Slashdot Mirror
UK ISPs To Hand Over Thousands of File Sharers' Data
Death Metal Maniac sends along a link from TorrentFreak on the latest development in game developer Topwear's battle against file sharers in the UK. "US game developer Topware Interactive, the people behind the now infamous Dream Pinball affair, are about to turn up the heat. Operating through London lawyers Davenport Lyons, they have managed to convince the High Court to send out an order demanding that ISPs in the UK start to hand over the details of several thousand alleged pirates ... BT, one of the UK's largest ISPs ..., confirmed it had been ordered to hand over details of alleged copyright infringing file-sharers ... Virgin Media was a little more slippery in its response but reading between the lines it seems obvious they are involved too."
IANAL, but consider that the majority of BTs home DSL equipment ships with WEP, often 40 bit WEP, enabled by default. Would this in itself be grounds enough to plausibly deny that the traffic came from the person paying for the box? Not to mention she sheer, massive, embarrassing level of negligence on the part of BT.
I'm glad I live in the US. Even though some ISPs cower in fear, most of them give us enough freedom to do what we want. We truly live in the land of the free!
slashdot rocks
What?! I thought P2P allowed me to hide.
...from the looks of it, it seems that the outfit is just as rapacious and extortionist as their US counterparts, but aren't anywhere near as stupid (e.g. I suspect that they don't hire inept unlicensed private investigators, spread easily disproven propaganda, etc). It's almost as if they've learned from their counterparts over here.
OTOH, they likely still rely on stupid 'evidence' such as IP addys, so (and I'm saying this completely ignorant of how UK civil torts work) there may be a chance of defending oneself there if one is truly innocent.
'course, it'll still be pricey as hell, etc.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
They don't want to sue you or arrest you for file sharing. They're throwing you a party with cake and just want to know how to reach you to let you know about your party. Just stay where you are. A party associate will arrive shortly to collect you for the party.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If I was the share owner of said US game developer, I would in no uncertain terms Sell Sell Sell. It always amuses me when a company goes off a tries to adjust their core business model. It normally always fails and it appers they are looking for another revenue stream as their's should I speculate is running dry. If I was running a games developer, I would be spending my money on games development not running down to the local casino and betting on black, ahh the wonders of stupidity.
I'm curious if this covers current targets and/or current sharers/infringers or if this is broader in the sense of going after people will Oink.me accounts... ?
Anything you say will be held against you.
for everyone to panic when the authorities start looking at online data storage services...
Stop trying to sell single TV episodes for $2. If the price was $0.25 or $0.50 to rent it (i.e. view it once or twice, delete 48 hours after first viewing), I'd be a huge customer.
Stop trying to sell downloadable versions of movies for the same price as a DVD. If I purchase and download a movie, it's already costing me my limited monthly bandwidth and hard drive space that I paid for. If the movie sells for $20 on DVD, sell the downloadable version for $10. After all, I'm missing the extras, too.
Stop limiting sales to a single country, the internet is world-wide. I don't care who owns what and who's under exclusive contrats with which stations. It's your mess, figure it out.
Stop trying to put DRM which limit the usefulness of the media we want to buy. I don't want to watch movies and TV shows on my computer and I don't want to be tied to Microsoft-only hardware/software.
Do people want your content? Yes, otherwise they wouldn't pirate it. Do people want to pay for your content? Yes, if the price, format and limits are reasonable. Find the balance and it'll work itself out.
I, for one, won't bother with P2P and torrents if it only cost $0.99 for a tune I want. It's easier and faster to buy it from the iTunes Music Store. Their TV shows and movies, however, are too expensive.
OK, I'll bite, what "now infamous Dream Pinball affair"? Gee Slashdot, this is the web and a post in HTML. Would it have been so much to ask that any such statement like this might contain a link to some past discussion about this now infamous thing that we are all supposedly in the know about? Is it too much to ask that an editor who accepts such a story either requires such strong statements to be supported or (if he's willing to do more than just accept a submission verbatim (you know what I mean, edit) put the link in?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
They're using Norwich Pharmcal court orders, which basically obligate someone mixed up in wrongdoing (i.e. ISPs) to hand over information related to that wrongdoing. However, in many cases the ISPs seem to be handing over information without a court order, or signing off a confirmation with the letter they get from Davenport Lyons so they don't have to turn up to the court order hearing. The court order is merely in case ISPs are worried about little things like the Data Protection Act. They can then invoice Davenport Lyons, and in one case Telewest invoiced for over £18,000.
