Ofcom Unveils Anti-Piracy Policy For UK ISPs

krou writes "Under plans drawn up by Ofcom, UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who infringe copyright, logging names and the number of times infringement took place. Music and film companies will then be allowed access to the list, and be able to decide whether or not to take legal action. '"It is imperative that a system that accuses people of illegal online activity is fair and clear," said Anna Bradley, chair of the Communications Consumer Panel.' The Panel, in partnership with Consumer Focus, Which, Citizens Advice, and the advocacy body the Open Rights Group, has released a set of principles it believes should govern the code of practice. The principles say sound evidence is needed before any action is taken, consumers must have the right to defend themselves, and the appeals process must be free to pursue. The code shall come into practice by 2011, and initially applies only to ISPs with 400,000 customers or more." Update: 05/29 09:11 GMT by T : As an anonymous reader points out below, that's 400,000 users, rather than 40,000 as originally rendered.

Comments

Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

400,000

Re:Correction

[TheRaven64]

Stop that! You keep doing that! Reading the comments and posting corrections is going to make the other editors look bad! Slashdot editors are not supposed to read the site, and they are definitely not meant to care about facts. You are doing it entirely wrong.

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't worry, I modded him as a troll for breaking the sacred rule.

Re:Correction

[shnull]

This should see the isp's with 400k customers or more quickly dwindle into isp's with less than 400k customers lol, it's actually nice move against monopoly (yes, hat spells warner brothers, seems after they hijacked midway i can't even buy joust on the xbox marketplace anymore)

Piracy clarification

[Rivalz]

Im just curious on how it is illegal to download content that is copyrighted.
I understand being prosecuted for uploading content to the internet but am I breaking the law if I watch something on youtube that was placed there illegally? Or if someone emails me a photo and they do not have the rights to it?
I'm pretty certain when I take a photo of my girlfriend in the city there is something in the background that I dont have the copyright of. If I post that on facebook am I doing something illegal?
Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law and just waiting for it to be my turn to get caught doing something idiotically illegal.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the point. Everyone is a criminal -> no one can stand against the system.

Re:Piracy clarification

[mSparks43]

Its ok, don't worry about it. UK law courts have no moral standing anyway. Its all a money making scam. So just tell them to go f' themselves.

Re:Piracy clarification

[arkhan_jg]

Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law

Well that's because you probably are; the laws about driving and copyright are so rediculously broad - and lightly enforced - that you're breaking the law most of the time, but simply aren't prosecuted for it until you appear on someones radar.

What I consider worst about this legislation is that major ISPs are going to have to monitor *all* traffic passing through them, make a judgement on whether it is 'infringing' then put you on a list, then hand that list over to the major label music industry to decide if they're going to take civil action against you. So not only am I having my privacy massively infringed by my own ISP, I'm paying them to do it, and act as enforcer and bearer of all the costs as evidence gatherer for another industry entirely - one I happen to be boycotting.

Thanks a bunch ex-labour government for pushing that little law through at the last minute without debate.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Elledan]

This whole thing stinks. Badly. Allow me to explain:

Here in the Netherlands we got a similar debate going on, with some groups demanding the downloading of copyrighted works to be made illegal (currently legal for movies and music). My housemate and good friend Pieter Hulshoff was present at a debate on this last Thursday together with a number of politicians, artists, lawyers and many other types of people (including the very embarrassing Dutch Pirate Party). As he pointed out during this debate, there is no conceivable way one could successfully implement a 'roadblock' against the downloading of copyrighted content. First of all, there's the technical limitation.

DPI, or Deep Packet Inspection, is a technique which can look into the packets sent through an ISP's network and which is suggested as a way to find those guilty of infringement. There is no way to figure out in even a fraction of all cases, even after assembling multiple packets, what format the packet's contents are in, what encoding was used, how to read it, let alone somehow figure out whether it is copyrighted information.

P2P, or basically anything involving Bittorrent, eDonkey and similar networks used for filesharing can easily be anonymized using encryption, private trackers, making it very hard to get into a cloud or similar, or figure out what is being shared.

Then there's the aspect of determining whether a copyrighted work being downloaded is actually 'illegal'. If personal copies are allowed like here in the Netherlands, or some form of fair use exists and the person downloading Generic Movie #24 also has a matching copy of the DVD he or she legally bought but feels too lazy to make a rip off (or wants a rip of the Blu-Ray version... another huge grey legal patch). Look at for example the demands made by media companies at Youtube and similar sites to keep out copyrighted content. It should be clear that it isn't feasible for even a huge company like Google to keep people from uploading copyrighted material they supposedly don't have the rights to to YouTube. Automatic filters fail, reports aren't affective enough and employing people to sift through incoming videos is so ridiculous for being impractical that it's laughable.

In other words this is yet another wet dream of the companies behind such constructs as the RIAA/MPAA and their many cousins throughout the world, put into law thanks to bribes and clueless politicians and completely not feasible in the Real World (tm).

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law and just waiting for it to be my turn to get caught doing something idiotically illegal.

Western countries are transitioning from a military industrial economy to a jail and criminal justice economy, and that is where corporations and governments make their money on enforcing laws and creating new and tougher laws (copyright, patent, obscenity, drug, think-of-the-children, etc and so on). Ignorance of the law is no excuse so you'd better keep up and have a good attorney ready to help you. If anything feels good or seems intuitively natural to do then there are probably laws against it.

At any given point in time the average person is breaking numerous laws without even knowing it, or on average about three felonies a day. Just be grateful that you haven't been caught yet.

If you are rich and powerful enough you shouldn't have anything to worry about though, because as one United States President once said, "... when the President does it that means that it is not illegal."

Welcome to the New World Order! (same as the Old World Order, but with bigger prisons and more CCTV).

Re:Piracy clarification

[TheRaven64]

Even if you have a complete list of all files that are copyrighted and require a license to distribute, it becomes hard. For example, my publisher and I frequently exchange files that are illegal for most people to distribute, but not for us because one of us owns the copyright. This system would be required to spot when two people exchange the file, determine that it is copyrighted, and then note that we are the copyright owners and so are legally able to distribute it so should not go on the list.

Requiring a system to do two impossible things is generally considered a case of bad specification design.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Joce640k]

This is just some ISP's PHB having a wet dream after being wined and dined by the RIAA. It's going to be impossible to put into practice. I've heard the boss of Spain's leading ISP ranting about this sort of thing and he's a barely coherent old codger who obviously doesn't have a clue about anything technical.

As a protest we should create a screen saver which maxes out an Internet connection 24/7 transferring random data to random people. Get your friends to install it ... let's see if the ISPs who sign up to these schemes can provide the bandwidth they've sold.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Rich0]

Well, while I agree with your overall points and philosophy, there are a few things that DPI could do to make things really annoying for ISP customers:

1. They can probably detect http headers that have a GET line that includes a filename of something that seems to be infringing. Better not view any websites with photos of artists named "Mariah Carey - singing Name-That-Song.jpg" on them... Or, if you're going to post mp3s on a website maybe you should rename them to .jpg files once they start filtering those out...

2. They could detect http response headers that have a mime type the record industry doesn't like, such as a torrent file or mp3.

3. They could detect non-encrypted torrent traffic, or non-encrypted mp3s/etc in general. Assembling the packets would be hard, knowing they're being sent is probably not.

4. When "suspicious" traffic like any of the above is detected, they could probably start logging full packets and assemble full streams for further analysis - if you only do that on a small percentage of traffic and don't keep the captured packets around forever it may be practical.

Sure, all of the above will probably hassle lots of people who do nothing illegal, but I don't think the recording industry really cares about that. Don't want to prove your innocence? Well, just don't use bittorrent. Oh, we're not banning it - anybody can keep using it as long as they don't mind proving their innocence in court every six months (make no mistake, in the end the burden of proof will end up on the defendant since the industry will have some nebulous report output that has their name on a list).

As far as not being able to catch all of it - I don't know that they really care. If the ISPs give the music industry 1000 people to sue every year, or 1000 people who they can ban from the internet every year, that would be a victory for them. Once people are afraid to click on links lest they accidentally go to a "bad site" and end up with a ruined life then they will be happy. That's why I pretty-much don't browse the internet from work - with the laws in the US as they are all it takes is one misclick or typo and a zealous log monitor and you can be in VERY deep water.

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Well, given how your rights are being violated by those industry thugs, and how your government will not protect you from the because they've been bought and paid for by the industry (which, by the way, is going to see megabucks in enforcing its own brand of private justice upon the netizens), isn't it high time to take the matter in your own hands?

Pass the word that for every user that is turned over to the industry mob, a price will be exacted: an office will be firebombed, an employee will be stabbed to death in a dark alley, an exec's family member will be kidnapped, tortured to death and the body never found. Have the message sent out that the streets are not safe anymore for these people. Yes, I know, you people in the UK have no firearms anymore but it only takes an IKEA steak knife to end someone's life and they would be begging for a bullet before the day's done.

If you really value "your rights online", understand one thing: those who want them taken away are powerful and will not stop at anything, they are winning and they know it; they see no resistance, they expect none. They are strangling the Internet by forcing the ISPs to cooperate through the use of their massive economic and legal power.

All you have against this is plain old violence. But you are cowardly geeks and will not do anything for fear of being pummeled.

What an irony if the loserboy nerds' playground, the Internet, will end up being saved by muscular, strong-willed jocks who will rip the industry goons' throats out and shit on their dead faces.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

warez is a problem and the creators need to be compensated for their work just like everyone else

Yes, it takes a lot of effort to produce high quality warez.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh.. shut up!

Re:Piracy clarification

[ydrol]

> Thanks a bunch ex-labour government for pushing that little law through at the last minute without debate

I think it got cross-party approval. But of course no public debate. Probably plenty of golf lunches and champagne dinners with Elton John, Bono etc.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Keeper Of Keys]

Don't mod him down! This guy understands the fundamental problem and even has a solution, albeit a morally suspect one.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

What I consider worst about this legislation is that major ISPs are going to have to monitor *all* traffic passing through them

ISPs don't have to monitor anything. nothing. zero. zilch.

what they have to do, is accept 'infringement notifications' from copyright holders - and keep count how many each customer receives.

the first 3 times per-customer these notifications are received, the ISP must write to the account holder, detailing the alleged offence, offering advice about securing their wireless router and offering alternatives to downloading illegally. the customer can appeal these notifications, if they think they're in error.

if a customer receives more than 3 notifications within 12 months, then the ISP must anonymously list the customer on a 'list of possible repeated copyright violators'. copyright holders can periodically browse this list, and may decide to apply for a court order to reveal a customer's name and address. they can then choose to sue them in the courts, where they will have to provide unequivocal proof of wrong-doing.

every 12 months, each customer's list of 'alleged violations' is cleared.

Re:Piracy clarification

[damburger]

The ConDem coalition could repeal the DEA any time they liked. Nick Clegg even hinted he would make such a repeal a condition of joining a coalition, and this has now been shown to be an outright lie.

Re:Piracy clarification

[AmiMoJo]

The biggest flaw is not so much the difficulty in gathering evidence but the fact that in the end the copyright holder still needs to sue the accused individual.

The law in the UK makes it quite clear that they would need to sue the person who did the infringement. Good luck figuring out who that is in a household with more than one person. Being a civil matter they can't seize your PC or anything like that.

Even if they do somehow figure out who it is the chances are the evidence they have will not stand up in court. Even if it does they won't be able to ban people from the internet because it would infringe on their human rights. Without the internet you become cut off from your friends, unable to do your job, unable to use many mobile phones. The real kicker is that if you share a connection with someone else then they would loose their access too which is clearly unjust. No court would ever allow that.

