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30,000 UK ISP Users Face Threat Letters For Suspected Illegal File Sharing
Mark.JUK writes with this excerpt from ISP Review: "Solicitors at ACS:Law have been granted approval by the Royal Courts of Justice in London to demand the private personal details of some 30,000 customers suspected of involvement with illegal file sharing from UK broadband ISPs. The customers concerned are 'suspected' of illegally file sharing (P2P) approximately 291 movie titles, they now face threatening demands for money (settlement) or risk the prospect of court action. It's noted that 25,000 of the IP addresses that have been collected belong to BT users."
We'll build a decentralized network before we allow you to dictate which information we may copy. We have the technology, we have the know how and you're giving us the motivation.
Strange to say, but in Italy we protect more our privacy than in UK: our Data Privacy Authority decided that it's against the law to provide a correspondence between IP Address and real person name if the suspected violation is only for copyright issues.
Is it 1984 on that motherfucking island of yours yet?
It's worse than 1984! It's 2009!!! (It would have been Orwell's sequel)
They could hide from the telescreens and meet in the countryside for illicit encounters in the book, you'd never get away with that in 2009.
Yes. Unfortunatly it is more easy to track P2P users than FTP users. Now what I don't understand is that they don't seed the tracked with some false IPs like the one of the Queen and some institutions for letting them receive these letters too.
I wonder how they found the 25000 BT users - it seems odd that 25,000 out of 30,000 come from one ISP if they found them by any public means (i.e by joining swarms on public trackers and seeing which IPs are also operating in the swarm).
My guess is that while they were testing Phorm's targeted-advertising-based-on-snooping technology they were also did something very similar to what Virgin are planning (from the earlier story today "CView's deep packet inspection is the same technology that powered Phorm's advertising system" - CView being what Virgin plan to use to inspect P2P traffic).
Guess it's time to get a Relakks account. Basically you use a VPN account which gives you some random Swedish IP address. This will keep you off the radar of those collecting IP addresses for a while.
Not related to them or anything, I was just a satisfied customer for a few months. I gave it up when I realized I almost never downloaded movies and music anymore.
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We'll build a decentralized network before we allow you to dictate which information we may copy.
Information? I thought it was Hollywood movies that were being copied and distributed...?
Everyone who's been observing politicians knows how to react to such allegations: "I do not remember doing that" (you don't deny, so you can't get caught in a lie).
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
From the summary, one might draw the conclusion that "be a BT customer, and you're more of a target", but I seem to remember BT being the biggest ISP in the UK by quite a big margin*. Virgin Media (aka. NTL / Telewest) are the second largest*, and so it goes on. So I suppose it's reasonable that BT would account for the majority of the infractions. Conversely, BT have amongst the shittiest networks of all, so you'd imagine that the file sharers weren't actually sharing that much after all. But I suppose that would mean BT won't mind 25,000 people getting cut off, because it'll save them having to upgrade their network (like they say they're doing on the TV ads they're running at the moment).
So the real take-away here is that if you're at a small ISP, you're less likely to be targeted (at least until the big ones tumble). Meanwhile, the utter incompetence of the BPI and their friends should keep this from being anything more than an annoyance for 30,000 people. If even 5000 of them follow up and challenge their accusers, it'll tie the whole system up for months, if not years.
The BPI, Mandleson, and their ilk have an idealised view that file sharing should be super-illegal and so almost entirely eradicated. The problem is, best estimates suggest 7 million people in the UK share files*, so even if half give up from fear of prosecution, that's still 3.5 million people they've got to prosecute. I don't imagine there's a lawyer in the UK who's capable of executing that many cases in a decade, let alone simultaneously.
(* No, I can't substantiate this with a link right now - you know how to use a search engine though, right?)
No, it's the real 1980s' vision of the future, only instead of OCP, it's the media industry that's gone on a power-mad rampage.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I am very impressed by the statement from BT:
A BT Spokesperson told ISPreview in September:
"BT and other ISPs agreed to send 1,000 notifications alleging copyright infringement a week for a 12-week trial period, with BT picking up the bill for this activity for our own customers as an act of goodwill. However, it was understood that at the end of this period, we would need to take stock and have further discussions with the rights holders about costs etc.
During this period, the BPI sent us around 21,000 alleged cases, but less than two-thirds proved to be properly matched to an IP address of a BT customer and not a duplicate, so this could indicate that the true extent of this activity is much lower than the 100,000 number the BPI claim since February. In addition since none of the customers we wrote to during the trial were subsequently taken to court by the BPI, we don't know whether they were actually guilty of infringement."
I never knew BT could actually sound reasonable. What a shame governments are still left trailing behind on common sense and decency.
Er...in this case BT refers to the communications company British Telecom, not Bittorrent.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
I visit the cinema on average once a week and every time the copyright warning is displayed and mentions 10 years in prison for recording a movie in a cinema I cringe. That's more than people get for killing and maiming people, robbing banks and committing other violent crimes. The MP's are in the pockets of the media companies. I'm not talking about small indie film studios, but the distributors and those who own them like Sony, etc. They've been persuaded that if the penalties are high enough people will not perform actions that are trivial to execute and have no visible consequences. This has been shown not to be true time and time again.