However, it seems that Davenport Lyons says that you can pay £300 and make all this legal stuff just 'go away'. I was under the impression that Norwich Pharmcal order were given out on a reasonable basis, simply because they can obviously be abused. I'm pretty sure that extortion, which is what this is pretty much, is against the terms of the order. You can't just use the order and the information you get from it to extract money from people.
I swear this contravenes the Data Protection Act.
And how come they are allowed to do such a thing?! One rule for them, another for us. Here's an example: The other day my brother calls me up to tell me he's lost his glasses. He's trekking in a jungle somewhere in Malaysia and now cannot see very well.
However, he asks me to get his prescription details so he can get a pair made up there. I then call the optician and explain the predicament. But, to my dismay, they refuse to hand over the details because it is a breach of the Data Protection Act. Erm... WHAT?!!
These ISPs should not be handing over any ones' details, at all. It's not like the users are planning to blow up Canary Wharf...
THE HONOUR OF THE KNIGHTS - CC Licensed Sci-Fi Novel
Well it's difficult to fight back but there is a way.
EVERYONE STOP buying the games from this company. PIRATE ALL of their games.
They want to play hard lets play harder, lets stop their revenue completely and force them to file a chapter 11.
Maybe the botnets could do some good, they could host & advertise the pirate copies
NO SURRENDER!
Always up in arms when their file sharing is exposed, but leading the torches-and-pitchforks crowd to a lynching if spammers or tax avoiders are involved.
You rubes don't seem to realize your views on privacy are leading to an internet where NOTHING is private. Everyone supports privacy when people are doing things you like, but we need a panopticon for people doing bad things. Just like the First Amendment only protects popular speech.
Either you support true privacy or you don't. Even when "bad" people might do so-called "bad" things you don't like with their economic or political privacy. If you think only p2p transfers will be private, but spammers and drug dealers and tax avoiders will be exposed to every govt regulator/tax collector on the planet, you are fooling yourselves and inviting in big brother.
If you don't have $2, no one cares about you in the first place. You are like one bum on skid row: only a problem for the street sweepers. Heard of Tivo? No, I don't think you have. VCR? TV Guide + alarm clock?
The correct response to such a request is a unanimous "no" from all large ISPs, and to await the fine.
Then to put up subscription prices accordingly to reflect the amount of the fine.
Then all users of those ISPs know what the "rights holders" are doing.
Then it gets press coverage.
Then everyone knows.
Then people start to whine.
Then politicians see a bandwagon to ride.
Then the law gets changed.
But it has to start with atlas shrugging.
And I hate myself for making the Ayn Rand reference, sorry, but a group of powerful businesses needs to say "no, we want to trade freely and treat our customers with respect, fuck off government" rather than being in cahoots with them.
I don't know about the pinball thingy, but generally, in the UK, you can see all the TV you want on iPlayer or any of the major and minor channels' own players - or just download Miro and thereby take part in legal, CC licensed or public domain video torrenting so as to watch whatever you want that's not spoonfed by media companies.
Same goes for online music - you can listen for ages on jamendo, last.fm or magnatunes, and an ever increasing number of net labels on archive.org etc, without ever so much as a sub-subpoena. Creative Commons music is now so varied and widespread that I don't see a reason to have to steal.
But for games? I guess games are still an area where there will be piracy... Open source and CC just aren't there yet (with big 3d flashy games, not the huge amount of simpler open source games around), although the guys at Blender are taking some first steps: http://www.yofrankie.org/
Ale
Here is a link to what theu are referring to: http://torrentfreak.com/uk-game-piracy-the-propaganda-the-evidence-and-the-damages-080821/
I eat Karma for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's why I don't have any.
Recently there was lot of UK press about someone being made to cough up £16K for sharing MP3s. What the press omitted to say was that Davenport Lyons wrote to thousands of people saying 'You owe us £6K for piracy!'. Almost everyone wrote back and said 'No we don't, prove it'. DL did no more. The rest of the recipients ignored the letter and in the case in question, the person didn't even bother to turn up at court so got the full amount of £6K plus £10K costs against them.