Anyway, the current government said they would repeal. I know, manifesto promises... But at least they are in principal against it.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Xugumad]

> am I breaking the law if I watch something on youtube that was placed there illegally

If you are aware of the content, certainly you would be in the UK (UK copyright law, last time I read it, even made it illegal to rip CDs you owned to MP3 for your own use, because it's a copy). You could almost certainly make a strong defence against such charges if the content was mis-represented (I don't mean if it's labelled "Not the latest blockbuster movie, lolz", I mean "Videos of my cat") and you stopped once aware of the true nature of the content, but if you're knowingly copying (by requesting YouTube send you a copy) copyrighted content that you do not have a right to, it's illegal.

On the other hand, at the time these laws were written, the sort of invasive monitoring being suggested here wasn't even a consideration. I don't think they were ever intended to catch someone who might genuinely make a mistake about this.

As someone whose day job is creating digital content, I want people to stop pirating content (and I want to strangle anyone who thinks they have some sort of moral high ground by illegally copying stuff - if it's overpriced, don't buy it, but don't copy it either). However, I also think the effort being put into stopping piracy is misguided, and vastly disproportionate to actual damage done. I would much rather see an emphasis on teaching people to make their own content, to show them the value of it, rather than this ineffective negative-reinforcement approach.

Re:Piracy clarification

[TheRaven64]

Don't make out the bandwidth. Create 400 byte segments of copyright works - small enough to count as quoting for the purpose of fair dealings law. Have the screensaver exchange these segments. Make sure it's the same segment in each direction, so there's no possibility that they're building anything close to a complete work. Also have it join a few thousand random torrents selected from some popular torrent site, but not transfer any data to any of them. Look as suspicious as possible, but without actually breaking any laws. Don't stress the normal Internet infrastructure, but put a huge load on the monitoring stuff. If you get any legal action, get the FFII to sponsor a countersuit for barratry.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

monitor *all* traffic passing through them, make a judgement on whether it is 'infringing'

That's easy: If the target port isn't 80 or 443, you're infringing. If you cause more traffic than what's profitable for the ISP, you're infringing. There's no way you can plausibly defend against "we've seen you infringe on copyrights more than x times" type of accusations, so detection accuracy isn't important.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Beorytis]

What I consider worst about this legislation is that major ISPs are going to have to monitor *all* traffic passing through them, make a judgement on whether it is 'infringing' then put you on a list, then hand that list over to the major label music industry

The CCP is concerned about fairness in who gets prosecuted, but I see some unfairness in who has the opportunity to prosecute through this system.

From the ISP end, the monitoring & logging requirements might be onerous to smaller players, but they may then become havens for serious piracy, which may be a greater exposure and business risk.

From the copyright owner standpoint, if you're not a "major" you don't get equal protection. (I don't know UK law to know whether "equal protection" is promised as it is in the US.)

Re:Piracy clarification

[ConfusedVorlon]

the liberal democrats voted against it

Re:Piracy clarification

[MoonBuggy]

I like the random data idea. A lot. We've tried petitioning and achieved nothing, so more direct (but still legal and safe) action seems sensible.

It looks like a very good form of peaceful protest: they've agreed to monitor our connections, so in return we will swamp their monitoring tools with more data than they can hope to handle.

From a technical standpoint, a quick search has turned up CSpace, which looks to me like a decent starting point. Any enterprising slashdotters feel like putting something together?

Re:Piracy clarification

[Sulphur]

Play nicely Draco.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

I do all my pirating by paying £5 per month (through a well respected third part payment system) for access to newsgroups over SSL. I'm not too worried about this.

But yeah, charges will increase to pay for this. Sucks.

RIP Gary Coleman.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

the liberal democrats voted against it

Yes, the handful that could be bothered to turn up...

Re:Piracy clarification

[impaledsunset]

It's a morally disgusting one. And won't work. But I couldn't say I didn't like reading it. Copyright enforcement has become so ridiculous that it is expected to inspire violence in many people.

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Are you sure it wouldn't work? And morally disgusting - more so than the extortionist and illegal practices used by pigs like ACS:Law for instance? How do you fight the bad guys if you don't want to get your hands dirty?

Or maybe you're just making up an excuse not to fight, huh? Is that so, loserboy nerd? Then kiss your precious internet goodbye, because they'll be taking it. Lock, stock and barrel. They will OWN it, completely. They will own your very lives, in the end, because a great lot of your lives will depend on the internet and those who control it will be supreme masters over your lives.

So, either realize that it's high time to take the fight to the next level, or get used to the taste of jackboot.
Seriously, do you think the partisans in occupied Europe got all fussy about moral high grounds so long as it helped put nazis six feet under?

Fight or lose. Jocks fight. Nerds can only lose.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

I really like this idea. It is the "I'm Spartacus" defence:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8h_v_our_Q

Please, please somebody make this happen.

Re:Piracy clarification

[wzzzzrd]

Well, this "fundamental problem" is easy to see and understand, and most people DO see it (ask anyone about evil corporations). But we still have food on the table and a home for the table, so most people don't care, because it only affects those "downloaders yknow", not the majority, which still buys dvds or cds or pay for downloads.

The danger is harder to see (but most people see it, never underestimate people), it's the infrastructure, both political and industrial which is put into place. And this infrastructure can and will be used in really bad ways. The nazis came into power in germany deploying exactly this technique: using the infrastructure to come into power (they didn't have the majority in the parliament at that time, not even close) and then abuse it to no extend.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

let's see if the ISPs [...] can provide the bandwidth they've sold.

I thought we already knew that the answer is "no"?

Re:Piracy clarification

[Ihmhi]

I'd wager that you'd run out of politicians who refuse to listen to the public before you run out of bullets.

Re:Piracy clarification

[manicb]

+3 Informative?!

At least give us a citation, I'm having difficulty understanding how a "hint" can ever be "an outright lie". "Misleading", perhaps. The conservative party were going to resist completely repealing a bill that they supported just weeks ago. Perhaps if there were more Lib Dem MPs they would have had a stronger basis for negotiation. Given their weakness they did fairly well at the negotiating table.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Runaway1956]

I agree - let's not kid ourselves. Irrationally designed copyright laws that protect 50 year old music is simply WRONG. Ditto with much of the rest of copyright and patent law today.

That said - the UK's law almost LOOKS fair. None of that idiocy from Murdoch's crowd down under - "Three strikes and you're out, and we don't even have to tell you about it!" In fact, if the copyright laws were structured rationally, I could get onboard with what I see at first glance.

The only real problem I have with UK's law is, a government agency has no business collecting data on it's citizens, then making that data available to corporate bigshots. In effect, the government is taking sides in civil litigation far in advance of any litigation taking place.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Runaway1956]

Morally disgusting? I don't know. Here in the US, our ancestors started shooting at Englishmen who were just enforcing the law, collecting exorbitant taxes. Morally disgusting? Maybe it IS time for some Englishmen to start offing those corrupt bastards for imposing what amounts to exorbitant taxes. Call it a "sin tax". If you enjoy it, you've got to pay for it, over and over and over and . . .

Re:Piracy clarification

[pbhj]

Presumably one of the ISP's can just sign up 399,999 people and then start a new sister company and sign up 399,999 more, etc., rinse-repeat.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Barrinmw]

Is there any other group of people other then Artists and Writers who can make money off work they did 100 years after the fact?

Re:Piracy clarification

[pbhj]

If personal copies are allowed like here in the Netherlands, or some form of fair use exists and the person downloading Generic Movie #24 also has a matching copy of the DVD he or she legally bought but feels too lazy to make a rip off (or wants a rip of the Blu-Ray version... another huge grey legal patch).

We don't have the US American fair use exclusions in the UK. Making a personal copy for format shifting is illegal [tortuous] in the UK. Ditto for downloading a rip.

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Exactly: there's far more at stake than P2P, and that's the ability to keep the internet a free place. Big Money doesn't want it, governments do not want it, so it WILL be wiped out and replaced with a corporate-friendly e-place where you will be able to say that all is well and watch commercials. Moreover, the internet can be turned into the most powerful of all Orwellian devices: keep the populace under automatic watch 24/7, keep an eye on what they say, what they buy, threaten to punish them if they commit thoughtcrime, threaten to take away what they have, and you have the perfect tyranny over them. You have essentially command over their minds, you make them so afraid to speak out for fear of the consequences of stating the wrong opinion that they'll be forced to think your way.

This is what it's at stake. It WILL happen. We will be all in thrall of the economical-political mob, forever. Or we act now.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Kilrah_il]

Yep, the Vatican

Re:Piracy clarification

[pbhj]

You could almost certainly make a strong defence against such charges if the content was mis-represented (I don't mean if it's labelled "Not the latest blockbuster movie, lolz", I mean "Videos of my cat") and you stopped once aware of the true nature of the content, but if you're knowingly copying (by requesting YouTube send you a copy) copyrighted content that you do not have a right to, it's illegal.

It's known that companies have uploaded content to YouTube in the guise of unauthorised content, as leaked previews, etc., in order to market their media offerings. There's no way for us to tell on YouTube if something is being distributed legally or not.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Although I'm not entirely sure about the details, but wouldn't the distribution of this personal information to unrelated third parties also be a direct violation of the Data Protection Act?

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I'm cancelling a couple of moderations to post this, but I think it needs to be said.

Making a personal copy for format shifting is illegal [tortuous] in the UK. Ditto for downloading a rip.

A specific format-shifting exemption is definitely on the way. It was recommended by Gowers and has basically been accepted by everyone in government, it just hasn't been put into law yet.

Also, at least one big name music label is on record saying they won't prosecute people for format shifting. They know MP3 players and similar devices are big business, and going after people who buy your music through legit channels with the sole aim of transferring that music to their portable player is just shooting yourself in the foot for no reason.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why I pretty-much don't browse the internet from work - with the laws in the US as they are all it takes is one misclick or typo and a zealous log monitor and you can be in VERY deep water.

Sailors like to be in deep water. *Shallow* water is dangerous.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent! My daily supply of loose/lose errors was dwindling.

The report doesn't mention downloading.. it mentions *copyright infringement* and that more often means uploading. Now most people may think they dont upload, but of course with torrents they do. Proving uploading is easier AFAIK?

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... inciting others to violence... urging others to kill people with steak knives gets a +4 insightful?

Seriously? While copyright infringement is normally a civil and not criminal matter, firebombing and stabbing certainly falls outside any moral grey area. And way to misquote TFA, "action against serial infringers" became "whether or not to take legal action".

I'm all about rights online, but the fearmongering and and nerdrage have got to be toned down.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It is also worth remembering that even if there were technically possible techniques for detecting infringing content using deep packet inspection, it would be absurdly expensive for ISPs to implement them.

If you're familiar with high-end network infrastructure products, you'll know that they are not cheap. This kind of DPI would require intercepting every packet and performing tests on it that would not be possible in real time. That would require a huge number of access points and dedicated hardware tools to operate on the scale of an ISP offering typical "up to 8MB/s" broadband to 400,000+ customers today. I'm not sure anyone in the industry currently makes enough hardware to do that, and even if one of the big suppliers could produce the required hardware in that kind of volume, the cost of buying it would make Google wince, never mind a typical UK ISP.

Bottom line: detailed analysis of every packet going over a major ISP's network to match the content against a database of infringing material is not practical, and it is not going to be any time soon. Any scheme that operates in practice is going to be based on some sort of very crude approximation (such as looking for certain filenames in certain specific places, as we've seen before) in the first instance.

Re:Piracy clarification

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

It's going to be impossible to put into practice.

Reminds of Bill Clinton's 2000 quote on China censoring the web "Good luck. That's sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." Well, Bill Clinton was wrong, and as the article note the Jell-o is now quite firmly on the wall, with hardly a single drip. Your comment is of a similar kind: "Ha, ha! I can't imagine any government/corporation/entity being able to censor the internet( that I became familiar with in the 1990s), therefore they won't be able to censor it(as it exists today)."

