Slashdot Mirror
UK ISPs Near Agreement On Illegal File Sharing
ISPreview UK writes "UK Music's chief executive, Feargal Sharkey, claims that progress has been made on a deal between the music industry and broadband ISPs to tackle illegal file sharing. The comments came during yesterday's annual Internet Service Providers' Association conference in Eversheds, with an ISPA spokesman confirming that 'some kind of agreement between rightholders and ISPs can be reached,' adding, 'everyone wants to work together to make legal online models work.' The news follows July's crucial Memorandum of Understanding agreement between copyright holders and six of the UK's largest ISPs, which account for roughly 90% of the country's broadband market. The initial agreement approved a principal of sending warning letters to customers who have been accused of downloading illegal music or movies."
Are they going to be spending much of my - as a customer - money on lawyers, differentiating between illegal downloads of current releases, and, say, rips of long out of print vinyl such as the Avant Garde Project (www.avantgardeproject.org) ? I rather imagine they'll just be trying to stop anyone who is bypassing the cosy tv/mp3/movie deals they've done with studios, broadcasters and publishers.
Some sort of blanket encryption on *everything* sent from/received by people's PCs is sorely needed. Perhaps if every PC were running TOR (or something functionally very similar) there would be less of a problem here.
FTA: although some ISPs have tested warning letters with suspected customers.
I would have thought the first steps in correctly policing illegal filesharing was firstly to have a firm grip on who exactly your customers are..
And while I'm being pedantic:
The initial agreement approved a principal of sending warning letters to customers who have been accused of downloading illegal music or movies
And who's doing the accusing? the ISP or the music industry? Cos if I was the music industry I'd just accuse everyone in the UK three times and hey presto the UK is offline.
Shall we state it again for prosperity?
America != World.
No matter how much you want to think so. How this relates to a story about **UK** ISP's, I don't know. However, if you wish to turn Slashdot into Slashdot World Series (i.e. only America actually contributes - my apologies... Wiki says that there is one Canadian team too...), then feel free to keep whinging. Or just read the story at the top of the front page about the election that, with its sister postings over the last few days, has made me remove "News" from my topic lists. Do British people shove comments on random pages when a new Prime Minister is elected? No. Why not? Because it would annoy the Americans and others who have precisely zero interest in such things.
If you're sent one of these letters that alleges that you've been 'pirating' film/music/whatever but you haven't been trading/downloading in anything copyrighted - and therefore innocent against these allegations - is there not a case for bringing some kind of libel or defamation action against your ISP, the lawyers and the BPI?