I buy lots of DVDs and DVD boxsets. I probably spent about £500 a year on these. I pay for the cinema one a week. I buy music on iTunes and only search elsewhere online if I can't find what I want. As a kid I pirated every virtual computer game in existence in the 8/16 bit eras. Now I rarely play games, apart from on my iPhone which I pay for. I don't have TV at home, so *sometimes* I get TV shows I like online before going out and buying the full season boxset as soon as it becomes available. I might consider buying them on iTunes or similar if they were available at a reasonable price, but they're not. Most episodes of TV shows cost far more than the equivalent DVD for lower quality and no physical media to keep and store and are non-transferable to other machines, etc. I hope I'm not one of the people discovered in this haul of IP addresses, but I do not download movies, only a little bit of TV. Fingers crossed.
If you go to the ACS web site thier definition of infringement seems to only apply to P2P traffic and even then seems to be limited to uploads.
Anyone with half a brain-cell would not use P2P networks for piracy anyway!
If you are really worried, the article has a link to http://www.beingthreatened.com/ - they seem to have some genuine advice.
By the way if you decide to pay the fine, it means you have admitted to guilt and will not be able to contest it or get your money back!
If you recieve a letter asking for payment under NO circumstances pay it!
Also, reply to the letter as soon as you can - you have a limited time to respond to it (cannot remember how long).
As a kid we also pulled lan cables with my brother from my room to his room. Every day, because it didn't fit under the doors and wasn't built-in to the house. Then we played Counter-Strike beta 6 and GTA 2.
And no government in our darknet!
Everyone who thinks this is a bad idea should sign this government petition, get everyone they know to sign the petition, and generally cause a ruckus
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/dontdisconnectus/
Then install Tor, because you have to look out for yourself when you don't live in a democracy any more.
right there in 5.3(a): ... download ... any material that is ...pornographic.
Boom. no porn. if people followed that, half of the IP space on the net would be freed up immediately. IPV6 adoption could be pushed off for another few decades.
http://torrentfreak.com/how-to-encrypt-bittorrent-traffic/
Just turn on encryption in your favorite torrent client, and only allow encrypted connections. In combination with the Distributed Hash Table, Magnet Links, and Peer Exchange, an entirely decentralized file sharing system will work
find ~your -name '*base* | xargs chown
The numbers are already messed up, the article above says 30,000, 25,000 of which are BT. The BBC article says only 15,000:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8381097.stm
So how many people really are covered I wonder?
Just so you know, a linebreak does not constitute an adequate chance to respond to your first question. Do you understand?
I'll take that as a yes.
That's why this is not about companies looking for IPs in P2P networks.
It's about a court actually granting discovery on 30.000 IP addresses, a political elite valuing perceived security over freedom and a populace that doesn't appear to care whatsoever, welcoming it even.
It's certainly not 1984, but equally abominable nonetheless.
The customers concerned are 'suspected' of illegally file sharing (P2P) approximately 291 movie titles, they now face threatening demands for money (settlement) or risk the prospect of court action.
The emphasized part is bullshit fearmongering to get them to pay. Expect the “charges” to be dropped as soon as you refuse and tell them to go fuck themselves. I’ve already seen it twice. You don’t pay, and nothing happens.
Which is obvious, since they have no proof, no legal anything, and were it not for the changes they pressed into law, they would not even be listened to by the courts.
If you got such a letter, tell them to go fuck themselves, because they don’t even know what “proof” is in computers, because they know shit about how computers work.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Most people posting about 1984 and making "Orwellian" references are talking about the Ingsoc nanny state. It doesn't matter that the book isn't actually about about that nanny state, or that it's just a plot device for the story/message that Orwell was trying to convey: what matters is that people understand what you're talking about when you make the reference. Specifically, a totalitarian society that constantly monitors its people, that assumes that everybody outside of the Party is a criminal, and that is trying to dumb down the populace in order to prevent them from thinking for themselves.
Considering the number of CCTV cameras in the UK, and the level of personal privacy that exists in the country, the suggestion that people on the Internet are being assumed to be criminals, and are being handed over to the media companies without the chance to defend themselves, really does conjure up images of Oceania, don't you think?
if millions of people find a particular type of behaviour acceptable that it should be legalised?
No. To use the often recycled example, the majority of people once thought that slavery was an acceptable practice, but that doesn't mean it should have been. This isn't to say that downloading and slavery are immediately comparable, but rather that a thing isn't necessarily right because "a lot of people are doing/supporting it."
On the other hand, the huge amount of torrent users shows a fundamental lack of support from the industry for what could be a viable market. Unfortunately it may very well be a case of "too little, too late" to tap, but had they done so they probably could have been making an extra chunk-'o'-change by this point off of online downloads. Things like the iTunes store are definitely still profitable.
They may still have a chance though. Personally, if I could purchase the various episodes of shows I like to watch for a reasonable price (at they are released), especially if they were sans commercials, I'd have my wallet open pretty quickly. Cable and even satellite seem to be dying media, and being able to pick-and-choose what you want online could be a fairly easy sell for studios. Even if they only charged something under a buck, they'd probably still make a fair bit of cash, especially if they threw a few ads on the website (not the video) for related products (e.g. if you're watching a season 2 episode of "show X" and season 1 is available on DVD, advertise!).
Uh, Airstrip One. Geek card please.
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The brits need to torrent this movie and then emulate it, it seems like they are slowly working their way into a police state..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?