Well you are probably very, very, very wrong.

Remember this is the UK where 90%+ of all internet connections are censored by the Internet Watch Foundation. It's a minor step to retrofit this system to monitor urls for "infringement activity" and take steps accordingly. This was in fact the whole point of the child porn filter all along. Here's the relevant quote(the speaker is a copyright industry representative):

"Child pornography is great," the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. "It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites".

The IWF works. It is a perfect censor: completely inscrutable and opaque, accountable to no-one, no appeal against decisions, no overseeing body, no audits, no way of reviewing lists. It's like something right out of China or the old Soviet Union (Actually that's not really fair. Their censorship organisations were/are actually accountable). The brits embraced all this with open arms, so if you think they're going to raise a fuss about a similar system for music, I say you're living in a fantasy land.

We no longer live in a age of governments accountable to the people. We live in a age of corporations accountable to their shareholders. As such, it's no real surprise that the primary drive to control and censor people in the modern age is coming from the corporate world. The big difference between censorship systems like the IWF and this proposed copyright system is that they are, ostensibly, completely private enterprises. In other words, they are subject to no laws but those made by the corporations they serve. Ultimately, such a system will prove far more effective than anything a government could devise. The philosophy of the market and the laws of free enterprise will shield these new tools of oppression from all attempts to stop them, ironically as (the spirit of) these same laws will be what people will actually be fighting to win back.

This system is going ahead. It's going to work. Once it works in the UK, it will shortly thereafter be applied everywhere else. Once the system is in place, its remit will be extended and the internet as you know it and beleive it to be invincible will be shut down and turned into little more than a glorified cable network with a few Geocities-type sites and the odd decaying blog. Commerical copyright will ultimately prove to be the most effective force for censorship the world has ever seen. It's already more important than national security concerns. Money talks a lot louder than most people, or even states, can be bothered to.

Re:Piracy clarification

[ratboy666]

Simple

Downloading IS NOT Copyright Infringement. About the ONLY thing that is illegal to download (in someareas) is child-porn. TFA even indicates "file-sharing networkings" (emphasis mine) -- because simply downloading is not a problem.

Downloading is not Theft. Downloading is not Copyright Infringement. Downloading is not Piracy. Download is just Downloading.

Re:Piracy clarification

[crucible01]

I despise the "copyright industry's" greed and corruption and everyone who sides with "them". But you're fucking crazy and dangerous and should spend some quality time in a psych ward. You're talking about firebombing, killing and torturing people because they won't they don't want to let you download a T.V show? What the hell is wrong with you? Get help.

Re:Piracy clarification

[chowdahhead]

I agree. Although for driving, there are traffic signals that at least indicate what you should and should not be doing. There is not an equivalent on the internet for this, and there is a lot of free legal content intermixed with the illegal stuff. It may seem obvious to ./ readers but most people on the net aren't privy to the distinction. Furthermore, this measure still doesn't distinguish the user committing the crime from the registrant of the hardware/ip that the crime was committed with.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Joce640k]

They're much more likely to just look at the number/type of connections than start analyzing packets.

Packet inspection will only happen after you've been spawning dozens of connections on various ports for a few minutes and none of the headers were HTTP.

Re:Piracy clarification

[icedcool]

Wow... you know this is the point. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy: If the target port isn't 80 or 443, you're infringing.

You've never seen Skype in action, have you? It uses so many ports your head will be spinning.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Skype is infringement on the telecoms' profit. Same thing.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

Or perhaps, using the science of the "bleedin' obvious", he has had to compromise his ideals - just as the Conservatives have done.

Why people continue to expect a coalition government to, for instance, implement LibDem policies in full is just beyond me.

Re:Piracy clarification

[nurb432]

To give them credit it did say 'infringe copyright'.

Re:Piracy clarification

[currently_awake]

In practice there is no possible way to catch all copyright infringement online. I expect they will (instead) just log all p2p (bit torrent) activity. Remember that the ISP isn't getting paid for this, so cutting corners is the only practical solution.

Re:Piracy clarification

[crucible01]

Well I think we're an ocean apart and that's unfortunate because I'd love to give you the chance to "beat the crap out of me". I suspect that it might not go so well for you. Unless you produce a weapon like all cowards do. It's true I am a g33k, a "Loserboy nerd" but like all those with a functioning brain I realize that it's mind AND body (I list them in that order on purpose and I'm explaining that because I fear the subtly would be lost on you) . But that's a different discussion. If you had two brain cells to rub together you'd realize that it's much more effective, and lasting, to defeat an oppressive authority from the inside by reason and "reverse subversion" rather than by violence. I won't bother explaining why. You either understand that or you don't. But that would mean thinking and reasoning and planning further ahead than "what's for dinner tonight?" I know how that tires and strains minds like yours. Rant away cement head but try and understand you're only helping the "oppressors" argument and re-enforcing their resolve that the brutish and criminal downloading rabble must be contained and punished. I look forward to your next inane reply.

Re:Piracy clarification

[currently_awake]

I don't wish to be associated with such practices. Governments are quite good at handling such things, and people (the sheep) won't tolerate open violence unless they are being personally targeted by the government witch hunts. Having copyright associated with terrorism and violence is -exactly- the sort of thing the RIAA wants.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone whose day job is creating digital content, I want people to stop pirating content (and I want to strangle anyone who thinks they have some sort of moral high ground by illegally copying stuff - if it's overpriced, don't buy it, but don't copy it either).

Martin Luther King Jr proposed that it was the responsibility of citizens to go out and directly challenge unjust laws by breaking them, positing that being quiet would get us no where but the back of the bus. Your industry has stolen from the public, robbing us of works that should exist in the public domain. By actively infringing upon your copyrights (there is no piracy here, no boats are involved, and no theft either as no one is being denied the use of their original property) I am standing up for my rights and challenging the unjust perversions of copyright law.

Plenty of us would love to strangle you too, but our disobedience is more civil than that.. for now.

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Yeah. "Reason" and "Reverse subversion" worked so well for the Jews in WW2. They worked so well in occupied France. They're working wonderfully for Tibet. Oh, what wonders does "reason" for the Karen in Myanmar.
I may have 2 brain cells to work together, but you have one sodium particle. All your brain cells won't do shit for you if they're turned into mush by a cop's baton. And weapons DO have a use - which is to even the odds.

I say your inane appeal to "reason" is just cowardice. You'd rather stay home all safe and warm typing away at your oh-so-mighty computer while in the real world someone with truckloads of money decides what to do with your precious interwebs.

Re:Piracy clarification

[zmollusc]

I'll take that wager as I have googled Gerry Adams .

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Wait until enough people are blackmailed by the copyright goons, and you'll see. I doubt the industry types will get any sympathy, however. After the financial crash, bankers had to dress as plain as possible for a while to avoid unpleasant confrontation on the streets, for instance. When they'll hear about some big media type or copyright lawyer being found floating facedown in a river or beaten into organ donor status, they'll be cheering.

One thing Big Money will never buy: sympathy. As for governments being good at handling such things, should I remind you that leftist terrorism in Europe during the '70s (fortunately) failed mainly because their own political base didn't support them?

By the way, just to make things clear: I'm not advocating violence to defend "copyright infringement". I'm advocating violence to protect the netizen's RIGHTS: the industry pushes monstruosities like ACTA through, bypassing the democratic process and putting the populace before a fait accompli. Our rights as citizens are being defecated upon.

Time to defecate back, with some diarrhea.

Re:Piracy clarification

[crucible01]

Well done cement head. Here's a thought though. Maybe there would be less of the tragedies you site if there weren't so many who think like you. Because each and everyone of the perpetrators of those acts believes themselves to be morally correct. Just like you. Now off to your football match old boy. There's fun to be had. Oh and I just wouldn't be happy if I didn't ask....what's that you're typing away on?

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Turn your oughts into shalls. I AM morally correct, since I believe individual freedom trumps Big Money's interests.
I'll be enjoying my football match - tomorrow. Tonight is AD&D time, of course with REAL dungeons and REAL dragons because that's how real jocks play!
What I'm typing away on? Jocks don't need to type: they stare at the webcam and the computer types for them, or else. And there's no swibble in my living room. What about yours?

Re:Piracy clarification

[u17]

The creators don't need to be compensated for anything. If they can't come up with a business model that gives them money then they should change profession. It's not the responsibility of the general population to bend over and take it from abusive copyright holders, just because they "need" to be compensated.

Really, there are only two possible conclusions of this situation:

1. Abolish restrictions on non-commercial copying
2. Introduce total surveillance over all personal communication

I prefer number 1, which one do you prefer?

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

The big difference between censorship systems like the IWF and this proposed copyright system is that they are, ostensibly, completely private enterprises.

The difference between the IWF and the copyright system and what?

Or are your assuming that the IWF is not a completely private enterprise? It is. It is an industry body created to try and avoid government control. It has no statutory authority. Hence every time they check a reported child porn link they are breaking the law.

Really, it is quite bizarre that the establishment has chosen not to prosecute a bunch of individuals who spend their days surfing child porn. Whatever their motives.

Re:Piracy clarification

[westlake]

Im just curious on how it is illegal to download content that is copyrighted.

It becomes illegal when you haven't acquired your copy through a legitimate distributor.

When you download the movie that sells for $29.95 on DVD and Blu-Ray. That is a $1 Red Box rental. Admission price at the Drive-In, $8.

The price tag is there for everyone to see.

You are in possession of a pre-release screener of Avatar. You are not on the studio's distribution list. You cannot produce a signed NDA.

Re:Piracy clarification

[westlake]

Pass the word that for every user that is turned over to the industry mob, a price will be exacted: an office will be firebombed, an employee will be stabbed to death in a dark alley, an exec's family member will be kidnapped, tortured to death and the body never found. Have the message sent out that the streets are not safe anymore for these people. Yes, I know, you people in the UK have no firearms anymore but it only takes an IKEA steak knife to end someone's life and they would be begging for a bullet before the day's done.

JockToll is fighting for his right to save the $1 rental fee at the Red Box.

The old guy who services the Red Box is trying to pay the rent, keep food on the table. Who do you think has less to lose, who do you think is going to be the first to reach for the IKEA?

"Some men just want to watch the world burn." It worries me when a geek talks like The Joker and gets a mod up to +5.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

The good news is that one CRITICAL battle to Internet freedom was won in the mid 1990s, when cryptography was in its infancy. It could have been that Lieberman and Biden got their way and managed to get laws passed making it illegal to *possess* cryptography applications like PGP. We could be living in a world where all crypto is handled by Clipper ships where the criminals have zeroed out LEAF fields making their keys un-escrowable, while law-abiding citizens can be backdoored by anyone who knows how to break Skipjack.

The big battle has been won. Now, it is an issue of implementing cryptosystems on various level (application endpoint to endpoint, and IP level for starters) so a corrupt ISP can do nothing except throttle or block communication. What will be needed is not just a PKI, but a WOT system that even an internet plebe who does nothing but eat Cheetos and watch pr0n can understand.

Corrupt ISPs are bad not just for customers, but they actually will damage legitimate law enforcement efforts. As low hanging fruit gets nailed, all the real criminals will be going to encryption so no traffic can be monitored.

Re:Piracy clarification

[arkhan_jg]

Actually, part of the negotiations between the ISPs and the various rights agencies - that foundered, causing the government to introduce primary legislation as threatened - was the agencies wanting access to the DPI equipment logs already in use in ISPs for P2P throttling (i.e. sandvining), and for those not using it to have to fit it and use it for that purpose. As far as the agencies are concerned, it is the ISPs responsibility to police their network on behalf of the copyright industry. And the legislation was heavily influenced by the agencies; witness the Lords amendment for forcing ISPs to block 'infringing websites' - i.e. youtube - that was literally written by the BPI.

