UK ISPs Could Be Forced To Block Or Restrict P2P

MJackson writes "The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has published a draft set of proposals for tackling illegal broadband file sharing (P2P) downloads by persistent infringers, among other things. The proposals form part of a discussion piece concerning the role that a UK Digital Rights Agency (DRA) could play. UK Internet Providers will already be required to warn those suspected of such activity and collect anonymised information on serious repeat infringers, though they could soon be asked to go even further. The new discussion paper, while not going into much detail, has proposed two potential example solutions to the problem. UK ISPs could employ protocol blocking or bandwidth restrictions in relation to persistent infringers. In other words, P2P services could be blocked, or suspected users might find their service speeds seriously restricted."

Comments

Why they bother to try?

[Darkk]

We can encrypt bit-torrent files so they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between P2P to normal traffic. Sheesh.

Re:Why they bother to try?

[Anonymous Coward]

In my tests (and I'm an active researcher/developer in this field), encryption, properly implemented, is faster.

Even if your ISP doesn't throttle, performance is typically better with encryption forced on and legacy connections disallowed, because of all the other peers in the swarm who'd only be able to seed to you effectively through encrypted connections because their ISP throttles. (Unless, that is, you have a legacy static seed in your swarm with high bandwidth; in which case, you should upgrade the static seed ASAP to encrypted, to get better performance for the whole swarm!)

In addition, the issue of certain bit patterns (for example, the 32 bits that make up your internal IP address) causing data corruption issues in some (faulty) consumer routers is worked around, as re-keying will naturally produce a different bit pattern the second time around.

Bittorrent's protocol obfuscation isn't very strong encryption (1024-bit RSA exchange, ARC4 stream cipher, moderately weak man-in-the-middle protection based on the infohash, so MUCH stronger when the infohash isn't available or there isn't a colluder in the swarm, ideally run the tracker over https), but also runs very quickly (RC4 is simple and fast, though at this point I would say possibly broken or at least breakable, and can be distinguished from random data as per recent research).

It's quite possible to do strong encryption just as quickly. In my tests, applications running over TLS actually deliver the exact same level of performance and negligible CPU usage except for the short pauses for RSA key exchanges when new connections are established; and much faster asymmetric Diffie-Hellman algorithms based on elliptic curves (or emerging schemes based on genus-2 hyperelliptic curves) which would not exhibit this issue already exist - as do efficient authenticated-encryption block cipher modes like OCB-AES-128 which beat CBC+HMAC in terms of speed and security and obviate the need for block padding.

And in other news ...

[krou]

... the Featured Artists Coalition, which consists of 140 of the UK's biggest music stars, voted recently on the issue of illegal downloading, and "most of the artists had voted against supporting any move towards criminally prosecuting ordinary members of the public for illegally downloaded music."

Bragg was speaking as a key member of the coalition, which was set up to give a collective voice to artists who want to fight for their rights in the digital world. It is pushing for a fairer deal for musicians at a time when they can use the internet to forge direct links with their fans. "What I said at the meeting was that the record industry in Britain is still going down the road of criminalising our audience for downloading illegal MP3s," he said.

"If we follow the music industry down that road, we will be doing nothing more than being part of a protectionist effort. It's like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube.

"Artists should own their own rights and they should decide when their music should be used for free, or when they should have payment."

The artists wanted to tell Lord Carter "that we want to side with the audience, the consumer".

Since we keep getting told to think about the artists, why is no-one listening to what they're saying?

Re:I don't get it

[jimicus]

UK copyright law is criminal liability - and we don't really tend to award punitive damages in the civil system so the $millions in fines you see awarded in the US wouldn't happen over here.

But even then there is plenty of opportunity to deal with criminal offences outside the court system.

Fixed penalties for speeding, customs agents have the right to impound your car if you import too much booze or tobacco - they don't need a court order to do so. Councils routinely hand out fines for parking which is decriminalised and the only appeal route is to go via the people who issued the ticket in the first place.

Re:I don't get it

[Andy_R]

It already happens, there are plenty of mp3 sharing blogs that post links to files stored on Rapidshare.de, megaupload.com and other similar sites.