UK P2P Fight Brewing

forunder writes "Zeropaid has been covering a very hot topic going on in the UK right now. The government, prodded by entertainment lobbyists, has gotten six UK ISPs to agree to help police piracy on their networks. A leaked government letter says they are looking to cut internet piracy by 80%. In the same week Microsoft released a study which found that some 54% of UK file sharers are between 11-16. The UK's Green Party has already spoken up, calling the new policies an 'Attack on Civil Liberties.'"

Comments

Re:How to cut internet piracy by 80%

[mccalli]

Yeah, all the free music from Beethoven can't hold a candle to Britney Spears

Unless you're playing it yourself, you will find there's still copyright on the performance of that music.

You're free to take Beethoven's music and form a string quartet to play it. You're not free to take a performance of Beethoven's 5th by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and stick it up on bittorrent - that's definitely still copyrighted.

Cheers, Ian

Re:Unfortunately

[arkhan_jg]

UK government business minister Baroness Vadera is expected to announce a deal she brokered...

The UK government has stated that they will bring in legislation, starting after the summer, to force all ISPs to co-operate with the music labels on copyright infringement if they can't come up with a self-regulation scheme that satifies the labels' agency, the BPI. The UK government is working hand in hand with the french government, who've already started the implementation of the 3-warnings-and-cut-off setup the french government favours.

A number of UK ISP's, with the notable exception of virgin, have been telling the music business to piss off, that policing their customers for potential infringing content and invading their privacy without any say-so from a court or judge is not their responsibility. Unfortunately, the UK government disagress, and is piling on the pressure to co-operate voluntarily before they are forced to do so by laws very much in favour of the copyright cartel.

UK ISP's are already required to keep records on users email and web-traffic due to the RIP act; it wouldn't take much for that system to be expanded substantially and the government have already ballooned the idea of having it all stored in a giant government database instead of at the ISP.

A conservative government would likely be no better; they mooted the idea of extending the duration of copyright for music recordings in exchange for more 'family-friendly' lyrics from rappers for example.

Be under no illusion - this is a direct result of government threats against the ISP industry to spend their time and money to prop up the existing business model of the copyright cartels.