Where exactly did you think the agencies were going to get those logs to accuse people of infringement from? They're going to continue to use 3rd party agencies that monitor torrent streams, initially, but the legislation itself - as apart from the initial code of practise drawn up by Ofcom for the first stage which you describe - is pretty damn vague over what further technical measures can be introduced for both logging and cutting off connections, without further need to introduce primary legislation. It was only the Labour government's promise that any further discussion would occur at all in parliament, and now they're gone all we're left with is a very badly worded bit of legislation that was heavily influenced by the copyright agencies, a group who wanted to force all ISPs to put in DPI equipment and the final decision will not be Ofcom's, for sure.

Warning letters is only *the first step*, and more will be done if that doesn't solve the problem (which obviously it won't). As the legislation is drafted, there are much worse things in the pipeline in the next few years - including potentially making ISPs responsible for their customer's infringement if they don't take sufficient steps to monitor and kick them off the network, which is the situation I'm afraid of.

Let's also just gloss over the fact that making the line owner responsible for the civil offence (i.e. cutting off their service) without making any attempt to identify the actual infringer, or indeed provide solid evidence that an offence was even committed is drastically at odds with centuries of British jurisprudence.

Re:Piracy clarification

[pbhj]

Also, at least one big name music label is on record saying they won't prosecute people for format shifting.

It should be legal not in the purview of the media moguls to overlook our taking of this scrap or liberty if they wish. Sony, Apple, others clearly have a balance sheet reason for wanting us to buy more tech and put our music on it - I'm sure this /laissez-faire/ position is not for liberty but for profit.

Thanks for your comments though.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Interfect]

There's a difference between "acting" and "threatening to murder people". One of them helps to influence the political process, while the other gets you thrown in jail. I'll let you decide which is which.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree; I've had similar thoughts before. I get so sick of hearing "violence is never the answer", not because I wish it wasn't true, but because it is a naive statement. Politicians and businessmen are often on the same level of corruptions as the mafia (and even work with them; this is even more true in a lot of counties outside the US, and I'm not talking about small countries).

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I agree completely that the law should not give Big Media the choice in the first place. As the other part of my post did point out, changes are likely in this area sooner rather than later as well.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Dracophile]

the laws about driving and copyright are so ridiculously broad - and lightly enforced - that you're breaking the law most of the time

You mean selectively enforced, don't you?

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no such thing as usenet you dickhead.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

No...the industry thugs get their power from idiots who whine about not being able to buy the latest sputum RIGHT NOW. Let's choose a month and not buy music....instead, listen to local bands...listen to the radio, satellite Internet, street musicians or your own music collection...buy no music for that month. Pick another month for DVD's and BD's. If you cannot go a month without buying an entertainment product, spread your cheeks wide and recite love poetry-- breaking into impassioned opera every now and again...because you deserve it.

Anand7

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

your username says it all 'troll'.
I work in the video game industry. I geuss to pond scum like yourself, you automatically reckon I'm evil, and an 'industry thug', whilst happily helping yourself to games I worked on for 3+ years.
Go fuck yourself you arrogant little prick.
The more people liek you that get their patehtic asses thrown in jail for piracy, the better the world will be.
Fucking tool.

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Where was the candelmakers' and horse carriage drivers' right to pay the rent and keep food on the table when electric light and cars came along? Progress moves on and don't kid yourself, if the industry could throw the old guy to the wolves and spare the expenses on him they would do it in a heartbeat.

I fight for the right to NOT be monitored on my online activities, to NOT be put on watchlists for "suspicious activities" (there have been civil rights battles to stop the police from doing that in the past, you know), to NOT be muscled to pay up and shut up when Big Money decides to help itself to lovely heaps of my dosh.

I fight for the right to private property: my computer, my console, the software I bought with my money IS MINE, not property of some industry cartel with me having a user license that can be changed at their whim with me having no choice but to go along with their wishes.

I fight for the right to speak my mind, to say what I want, on the Internet. I'm not interested in the industry mafia's imprimatur. Control of communication is mind control.

And no, I'm no leftist radical. I'm as conservative as I can be: I want to conserve MY RIGHTS - at gunpoint if necessary.

What about you?

Re:Piracy clarification

[JockTroll]

Loserboy nerd, I BUY my videogames. If they're too expensive, I wait until the price have come down. None of your grotty little pieces of buggy software is worth full price anyway and I can wait. Sometimes they come out as coverdisks on the game magazines I buy, 1 and a half years after it has come out.

Get a piece of rubber hose about 10 meters long (to compensate for the negative length of your prick), shove your pathetic dick into one end (and don't forget the silicon paste or it will slip out like a needle in a tunnel), the other end up your nose and piss up your braincase.

And if you work for Ubisoft with its shitty DRM, douse yourself with gasoline and light a match.

Re:Piracy clarification

[halowolf]

I think a better approach would be to stop buying (and pirating) all their crap. If everyone, just stopped buying it for like 1 week that would send a message that we the people that give them all their cash are sick of what they are doing and want it changed. Nothing will make them roll over faster than not getting their money from their sales.

Plenty of examples of big business caving in to a well organised customer opposition to their practices. Like that good old McDonalds bun crisis, now that was an example of the man sticking it to big business that had hilarious results.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Rich0]

True - plus with loser pays the industry is going to be very careful about filing lawsuits left and right. Maybe if they manage to start winning a few at a time consistently they might go to that tactic.

In the US just being named in a lawsuit is going to result in penalties that are effectively bigger than what you'd get for most non-felony crimes. The verdict is just the final life-ruining blow - from day one you're paying more in legal costs per day than the fines associated with all but the most heinous crimes. Innocent or guilty - in the end it is just how much debt you end up in.

Re:Piracy clarification

[AmiMoJo]

It isn't entirely clear if uploading is even copyright infringement. Blockbuster or a public library can lend you a DVD and they are not held responsible if you copy it. In the same way it may be argued that simply uploading part of a file to someone else who requests it puts the onus on them to act legally with it.

Re:Piracy clarification

[vegiVamp]

So if I go watch a movie at a friends' place, and he's playing a pirated copy; I'm liable, too ?

Re:Piracy clarification

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're sending files back and forth to your publisher, and they aren't encrypted, you're probably a fool.

Take a look at the Accellion vmware app. Free, very simple to install and use, and best of all, https for all of your traffic.

(in no way associated to Accellion, only a satisfied "free" product user)

Re:Piracy clarification

[TheRaven64]

They host an FTP site, refuse to support anything sane, and their corporate firewall blocks access to my SFTP site, so I don't have much option.

Re:Piracy clarification

[Philip_the_physicist]

Yeah, that's a tactic which has worked very well for everyone who has tried it.

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, I don't live in the UK.

How about limiting damages to thrice the MSRP value of the infringed content for the first offense, and subsequently doubling (6 times the MSRP for second offense, 12 times the MSRP for third offense, and so on...)

This way, people's lives won't be ruined the first time they get caught infringing.

So, if the MSRP is $29.95 for a given movie (think how expensive Blu-Ray is), then on the first offense, that's $89.85. Or, maybe multiple movies were pirated on the first offense. Well, that is 3 times total MSRP sum.

Re:How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

because law is supposed to be based on actual damages, and that would result in it being like 97 cents. double each time, etc? sure. But let's start at reality.

Re:How about...

[Uranium-238]

That's what the first Anon was suggesting you retard. If the damages are based on the MSRP value then that would be the ACTUAL damages rather than letting the MAFIAA demand you pay in excess of £100,000 pounds for say 5 illegally downloaded items with say a total value of £100.

Re:How about...

[digitig]

IANAL, but as far as I can see doubling each time would mean that it is no longer "damages" and has become punitive, which takes it out of civil law and into criminal law. There are cases in UK law where punitive can be applied in civil cases, but they're very few and far between and unlikely to apply here. And there are cases in which copyright violation falls within UK criminal law, but they're essentially on the supply side, not on the receiving side so again they don't apply. So no, doubling each time would be a major violation of a basic legal principle, at least, without new legislation to criminalise receipt of copyright material. Expect anybody trying to introduce such legislation to get mail-bombed with lots of copyright music and video clips.

Re:How about...

[Opportunist]

There are cases in UK law where punitive can be applied in civil cases, but they're very few and far between and unlikely to apply here.

Not yet, my dear, not yet. If the content industry considers it a worthwhile idea, I'm sure a few bucks placed in the right hands will quickly blur the lines.

But why bother? They can already sue for whatever amount they want to, why should they ask to be limited?

"Violation of a basic legal principle"? Fffffft. We can extend copyright to life and beyond, do we look like we care about such petty things like "basic legal principles"?

Re:How about...

[digitig]

But why bother? They can already sue for whatever amount they want to, why should they ask to be limited?

Remember that this is about UK law. Although I'm sure the major players would love to try it, I'm not aware of any equivalent of the silly numbers in US cases being awarded in UK cases. (Silly actions, yes, silly numbers, no.) Maybe I've missed those cases?

Re:How about...

[Keeper Of Keys]

There are no details that I've been able to find about people sued by the BPI. Try it; the trail always goes cold. Maybe a few settled out of court, possibly nobody was actually ever threatened; they just announced they had threatened people in order to ride on the backs of the RIAA's climate of fear without risking the backlash.

Re:How about...

[pbhj]

There are no details that I've been able to find about people sued by the BPI. Try it; the trail always goes cold. Maybe a few settled out of court, possibly nobody was actually ever threatened; they just announced they had threatened people in order to ride on the backs of the RIAA's climate of fear without risking the backlash.

Certainly people have been sued, but I think you mean private individuals. The BPI tend to stick to hassling small businesses who play background music or police forces that have commercial radio playing in their offices, that's more profitable for them I guess.

However a simple first google turns up: http://www.out-law.com/page-4957 with reports of 28 UK individuals being sued. (out-law is a very good source for such things IMO).

Re:How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

There are no details that I've been able to find about people sued by the BPI. Try it; the trail always goes cold. Maybe a few settled out of court, possibly nobody was actually ever threatened; they just announced they had threatened people in order to ride on the backs of the RIAA's climate of fear without risking the backlash.

A friend of mine got a letter from the bpi. It just warned him they knew and would sue if they caught him again.

All he actually did was sold some of his old vinyl on ebay but because it was rare they assumed it was fake.

Re:How about...

[Keeper Of Keys]

Yes, I meant private individuals, of course, and I meant in connection with p2p.

That article (from 2004) is far from conclusive. All we know is that they tried to find out the identity of 28 filesharers. This was well publicized at the time. We don't know if the ISP's actually managed to identify the accounts in question, if they handed over the people's details, and what happened if they did. I would be genuinely interested if you could find proof that anyone was actually ever charged. I have tried to find out and hit a brick wall. It is my assumption that nothing happened, or they would be shouting from the rooftops about it.

Re:How about...

[Philip_the_physicist]

No, the actual damage to the rights-holder is far less than the MSRP, because that's adding in the retailer's mark-up, the wholesaler's mark-up, and the rights-holder's marginal production costs (if the band holds the rights for music, that would probably be $0), not just the marginal profit and the proportion of the fixed costs which would have been paid by that copy. It might even be possible to argue that the actual damages were less, because you would not have bought it if you could not pirate it (I know that's true in some cases, but it would be hard (and probably pointless) to argue), which brings the actual damages down to quite a small amount per copy (for an MP3 rip of a song, the damages would be considerably less than $1 per song, since the iTunes price is obviously profitable). Then there is the fact that unless you had a very large collection, the damages would be less than the limit for the small claims court, so they would not be able to bury you in legal fees either.

