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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.'"
The ISPs know who pays their bills. They're not going to get rid of customers unless they become a net cost. They might ditch a few of their customers but only because their bandwidth use is too high, and a complaint from the BPI will be an excuse.
Keep your torrenting to a reasonable level and ignore any complains from the ISP (and maybe install peerguardian or something). They really don't give a damn what you do.
Just Install peer guardian and configure it to use the Level1 Bluetack blocklist... then your safe as this blocks the vast majority of all anti P2P organisations worldwide. If everyone did this the BPI's job of detecting file sharers would be a WHOLE lot harder and their deal with ISP would become worthless.
On another point, I think its naive to think that if your ISP send you one of these "informative" letters that they wont pass on your personal details to the BPI, who identified your IP address in the first place. The next logical step after is you end up in court fighting a copyright infringement case against the BPI or one of its "partners".
THE ARTICLE HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM APART FROM THE ARTICLE ABOUT THE LEAKED GOVERNMENT LETTER
There - fixed it for you. Geez - I know this is /. but at least RTFS before commenting about TFA. Then again, you got modded insightful - by the same mods - so I don't know what you are complaining about.
Stupid flounders!
The summary says that 54% of filesharers are children, when the linked article says that in fact 54% of children are filesharers, which is actually much more interesting.
This sig washed every five years whether it needs it or not!
"After all, the nominal "cost" to the metro company of another rider is effectively zero. " The nominal cost of 1 more rider is small, the nominal cost of 10,000,000 extra riders would be huge. The cost to the music company for one song downloaded on a p2p network is exactly zero. the cost of 10,000,000 songs downloaded on a p2p network is exactly zero. Changes the game a little. Now of you might say they won't sell albums if people can get them off p2p sites, and you could call that a "cost". Of course then you have to show that their sales droped because of filesharing for that "cost" to be valid. Unfortunatly since the advent of filesharing the sales of most big labels seem to have climbed in a very healthy manner. Now comes the point. I never used to listen to music. At all.Had no interest. I tried out some filesharing sites in the napster days cause "hey, why not, I'm bored" Got some music, I liked it. Then I did something very very strange, I went and bought a copy because I like having a solid CD with a nice case, just like I like to own solid paper books. Bought a bunch of other CD's as well. Many of my friends are the same. Total cost to the copyright holders: 0.00 Total income which they never would have seen otherwise: ~200.00 Total lost revenue: 0.00 But they could haul the guy I got the copy from to court and say "HE COST US 200 THOUSAND DOLLARS!" On the other hand since napster died I've downloaded no music at all and I've bought none. Who's lost revenue there? It doesn't matter if a billion copies are going around online. If you get two thousand sales where you would have only got one thousand otherwise then you haven't "lost" anything to piracy. The pirates have not harmed you in any way shape or form. The metric of "take [number of downloads]*[retail price]" and claim that as how much you've "lost" is stupid if in the meantime you've gained sales which you never would have had otherwise since if you've gained sales you would not have otherwise then you've lost nothing. if you've lost nothing then what case do you have for claiming you've been harmed?
'So any Beethoven CD you can find in the shops today, or any Beethoven record your grandparents might have in the attack, is still subject to copyright, and that copyright will outlast you just as much as Beethoven's would, were he still alive.'
In the UK this isn't true about the records in the attic, unless you have young grandparents (see comment above). It _might_ also not be true about the CD if the original recording was made >50 years ago - see 'COPYRIGHT IN REMASTERED SOUND RECORDINGS' here:
http://www.copyright.mediarights.co.uk/
Please. These are no "wild shots in the dark". If they were, they wouldn't work and wouldn't hold up in courts. As we've seen from cases in the USA and elsewhere, this is done algorithmically first by analyzing the shape of traffic to see that it is indeed p2p (by which ports it uses,etc) and then it uses a hash lookup table to identify known infringing files.
You need to pay closer to attention to the court documents that NewYorkCountryLawyer has excerpted here and on his blog. Your description of how the MAFIAA goes about suing people is FAR from accurate. For one, they do not use any traffic analysis - they just connect to bittorrent trackers like thepiratebay and/or user's own machines running limewire, etc. And two, they don't use file hashes, they just use keywords in filenames without even downloading the file themselves to check content. Yeah, I didn't believe it either until he posted some 'expert' testimony by one of the MAFIAA's 'expert' witnesses describing the process they use about a year ago.
The only reason their shenanigans have held up in court is that the relatively few people who have actually taken the gambit (the choice they offer is pay ~$2K now or they will take you to court for at least $10K and most people take the $2K fine rather than spend more than $2K on a lawyer and risk losing) have not had enough money or connections to bring in real experts to decimate the MAFIAA's piss-poor evidence collection.
If i don't, I have a mechanism to change this, which is to elect people who will change laws in ways that are amenable to me.
You must be awfully rich to be able to afford that kind of influence, the MAFIAA has contributed over 26 million dollars to politicians so far this year.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.