISPs are finding ways to slow down the connections (which is sad really, since the BT Protocol is used in many nets where only *legal content* is shared.) ASAIK every major bittorrent client now supports encryption, and if ISPs break through that, somone will develop a way around it. We might reach a point one day when FreeNet is the one way around our own ISPs.
This all makes me wonder what the Internet is. We know of the reason behind its origins, and in the 90s it became this world network created on the basis of digital anarchy in a sense. What do people think the final outcome will be in the end? Just another stream of knowledge limited by the government or something more still? I'm curious on what people think.
So i guess if you encrypt everything, even if you are 100% legal you will be falsely accused, retaliated against, and perhaps have a civil case you can file?
Or will they just fall back on the fine print in their contracts where the ISP can pretty much do what ever they please, anytime they want?
---- Booth was a patriot ----