This is the situation in Australia, (although Sen. Conroy has said he wants to change the law) and there are still plenty of record shops (my local mall has I think two record shops, and the nearest big one has 3 record shops and 2 DVD retailers, as well as 2 big retailers), so piracy can't be doing that much harm to the recording industry.

Re:How about...

[clone53421]

This style would be great for actually hitting the problem without destroying people and giving them a change to learn and not do it again.

That’s exactly why they’ll never adopt it or anything like it.

They want utter life-ruin. They need utter life-ruin. Anything less than utter life-ruin doesn’t terrify the people they can’t catch enough to prevent widespread copyright infringement.

How? Passive traffic analysis?

[Sean]

Encryption will make this difficult. It'll be right back to making unsubstantiated claims that some IP address was serving up copyrighted content then demanding to know the subscriber details.

Re:How? Passive traffic analysis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, why don't torrent sites and trackers already run over https? Wouldn't that kill this idea entirely, plus any other ISP-based snooping?

Re:How? Passive traffic analysis?

[game kid]

If you use an https site that's not run by a bank, credit card issuer, school, or the guy who built your second home as a campaign favor, you are a dirty pirate and must pay.

Re:How? Passive traffic analysis?

[Znork]

Well, on the upside, these actions certainly encourage the adoption of encryption, vpns and distributed darknets on a much more massive scale. Soon enough the evolutionary pressure towards unmonitorable connections will have put private communications permanently out of reach of any agencies.

Encrypted f2f sharing is certainly the killer app for the emerging distributed social networks.

Re:How? Passive traffic analysis?

[gilgongo]

Most people I know here in the UK are simply installing VMs on their machines and having them connect to P2P and Usenet services via VPNs. I'm not sure whether DPI would be able to detect what they're downloading, but it would seem at least pretty difficult to do so. Bitorrent over I2P is also starting to speed up now too with more users (well, to the point where you can probably download an 8Gig movie file in about 7 days).

Re:How? Passive traffic analysis?

[adbge]

Indeed, why don't torrent sites and trackers already run over https? Wouldn't that kill this idea entirely, plus any other ISP-based snooping?

Many private trackers (maybe some public, too) already offer https. I'm not a security analyst so I'm unable to comment on how effective the provided services are, but there has certainly been a stab at doing just that.

Re:How? Passive traffic analysis?

[Burz]

Because that's only a solution to throttling by the ISP.

See my other post... http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1668842&cid=32389280

Re:How? Passive traffic analysis?

[nurb432]

Then they will just ban 'unapproved' encryption, and if you use it its assumed guilt. It wont matter what that data was, its illegal.

Sucks for my neighbour

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using his open wifi for years to download stuff

Re:Sucks for my neighbour

[Anonymous Coward]

I use my work VPN

Re:Sucks for my neighbour

[pbhj]

I've been using his open wifi for years to download stuff

But you'll be getting punished when his family and anyone else at his address gets cut off for life, so what's the problem.

Re:Sucks for my neighbour

[SST-206]

Be careful...

http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html

Infrigement.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is so hard to prove, you just might as well not try.

Re:Infrigement.

[TiberiusMonkey]

I doubt this is going to stop them, I also doubt it's going to stop them destroying someone's life based on little solid evidence.

"Music and film companies"

[Timmmm]

The biggest problems I see with this are:

a) How do they decide what is copyrighted? If *I* were to write a game/song/whatever and it got pirated I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even notice.
b) How do they decide who is a film or music company? What's to stop anyone getting access to this list? Conversely why couldn't smaller film and music companies access it?

Re:"Music and film companies"

[Opportunist]

a) Whatever film and music companies want. When in doubt, record it. Until someone takes it and uses it, there won't be any harm in recording that movie.avi was sent from A to B. Huh? What is that "privacy" you're talking about?
b) Whoever inserts sufficient coins.

Re:"Music and film companies"

[betterunixthanunix]

"a) How do they decide what is copyrighted? If *I* were to write a game/song/whatever and it got pirated I'm pretty sure they wouldn't even notice."

Welcome to the brave new world: individual creativity is ignored, because the major corporations are in control and do not care about individuals.

Re:"Music and film companies"

[Threni]

The biggest problem I see is what happens when people open their wifi connection and let anyone use it. The ISP/Record/Movie companies will have to get search warrants to see if the stuff allegedly being downloaded exists in the wifi owner's properties, or if it was downloaded by other people.

Re:"Music and film companies"

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think you have a hard time determining whether content is 'infringing' or not, search google for "YouTube's Summary Judgment Motion Against Viacom". If you read through the depositions and emails, MTVN can't even tell if they are about to issue a DMCA against themselves.....

great

[Anonymous Coward]

i will have to look again through those emails sent from my MP
it would be a shame if there was an x-originating-ip: mail header
and a way of injecting it into a torrent tracker ;)

That's fine...

[Manip]

It is great that people who create content might get paid for doing so (*genuinely). The real issue here is the publishers who's 1980s business models cannot adapt to the 2000s with high speed internet in every home and multiple mobile devices per person. In the long term these publishers will go out of business but not without dragging their feet ruining it for everyone else in the mean time.

Why can't I buy online instead of a DVD and get all the extra features?
Why does online content cost more than a physical disc?
Why when I buy online content can't I put it on my iPad, Google Phone, Laptop, and PC?
Why can't I watch Hulu and YouTube in another country? What's this international border junk doing on the internet?
Why is content priced unfairly between different countries (*even taking into account taxes, duty, and cost of living)?

Publishers claim they can't compete with free/"stolen" and while for the poor that is often true, there is a large percentage of people who would LOVE to pay for content but literally cannot. For example if I slept through last week's episode of a TV show, and cannot watch it online in my country -- what other options do I have? Wait for the DVD a year from now?

Re:That's fine...

[jez9999]

It is great that people who create content might get paid for doing so

Only if they're doing it through a successful business model, not having it extracted from people through an obscenely backwards law.

Re:That's fine...

[Bobakitoo]

"what other options do I have? Wait for the DVD a year from now?"
Exactly, that is the honest way to watch the show. You wait until it is avaible in your market. Been honest is a choice. I suggest you just stop caring about them. Stop bothering yourself with all those questions and just go full pirate! Arr!

Re:That's fine...

[Mathinker]

> I suggest you just stop caring about them.

I was with you 100% there.

> and just go full pirate! Arr!

Oh. And here I thought that there was a chance you'd continue: "and just watch free legal content, there's tons of it".

Maybe we should start a slogan campaign: "Media unavailable? Pirate it! Show you care!". (This is a hypothetical suggestion to show that some people might believe that copyright infringement is moral in certain circumstances, where they believe it actually benefits the rights holder).

Re:That's fine...

[Bobakitoo]

What is immoral is:

1. lying about obscene profit and claim to be losing money to priracy.
2. stealing gouvement and artist by employing clever hollywood accounting.
3. stealing, as in depriving the public domain, from its culture by copyrighting expired publication and ever extending copyright duration thru 4.
4. corruption, by lobbying for theire immoral need, they are undermining democracy.


I dont claim that pirating is moral, but i just dont care anymore. And neither should you since they dont care themself.

Re:That's fine...

[Opportunist]

Do you know why train stations are usually at the outskirts of towns? Nooooo, not because of the steam engines causing so much pollution. You're kidding? Back when these things were fashionable, the average steel mill in the middle of the town blew more black smoke constantly into the vicinity than the occasional train possibly could.

The reason is that hackneys and cabs were fearing that they'd go out of business. They immediately noticed that they will (and did quickly) lose all the business between towns. Nobody wanted to be transported like cargo when they can sit comfortably in the "luxury" of a train waggon. So they campaigned and clamoured, citing the most impossible and unbelievable dangers and threats of those horrible machines (look it up, some are quite entertaining. Like claiming that just watching "zip" by at that breathneck speed of 40 mph will send people into seizures and a delirium furiosum and that train tracks have to be shielded off so nobody gets to see these trains) until the politicians caved in and put the stations at the edges of towns, to protect their failing business.

Of course the whole deal completely floundered when cars started to become the next big thing (and again, accompanied by similar ridiculous laws, like requiring a man with a lantern running in front of the car to warn others). But by then the train stations were already at the outskirts of towns, and of course they stayed there because by then nobody wanted to spend the money to lay tracks through the growing towns.

A perfect example how an outdated business model keeps progress at bay with harebrained claims and artificial scaremongering. People don't want to adapt. That's nothing new. And companies even less so. Who likes to change his job? But standing in the path of progress for the sake of retaining your comfy job makes you nothing more than a sponger. You contribute nothing to the progress and expansion of the economy but you leech off it.

Re:That's fine...

[gilgongo]

It is great that people who create content might get paid for doing so (*genuinely).

Really? As far as I understand the music and recording industry at least, if you are an artist, you will have a contract with a publisher (eg a record company). That contract usually says you get some money up front, then some percentage of sales as determined by a collection agency like ASCAP. If the publisher shops a bunch of people downloading your stuff and gets the courts to fine them, then there is probably nothing in your contract that says you get any of that money at all.

So in other words, this isn't about protecting existing artists, it's about the publishing and recording industry making money for themselves. The publishers' line is that in fining and jailing transgressors, people will be terrorised into paying for music and films in the future, which of course does in theory put money in the pockets of artists, but that's a purely theoretical outcome. It may be just as likely that being terrorised means you simply watch and listen to less media - or at least less that's owned by litigious publishers.

Re:That's fine...

[Barrinmw]

Oooh, ooh, I got one. What is immoral? 1. Buying a DVD and trying to watch it on your computer only to find out it has DRM on it and then watching it on VLC anyway and now you opened yourself up to a lawsuit for trying to use a product you bought.

Re:That's fine...

[Barrinmw]

You are also forgetting that many recording labels require that the Artists cut is where the advertising for their music comes from so until their CD sells so many copies, they don't see a dime.

That is why if you truly like an artist, you don't buy their CD, you see them in concert, cause most of that money actually goes to them.

Re:That's fine...

[canajin56]

It still happens. In Calgary there's a commuter train system. There were plans to extend it all the way to the airport on the edge of town. The Cab Drivers Union protested, said that if it got built there would never again be a single taxi in the entire city for all eternity, the cabbies would all move and the union would bankrupt anybody who tried to run a cab company with scabs. So the plans were scrapped, if you want to leave the airport, you do it by cab or you walk. Only they don't even pretend to do it for other reasons like they used to. It's bald faced strong arming. "If you get in our way, we will kill you".

It's also been the same with music. When the player pianio was invented, the sheetmusic industry tried to have it crimanlized to own one, saying its only purpose was copyright infringement, and allowing it to exist would mean the absolute and utter end of music. Then when the wax cylandar was invented, same thing, had to be made illegal or it would destroy music utterly. Then it took off and the sheet music industry turned into the recording industry. Then the tapedeck was invented. Once again, if it was not made illegal, music would be utterly finished forever. Then music was fine, and in fact, bands like Metallica made a name for themselves only due to giving out tapes for people to copy and share with their friends. And now those same bands that only exist due to "copyright violations" are saying that the internet will utterly destroy music forever. Just like the MPAA said the VCR was worse than just murdering movie makers, because at least if you just killed them it would be over quick! Now, of course, they make most of their money from tapes and DVDs, so it's the internet that's the threat. Even though the make larger and larger profits each year, growing well faster than inflation. (And, in fact, although they make record profits, every single movie in the past 100 years has been a loss and has thus qualified for capital loss tax writeoffs. Being a loss also lets you not pay any money to people stupid enough to sign for a share of the profits. Sir Alec Guiness wasn't paid for Star Wars, Marvel wasn't paid for Spiderman or X-Men, all movies that "lost millions")

Re:That's fine...