I suspect they know damn well all they have is some basic data and not enough for any sort of solid case. Did they have entire files? Did the file signatures match known cheksums of copyright files? Were the connections wireless and unencrypted? Are there multiple users on a single PC etc. etc.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Sorry, do we talk about "Pinball Dreams", on Amiga ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinball_Dreams
(Sorry my bad French) Je fais parler les Guignols de l'Info. Le pied, quoi.
If you look at the article over at the register and the court order they link to you'll see that the information handover took place at the end of June (or July for BT).
There are lots of reports of them getting this stuff totally wrong though. Also the people gathering the data have apparently been pretty much banned in France/Germany, hence trying their luck in the UK.
I don't think this'll last long, but on the other hand it could ruin some lives in the mean time.
Alan Sugar got rich by making a HiFi with twin cassette units. If you didn't have one yourself, you knew somebody who did. Suddenly *everybody* could copy tapes easily (and at double speed!)
Home taping was rampant. I knew people with tens of thousands of tapes in their room.
The record business didn't die then, in fact their boom years came long afterwards.
How come Alan Sugar got a knighthood but these days we're throwing away all due process over the exact same "crime".
No sig today...
Look people, its all over. Why persist in trading copyrighted materials using Bit-torrent?
To find anyone who is using bt to get an illegal file is like shooting-fish-in-a-barrel. Its not rocket science. To get a file sharer's name all any corporation has to do is:
1) attempt to download the file (just a tiny bit).
2) snap the list of peers that have 100-percent (cut and paste) and note the time in GMT (UTC).
3) end the download before you got anything
4) using ping -a to lookup the name of the computer at that ip address (gets the ISP, too its just that simple).
5) write letter to ISP demanding its logs of what customer was on that IP address at that time.
The ISP then sends it letter and its game, set, match. Just give it up. Use bt for your own creative content and what (like youtube) could be considered fair use.
democrats are not supporting it. but obama and his group had to vote for the bill, because if they resisted it, they wouldnt be enough with democrat numbers in senate to bring a bill that would trash telecoms, and nothing would change. in previous situation, warrantless wiretapping was totally without oversight. in the new situation, at least high courts are involved.
Read radical news here
For that matter, any company that keeps data on customers should erase it when it no longer needs it, unless data retention is required by law.
If ISPs had a "keep metered-billing customers' data until the bill is paid, and don't keep unmetered customer's data for more than a few days" there wouldn't be much data to subpoena.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I read this on a slashdot post that I am too lazy to find. Here is the gist:
The mice in mousland are very patriotic and they always vote. Usually they have two options: the red cat, and the blue cat. Once in a while they get the rogue spotted cat as a third option.
The cats pass laws that are very good....for cats. Unfortunately, they are very hard on the mice. The mice usually respond by voting one cat out of office, only to replace him with another cat. Then they are surprised to find things aren't getting any better.
I thought Britain had better privacy laws than in the USA where, while the RIAA is still getting data as we speak, it's getting harder and harder for them and many defendants are able to challenge at the initial John Doe stage.
What would happen if every one of these cases decided to go to court over this?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The next step -- prosecutors to peruse through ISPs data.
The new address was in a locked file cabinet in a disused bathroom in the basement with a sign on the door that said "Beware of the leopard".
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
It shouldn't even be an issue of a lack of research skills, it should just be common sense in an HTML medium that one would include a link in such a serious statement. Yea, Google comes up pretty dry unless you find the magic words to key on, but if you are doing web journalism, as /. claims they are doing, (as well as calling the people who somewhat arbitrarily pick stories to be "editors"), then it's not unreasonable to set an expectation that links would be provided in such statements. I'm as peeved about this as I am when Associated Press or Reuters run a story on the world's ugliest dog, or fattest cat, or how much Rielle Hunter's baby looks like John Edwards, without actually showing a photo of the subject. Perhaps more peeved, because (not to excuse the others) Slashdot is exclusively web based and should be more technical and should know better.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
ok, i'll post first. whatever.
Well somebody has to.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
"How can you f***ing be responsible for something you don't even know how it works?"
I feel the same way about Linux.
Why not us?