[Opportunist]

They tried a similar stunt here. Only that the town decided to give them the finger and build the train to the airport. Taxis went on strike. So the town ran the public transport round the clock. You had to buy extra tickets for the "Nightline" and they were more expensive than the ordinary tickets, but still, where do you get by cab for 4 bucks? The people were happy, and, and that's the funny part, so was the town because the whole deal was actually profitable. The cab union caved in but the town decided to keep the night busses and trains running. Oh, and thanks for supplying us with that great idea, dear Union.

Never again they went on strike...

Re:That's fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree completely.

Re:That's fine...

[sixsixtysix]

so true. the internet was supposed to break down all these barriers, regions, zones, etc. want to play on the global network? price your shit globally or gtfo. same with out of print works. sell me a .iso download and let me print my own cover, that or i will get it wherever i can. honestly, you should HAVE to make it available to be protected. don't sell it in my country? maybe you should have. thre is no rteason not to have your movie open gloabalyy either. it is 2010, right?!

Re:That's fine...

[sixsixtysix]

or you just buy directly from the artist. if you can't, the artist probably isn't worth supporting.

FTFY

[jez9999]

UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who are suspected of infringing copyright

Re:FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

I want a copy so I can sue for slander if I'm on it.

Re:FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

What if isps issue Dynamic IPs? my country's ISP does that... So do they keep a record of the access times of the violations and the mac address as well? then what about mac address spoofs? and then again, if someone is accused of sharing file X, but has never heard of file X but has other infringing material A, B and C, how will they be prosecuted? i know most people getting caught with CP or infringing materials in the house get caught because the police came looking for other things and noticed the DVDs and stuff lying around.

What do?

Re:FTFY

[fluch]

Yeah, that emphasisement is precisely what I thought...

Re:FTFY

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.internetworldstats.com/eu/uk.htm

Shouldn't take too long to copy a few databases with a total of 48,755,000 records.

Plug in a random number generator and hook it up to mail merger software.
After all, the RIAA/BSA/what-have-you seem to suspect ALL of us, so let's just cut to the chase and we can all chip in to help these poor bastards pay for their hookers and coke.

Access to detailed information

[Anonymous Coward]

Music firms and movie studios can request details from the list so that they can decide whether to start their own action against serial infringers.

If music firms and movie studios can request such information i hope it is available to the account holder as well.

I imagine a large percentage of 'serial infringers' will be under age and living at home. Parents - and all account holders - should have access to this information if they and going to be handed on a platter to music firms and movie studios.

It does look like this assumes P2P is all piracy,

[qwerty8ytrewq]

there is no statements about how copyright infringement will be detected, and engaged with. At least there is some engagement with suggesting legal digital frameworks or 'alternatives' as the article calls them. Soon, the old-skool 1982 power-suit-jockeys will lose their tenuous hold on power, and the new wave of network savvies will start voting in some sane laws. Not soon enough from the looks of it.

This is simply wrong

[Budenny]

"Under plans drawn up by Ofcom, UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who infringe copyright, logging names and the number of times infringement took place. Music and film companies will then be allowed access to the list, and be able to decide whether or not to take legal action."

No, its not those who infringe. It is ONLY those who are ACCUSED without proof of any kind in any forum which is legitimate to establishing the truth of that accusation.

We should consider similar cases. Do we want to draw up lists of those who three people accuse of speeding, and on the fourth accusation, take away their driving licenses?

The utterly ridiculous and anti-democratic aspect of this is the following: there is a move in this particular case to substitute accusation for proof. This is wrong. We need to treat all violations of law in the same way: require proof before sanction.

Re:This is simply wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a policy - and without regard to the law - is a good reason for abolishing Dfcom.

Whatever happened to EU Privacy?
What about the expenses scandal - there was a list but hey different stroke for different folks.
How about 3 falsified expenses and you are named.

So many principles of natural justice and equity are recklessly being trashed. I don't know about illegal either - it is at best a would-be unproven civil matter, yet names are being made available?
If defamation is bad - how does one think drawing up lists is any different?

Compare this with *breaking the law and committing a criminal offence* for
say naming and posting the abode of released criminals, peodaphiles - although the legality of gag/supression orders is under a cloud.

There is no benefit to Britain by doing this. The only course of action is to file this in a round bin, and save some money by firing those participated.

Re:This is simply wrong

[rtb61]

Via the proposed OFCOM list on one hand we have people suspected of infringing copyright and on the other hand we have proof of ISPs monitoring, recording and invading the privacy of citizen upon a nationwide scale. That diseased myopic organisation is proposing that private corporations have the right to monitor and record every action of their customers. What next those tin foil hatters, cameras and microphones in cable TV boxes to monitor people in their homes, compulsory mobile phones that cannot be turned off and can be activated by OFCOM memebers to monitor suspect activity.

There is absolutely no way an ISP should be aware of what a customer is doing on the internet, it is none of their fucking business. They provide a service, the transmission of data at the defined bandwidth via interconnected services. It is not their place to intercept record and, monitor private communications of their customers.

That POS http://www.ofcom.org.uk/ organisation is proposing the trappings of a totalitarian corporate state, where corporate masters will monitor all your and your families digital communications for anything "THEY" deem to be infringing upon their profit and control humanity. I find it disgusting to see how readily greedy socipaths will sell away the freedoms and rights of their fellow citizens and even their future descendent all to line their own pockets and feed their ego today, basically an ideology of fuck the future I want more now, now, now.

Re:This is simply wrong

[qwerty8ytrewq]

True this is wrong. I do however like your ..(sarcastic I know).. idea of a system that uses Mod Points for grassroots traffic enforcement. On the many occasions a dangerous driver has narrowly missed me and then sped off into the distance, I have wished I could add a strike to the three, for example, that are required to suspends their license. Sorry to mess with your car metaphor, but a driving license is a priviledge, not an inalienable right. I do agree with the spirit of your argument, that for citizen rights, like access to the internet, freedom of speech, the onus should be on proving guilt.

Re:This is simply wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of this stupid law, I suggest that all copyright infringers own up and turn themselves in to the authorities now.

Dear customer

[91degrees]

It has come to our attention that you have been frequently accused of piracy. As a large ISP we are required to log this information. However, we would be willing to transfer your account details to our wholly owned sister company which currently only has 399,998 customers and has no policy of logging your information.

Re:Dear customer

[Mathinker]

> which currently only has 399,998 customers

From the summary:

>> only initially(emphasis mine) applies to ISPs with 400,000 customers or more.

Anyway, we all know that the more the fight against piracy revs up, the more pirates will find ways to circumvent the enforcement. And the worse and worse PR this will generate for the media companies.

We live in interesting times, as the Chinese might say.

Re:Dear customer

[tumnasgt]

Not only will pirates find ways to circumvent the the enforcement, ISPs will too.
It costs the ISPs money to track all this data, they aren't getting paid for it, and customers will either have no opinion or be extremely against the monitoring. Lots of ISPs are willing annoy their customers if it increases their profits, but I have never heard of an ISP (or any company) that likes having to pay to reduce customer satisfaction.

Re:Dear customer

[Endophage]

There is at least one ISP I read about recently that is planning to do exactly this without charging users. It was to get around the 3 strikes rule in Ireland I believe. Once a user was given 2 strikes, the company silently moved them to their sister company. The law did not require that the 2 existing strikes followed the user so they were essentially clean again, even if they were eventually moved back to the original company. Apparently the law permitted a service provider to move customers to another provider as long as there was no charge and no change in price or service. I'm sure you can find the story somewhere on /.

A good quote

[Anonymous Coward]

American movie makers have always held a deep reverence for composers whose works lie in the public domain — Cecil Adams

Harvesting low hanging fruit?

[lostsoulz]

So, some of the mooing masses that use the larger ISPs will find themselves targeted for file sharing. Will this really make any appreciable difference to the issue of downloading illegal content? This is no more than an attempt to target the low-hanging fruit (porn downloading pun unintended.) Tech-savvy downloaders will improve their attempts to maintain online anonymity. The rest of the great unwashed will continue as before...and a few may even find themselves excommunicated from the 'net. Until the content providers embrace a little more flexibility, allow us to consume their garbage in a more convenient fashion and generally act their age, this bizarre legislation will only cause more problems than it solves. On the ass-ometer scale (where Australia's great firewall hits a 9 out of 10,) Baron Mandelson's swansong is worth an 8 - annoying, but not the biggest challenge to common sense.

Re:Harvesting low hanging fruit?

[Anonymous Coward]

"mooing masses" LMAO

Re:Harvesting low hanging fruit?

[gilgongo]

I also think it may be an example of "copyright theatre" - OFCOM is seen to "do something" which in reality has very little effect on anything at all, and - crucially - puts the legal ball in the copyright holders' court. You wanna sue somebody you suspect of downloading your movie? Go ahead and have lots of fun proving it, just don't complain that OFCOM got in your way.

It just could be an example of some crafty legislation to get the crazy music and recording industries off the government's back while actually protecting the voting public. Nice!

Re:Harvesting low hanging fruit?

[horza]

It's putting the cost of policing onto the ISP's, and getting them to inspect and log every data transaction a citizen makes and tie it in a non-anonymous way to that individual. That is more than theatre. It is expensive, impractical, ripe for abuse, and reverses the burden of proof.

The job of a government department isn't to get somebody off their back, it is to look after the future best interests of the country. It is a complex balancing act, including freedoms, privacy, encouraging innovation, increasing economic output, building a solid legal framework for business, and facilitating trade. I cannot see how building a catalogue of media seen and heard by each voter can possibly be construed as protecting them.

Phillip.

List details

[Alwin Henseler]

What's to stop anyone getting access to this list?

I'd be more worried about what's recorded in that list - I don't read anything in the article that says person-identifying data is hidden / kept in a separate, inaccessible list until a court orders such data be handed over.

If all details are free for checking by 3rd parties, that would mean they could get private and/or identity data without any involvement of a court. Basically sidestepping any legal checks & balances. That is bad for many reasons. And of course once they have such data, they have it, period.

IMHO, ISP's should only turn over private/identity data on direct order of police/intelligence authorities in acute, life-threatening cases (terrorism, kidnappings, that kind of thing). For non-lifethreatening cases, anyone fingered should be able to defend themselves, and a court deciding, before the other party gets private details. Anything else should be regarded as careless handling of customer data on the part of the ISP. And I wouldn't want to be a customer of an ISP that handles private data (mine or anyone else's) carelessly.

Re:List details

[infolation]

I don't read anything in the article that says person-identifying data is hidden / kept in a separate, inaccessible list until a court orders such data be handed over.

ofcom's website says exactly this:

ISPs will have to record the number of notifications sent to their subscribers and maintain an anonymised list of alleged serial copyright infringers.

Copyright holders can then request information on this list and pursue a court order to identify serial infringers and take legal action against them.

Legislating one's business model into relevance

[Vekseid]

After all, they can't compete legitimately. They're still going to run into the old issue of respected laws needing to be respectable. The more onerous and invasive they get, the more people will notice.

Proxy, proxy, proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

Like it's not pathetically easy to proxy yourself out of the whole mess. For those inclined a small VPS can be obtained for a few dollars a month in one of the more liberal european countries such as the Netherlands or Sweden, or if you feel the need go further afield to the obscurity of Panama, Hong Kong or Malaysia. Setting up Squid server and SSL tunnel is then the work of less than an hour. Alternatively if that's too complex there's any number of companies offering private non-logged VPNs for a similar price.

If the media companies pursue this then all that's going to happen is it'll be increasingly lucrative for companies to set up anonymising VPN services in regimes around the planet where their copyright writ doesn't run or is practically impossible to enforce. Instructions for how to use these will pass from geeks to common knowledge, and furthermore because people will be paying a few dollars a month for the proxy they will be more inclined to use it to "get their money's worth", and hence 'piracy' will actually increase.

Of course the sensible alternative would be to provide a widespread service such as Spotify which would effectively do the above but legally, but the media companies are too short-sighted to see that.

Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

Paying for piracy kind of defeats the whole idea of stealing stuff for free.

Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

Like it's not pathetically easy to proxy yourself out of the whole mess. For those inclined a small VPS can be obtained for a few dollars a month..

..Do you actually believe that people downloading songs you can get off iTunes for about a dollar are going to pony up a fee for a proxy? Or that even a significant percentage of them have heard of a VPS?

Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's hardly the point of piracy. Copying isn't theft anyway, but nowadays drm-free "pirated" stuff is higher quality than the drm-banjaxed version.

Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy

[pbhj]

Big media to your ISP: "Connection to a foreign terminated VPS, looks like they might be a copyright infringer, sever them, bleed them, ... err, I mean cut them off from the internet."

Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what I'm doing now. I've setup Squid on a non-UK dedicated server and us stunnel to tunnel all my traffic through it. All completely encrypted until it's well out of the country. Thinking of chaining it through another out-of-UK box if things start to get worse here, or in other parts of Europe.

Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy

[mlts]

Barring either of those, I wonder with the advent of Linux VPS hosting that more people won't go in and create a Linux VM whose sole purpose in life is to host VPN services where all your Internet traffic goes to that remote place, including DNS. Perhaps at the minimum have a HTTP or SOCKS proxy.

From what I see, the jury is still out on commercial proxy services and packet log retention. There have been allegations of some not just logging packets but keeping IP logs permanently. Other proxies have a distinct log rotation policy because they need to keep some type of audit trail in case they get hacked. However, as of now, the only person I know that has ended up facing civil/criminal charges and caught while using a proxy was the guy who allegedly accessed Palin's Yahoo E-mail account.

Commercial proxy services are important to security. I use a proxy server when on my laptop, because there are a lot of dodgy open wi-fi points, and having a connection to strongvpn.com or another proxy means that a blackhat who owns the wireless AP only sees the encrypted VPN traffic and can't do much to the connection other than throttle or kill it. Since most Web based E-mail sites (except for Exchange OWA and Gmail) only use SSL for authentication, an attacker who owns an AP can get a lot of information about an individual, and a more sophisticated attacker could hijack the connection and use the account as launching points for ID theft. Having a proxy means that only the people between the VPN service and the E-mail service can sniff the connection, and there is far less chance of an attack happening there as opposed to a compromised wireless AP run by a blackhat, or a dodgy local ISP.

Since I don't use proxies for P2P, I have zero clue how well they actually will protect someone in case someone tries to trace an IP through one. Maybe someone else who is more clued into this might have the answer.

Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy

[Anonymous Coward]

Half the fun is the risk. The other half is amassing the biggest collection in order to be the best and "win" filesharing.

In many ways filesharing is like an addiction, although most file sharers would of course deny that they have a problem. They come up with all kinds of crap to justify it, some of them might even become so deluded that they start to believe it.

Fine, just be prepared to pay for my time

[bedouin]

Interestingly, I could be placing my own copyrighted works on-line for download -- even while selling it, but get prosecuted for distributing my own content. One could say -- no big deal, just appeal the decision. That's another issue though: a few hours or days of my time should not be wasted over someone else's mistake. At that point they should be reimbursing me for damages.

Crooked politics

[Alwin Henseler]

It is great that people who create content might get paid for doing so (*genuinely). The real issue here is the publishers who's 1980s business models cannot adapt to the 2000s with high speed internet in every home and multiple mobile devices per person. In the long term these publishers will go out of business but not without dragging their feet ruining it for everyone else in the mean time.

No the real issue here is that publishers have enough power to corrupt our political system. To the point where ridicilous/draconian laws are passed in a so-called 'democratic' society. Creating an enormous gap between those laws, and what an average person feels is reasonable.

In a proper democratic society, movie studios' deep pockets & their lobbyists should make exactly 0 difference, copyright/patent/trademark issues should be decided on hard economic evidence and/or scientific merit, and optimal length for those calculated (and lacking hard evidence, be abandoned). Outdated business models would simply die in the free market. None of which is happening. It's okay for anyone (including music business & movies studios) to have an influence on our political systems, but that influence should be limited to arguments, and the number of people working in those businesses (as part of the total population), not how much money they spend on lobbyists, or throwing all-paid private parties for 'friendly' politicians.

a short explanation

[petes_PoV]

First of all, forget about the sorts of examples you've cited. That's not what it's about. Really it's only about emerican film and music companies wanting to punish (as opposed to simply recover any lost revenue) who look at their products but haven't paid them before doing so. The basic problemm with all f this is that if you download a movie then they're after you not just for the £10 or so that a top selling DVD goes for, but they want to ruin you - take your house, all your money and make it impossible for you to live normally forever after that.

Although I'm not an expert, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a convicted rapist has a less onerous punishment placed on them than someone in the grips of these film studios.

Re:a short explanation

[Rich0]

Agreed. What's wrong with a $200 fine like you have with speeding? It isn't like people go flying down the streets at 200mph with impunity since they don't mind paying the fines 3 times a week. Really, even just a slap on the wrist will tend to moderate bad behavior when you're talking about stuff that isn't all that serious.

Suppose a 15-year-old downloads some songs - either they or their parents are at risk of a seriously damaged life (and I mean effects that will last decades even with bankruptcy "protection" / etc). If a 15-year-old stabs somebody with a knife the penalties are FAR less onerous. The parents won't be prosecuted at all, and the child will be tried as a minor and will have an expunged record in many jurisdictions. If the kid turns himself around he could still have a fairly normal life. A 15-year-old who commits homicide might end up in worse shape, although I suspect a 15-year-old rapist could do better. We're effectively placing teenagers downloading music in the same category as aggravated assault, rape, and murder. I looked up somebody I knew who was convicted (as an adult) of simple assault and associated minor crimes (first time conviction) and they paid $4k and a year's probation.

Re:a short explanation

[misexistentialist]

Precisely because file-sharing is victimless small fines wouldn't be particularly effective. Because no damage is done and no evidence produced there is basically no moral or pragmatic reason to refrain from doing it. The situation is similar to penalties for drug offenses where the only way to temporarily stop someone from selling plants to eager customers is to put them in jail for a couple of years. Most speeding on the other hand is done under rather limited circumstances because people naturally don't want to die or damage their cars (and if you are caught too many times you will have your license suspended, which is the kind of punishment that the copyright industry is interested in).

Even though lesser punishment is ineffective, courts should of course still rule that these huge fines are "cruel and unusual," but the courts are rarely concerned with justice.

Quick!

[Anonymous Coward]

set up encrypted torrents of live images of free operating systems!

A couple of Linux distros (GNU or otherwise), some BSDs and a GNU Hurd or two plus a smattering of smaller ones (FreeDOS comes to mind) should do fine.

Re:Quick!

[mlts]

IIRC, even the CentOS tracker supports encryption. Granted, it is only RC4, but the reason it is present is to prevent an attacker in the chain from attacking what is being shared directly. Of course, the tracker will know IP addresses, as well as everyone in the swarm, so the encryption is useful for dealing with arbitrary throttling, but not hiding where one's origins are.

Muahahahahahah

[Tei]

I think, I am going to embed something like this on all my websites.

<img src="http://megaupload.com?downloading=jkjkhdfgsjdfgiuyiumnsdfg&#241;lkgsdfg" style="display:none"/>

Just make sure....

[Joce640k]

Just make sure all your windows are closed when you play the radio in your car and you should be OK.

Re:Just make sure....

[xOneca]

That may sound crazy, but here, in Spain, things are getting somewhat like that.

Spanish RIAA (SGAE) has people going to small businesses like hairdresser's or gyms to see if they're playing music (or radio) and employers have to pay a fee if they're. The odd thing is that if customers were listening to portable media players with headphones, they aren't required to pay.

All your asylym is belongs to us

[amn108]

No worries, we, inmates, will soon run the asylum.

I see two problems with this

[Opportunist]

First, most P2P protocols work by the idea of "pushing" instead of "pulling". I.e. a connection that I establish is used to "push" my content towards the receiver. The idea is to discourage people from using NATing routers to simply block off those that would like to download from them (because, well, that way you'd be blocking the incoming content, not the outgoing).

But that means I'm not downloading anything. I provide someone with the ability to upload. If this is illegal, anyone running an insecure FTP server (knowingly or unknowingly, like, say, a Linux bos being run by an idiot who can't configure it properly) is due as well. Anyone here willing to join me in a port scan of politicians' machines to see whether we find a server that accepts incoming connections? And then fill it with ripped midget porn? Or, can anyone provide midget porn, I didn't have any use for it 'til now.

Aside of that, it smells a lot of "guilty until proven innocent". A list gets assembled and the MAFI-UK can pick and choose who to sue. Anyone else feeling like this gets rubberstamped "guilty" fairly easily unless you somehow manage to stand up in court against it?

Re:I see two problems with this

[Endophage]

Thing is, it's much more illegal to supply ("push") copyright data than it is to receive ("pull") that same data (if of course, relative legality existed but hopefully you get the point, the rights holders are more interested in taking down the suppliers rather than the consumers which is why you end up with leechers on torrent networks).

And then the smart ones will find a way to profit

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.ipredator.se/?lang=en

Blatent abuse of their power

[gilesjuk]

Ofcom are a telcoms regulator. Their job is to ensure competition in the telcoms sector in the UK. They were set up to keep the privatised BT under control to stop them abusing their dominance (they still own a lot of the UK's telephone network).

Their job is not to assist in copyright enforcement.

Re:Blatent abuse of their power

[Anonymous Coward]

Ofcom are a telcoms regulator. Their job is to ensure competition in the telcoms sector in the UK. They were set up to keep the privatised BT under control to stop them abusing their dominance (they still own a lot of the UK's telephone network).

Their job is not to assist in copyright enforcement.

hello speaking as a bt home customer they are no good anymore than virgin
  or any others all they sell is faked up 2mbps with 123kbps upload they may
  have hispeed network somewhere, but i believe they rent that service to the
police and other high paying civility.....big brother is watching ya!!??
  smacks of to me

Re:Blatent abuse of their power

[Anonymous Coward]

Their 'official' job is as a regulator.

In truth the board and executive is stuffed with people who have worked in the industry and who favour business over customers. You have the politicians to blame for that.

Sure they publicise the odd case here and there when they help a customer, but for every customer they help, there are a thousand who they fob off with jargon and phony arguments about the costs of supplying the services and the burden on the suppliers.

2 months to respond

[Anonymous Coward]

From TFA:

Ofcom has begun a consultation exercise on the proposals which will conclude on 30 July.

So I guess there's time to do something. Or maybe the new Government will
squash this? They've already dumped the ID card thing.

Any Deep Packet Inspection scheme is inherently a violation of privacy.

Write to their complaints email !!

[Anonymous Coward]

graham.howell@ofcom.org.uk

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/accoun/complaints/

Re:Write to their complaints email !!

[JockTroll]

Don't waste time with e-mail. Send a nice boompack to their snailmail address. Nothing says "capisce" like an employee with his hands blown off.

Re:Write to their complaints email !!

[hack slash]

I hope you were joking, it would just give the industry the ability to label pirates as terrorists, making the whole situation a fuck load worse.

Re:Write to their complaints email !!

[JockTroll]

They'll do it anyway eventually. At least let's have some of the perks of being a terr-ow-rist like, terrorizing them.
If terrorists would really target the media industry mob and their lawyer goon, it would be too nice. Would they act so smug in their highrises and offices, knowing that at any time a bomb or bullet could end it all? Living in fear, 24/7? Never knowing if their kids will come back from school? Having to worry about their elderly parents, alone in their homes?

And that's only their bosses. What about the shareholders? Knowing that owning a share in Big Media is a death sentence, and wondering when it will be carried out? Who knows, you're walking in the street and all of a sudden a flash of pain in the side, or you're eating at a fancy restaurant and after a couple of bites you feel this numbness in the limbs and your head spins...

And the employees. You come home all alone when some threatening types surround you and they don't want your money, oh no...

Now, wouldn't it be sweet? Come on, admit it. There's no shame in that. It's just payback time.

Only a matter of time...

[History's Coming To]

"Hello? Canonical? UK-ISP here, we've got loads of people downloading your 'Ubuntu' programme for free over P2P, do you want their details to sue them? What? Don't be silly....no, seriously, we spent a lot of money getting this data for you...."

Take a leaf from Gandhi's playbook

[bzipitidoo]

Gandhi beat the Brits without violence.

In this case, get everyone's name on the ISP's list. Then I wonder if a "reverse" class action is possible? Soon as anyone is sued, turn it into a massive class action defense. If class action isn't possible, the sheer numbers will overwhelm the system.

Further actions would be things like boycotts. Not just boycotts of the music industry, but of the tax system and court system. The government will back down in a big hurry if half the nation is supposed to appear in court, and does not. Or does, but refuses to pay any judgements. Also, the ISPs may need reminding who their customers really are. Are they going to risk losing ALL their customers and going out of business, for being too willing to play along with this scheme to turn everyone into criminals? ISPs that fight this law and refuse to keep a list will get business, ISPs that go wobbily will be downsized perhaps all the way to oblivion.

Elect a few Pirate Party members. That'll scare the politicians, and they'll run away from their industry buddies faster than Chamberlain appeased the fascists. Everyone is so scared of piracy anyway that it won't take much to convince them to back off the insanity for fear of bringing down the entire system of copyright.

Re:Take a leaf from Gandhi's playbook

[JockTroll]

Gandhi didn't "beat the Brits". The Brits saw that it was better for them to let him be and let go of India than antagonize the entire world opinion. Some decades earlier he would have been quietly disappeared. Nowadays he would be labelled an EEEVUL TERR-OW-RIST (GASP!) and be disappeared, deported or executed among the cheers of a pant-crapping populace. The media would be against him, so he would automatically lose.

And that's the situation now: the media will not come to your side, and should the Pirate Party manage to get some more seats, Big Money will simply buy the government into declaring the party illegal and to be dissolved by law. They have that power, and they're not afraid to use it. The politicians will never run away from the mighty industry: their billions are worth more than millions of citizens who can be safely ignored anyway. How did those protests against the war in Iraq go, by the way?

But try to jail an entire population, and they'll see.

Re:Take a leaf from Gandhi's playbook

[currently_awake]

Money is the key. Pick the weakest (least amount of money) recording company in RIAA and boycott them till they agree to stop. Rinse and repeat till the whole pack is down. The other method is to make enforcement of this so expensive for the ISP that they refuse to participate in the whole thing without compensation. Then watch as gov/riaa/isp fight over who pays.

Re:Take a leaf from Gandhi's playbook

[zmollusc]

Gandhi only got anywhere because of the good nature of his opponents. Look how far hunger strikes got against Stalin (Stalin abolished hunger strikes. The number of days on hunger strike were added to your sentence, if you starved yourself to death, good riddance).

Infringing copyright is not illegal

[Anonymous Coward]

"Under plans drawn up by Ofcom, UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who infringe copyright, logging names and the number of times infringement took place."

That's fine. They can go ahead and log whatever they want on their network system, as long as they understand that there are circumstances where infringing copyright is illegal, such as when fair use applies, if the copyright holder says it's okay, etc. If they want to spend the money to log stuff, why not? But they've got to realize that simply logging the passage of copyrighted material over their network does not determine anything about the legality or illegality of that activity. "Infringe" != "guilty". Furthermore, from a technical perspective we all know that what they're going to get (IP addresses) will be pretty meaningless anyway. "Names", "those who infringe"? Don't make me laugh.

"Music and film companies will then be allowed access to the list, and be able to decide whether or not to take legal action."

That's not fine. Why should select copyright holders have the right to see such lists, and why music and film companies? I personally have loads of things on the web for which I have copyright -- pictures, text, program code, all sorts of things. In principle, why shouldn't *I* also have the ability to contact my ISP and ask them who is downloading my copyrighted stuff? Why should "music and film" get special attention? And if they do get special attention, why shouldn't *THEY* be the ones to pay for the logging costs?

They shouldn't have access to that information unless they get a court order on a case-by-case basis, just like I can't call up the phone company and ask them for the list of people who have been dialing 867-5309.

Re:Dear customer ... we've grown too big

[petes_PoV]

So when they click over from 399,999 to 400,000 and have to start spying on people I would guess that they have to notify all their existing customers of the change. Which would lead to a mass exodus (or not) which would drop the number back below 400k again .. and so on ...

it would also be interesting to know if they would then be able to enforce minimum contract lengths, given that they would have tomake significant changes to their contract conditions. Maybe we'll start to get closed memberships of ISps when they get too close to the limit, rather than having customers desert them.

Flat-shares

[Endophage]

I'll be interested to see how they deal with student flat shares. Personally I don't use P2P programs as I use Spotify for music and I would honestly rather own films on DVD (although I wait until they're on special offer in HMV, you can get DVDs a year after release for £5 now!). However, for the last 3 years I've been the person in my flat share to sort out the internet connection and all 3 years I've had at least one flat mate that is a very heavy bit torrent user. I wonder how the ISP and copyright holders would deal with that situation...

How exactly is this supposed to work?

[Adrian Lopez]

How will ISPs be able to tell the difference between infringing and non infringing transfers of copyrighted material? Do they intend to log everything a user downloads and let the copyright holders decide for themselves which downloads and uploads are infringing and which are not? Considering the large number of legitimate downloads and uploads, this would doubtless be a huge privacy violation. Or perhaps they intend to flag only those works that are listed somewhere as "do not distribute except through [domain list]"? Such a system could easily be foiled by encryption and would increase ISP computing costs (to be passed on to customers) as every single download is checked for infringing content.

Any way you slice it, it's simply a bad idea.

Anonymized networks like I2P

[Burz]

See my sig for the link.

A couple years ago I searched intensively for anonymous networks that could candle a variety of traffic (as opposed to Tor, which handles little more than web) and came up with I2P. It is a FOSS darknet which means you're communicating anon only with other I2P users, but the good news is that the network has grown a lot in a past couple years. Another upside is that it is supposed to be more secure/anonymous than Tor by design and unlike Tor, I2P is much more decentralized and would be harder to take down.

The FOSS distributed filesystem Tahoe-lafs just got ported to I2P and there is more in the works. Right now iMule and ported bittorrent clients are the most popular P2P on I2P.

Encryption alone doesn't work

[Burz]

You need to link up to an anonymizing network with some kind of routing (like onion routing) that creates a level of anonymity... see the link in my sig for a good example of such a network.

The reason encryption alone doesn't work (turning encryption on as a connection requirement in a torrent client) is that anyone from the ISP to the police to the MPAA can simply join the swarms the same way you do. From the standpoint of large corporations, that requires very little effort and may even be less complex than setting up special packet-inspecting equipment to scan unencrypted traffic.

Adding simple encryption only makes it hard for an ISP to throttle or attempt disconnection on P2P traffic. It doesn't prevent anyone from easily discovering that you're uploading.

What's worse

[Snaller]

"'"It is imperative that a system that accuses people of illegal online activity is fair and clear," said Anna Bradley, "

Overlooking that its even more important to have fair laws which precludes the amoral and unfair copyright laws.

It's been done

[swm]

I seem to recall there was an organization that used those tactics in Britan.
Irish Republican something-or-other.
Some dispute over a piece of Ireland.

I haven't heard much about them lately,
but they're probably still around somewhere.
You might want to check on how those tactics worked out for them.

Re:It's been done

[JockTroll]

I'd say they worked out pretty well, since their activity led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty that put an end to British rule on Eire. ;)

Or do you believe the Brits would have folded tents and run if the Irish had come to them begging for a little freedom pretty please? Those who have the power and know it, see absolutely no need to come to the negotiation table. Why should they? They can only lose. They must be forced to negotiate - or to capitulate - by the use of force.

Right now the media industry knows it has the power: it has the politicians in their pockets, it can bully entire states into changing their laws (see Sweden), it has the economic and legal power to blackmail and extort thousands of citizens with either the indifference or the complicity of the State.

To force them to negotiate or, better, to defeat them no amount of technological savvy can avail us. They have more assets that we have, and they can make any technical countermeasure illegal by simply buying a new law. Where does cryptography help you when you can be forced to reveal your passwords or go to jail? And it will become worse.

The only thing that can turn the tide now is to put fear into them: fear for their lives, fear for the lives of their families. Outlaws do not obey laws by definition, so no law bought by them will save their hide. We'll see if they value their money more than they value their lives.

Re:It's been done

[Threni]

> I haven't heard much about them lately,
> but they're probably still around somewhere.

They're part of the NI government, running the country, fuckwit.

Re:It's been done

[Xest]

"You might want to check on how those tactics worked out for them."

Quite well, they're running Northern Ireland nowadays.

Hint: Many of the top names in the devolved Northern Irish parliament are ex-terrorists.

Class action tort?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how the legal system works in the UK, but here in the U.S. these large ISPs would be opening themselves up to large class action litigation from people wrongly accused. Perhaps this would offer some discouragement to these ISPs if they have very large legal bills to attend to due to these lists. All you would have to do is make an example out of one or two of these companies and the rest would likely fall into line.

A real anonymizing service can't renege

[Burz]

...on their policy by running to the MPAA or the government (both of which have megatons more money to throw around than VPN subscribers, money that's welcome in any country I might add). And if the authorities decide to play whack-a-mole with uncooperative VPN services surely more will pop up -- but then subscribers have to keep paying for new subscriptions to new providers and these providers will be less and less established. The game will keep getting more costly and less certain/trustworthy to the consumer.

The proper way to proxy in a draconian environment is to use a network based on FOSS anonymizing software like Tor or I2P that does onion routing. The latter is made to handle P2P traffic and even has a built-in bittorrent client, whereas Tor prohibits P2P data transfer.

Wikipedia can be illegal under the DEA

[cheeseandham]

IANAL, but the UK does not have "fair use", it has "fair dealing", which is a fair bit stricter as I understand it.
An interesting by-product of this is that it looks that accessing the Wikipedia in the UK can break UK's copyright laws simply as there are a lot of images which aren't Creative Commons, but are "fair use" under the US interpretation.
So I'm guessing it could be possible that the lords of copyright could accuse you of copyright infringement by reading Wikipedia. And cut you off after logging you accessing particular images a few times.

(An aside which irks me, these headlines in the press and the attacks expressly against "Downloading copyrighted material". Pretty much _all_ things "copyrighted" (except Public Domain and lapsed copyright). This post is copyrighted, that photo you publish to to Flickr is copyrighted, that audio file of your 3 year old singing "twinkle twinkle little star" and the Ubuntu CD ISO is copyrighted. Accessing the Nike website is also "downloading copyrighted material". Just please make it clear to friends/MP's etc that "Downloading copyrighted material is not illegal" in itself.)

Reality shear

[swm]

What we're seeing here are the results of reality shear (props to Neal Stephenson).

Historically, people had separate legal and ethical frameworks for managing tangible objects and for managing speech.

The basic rule for objects--respected by almost everyone--is don't take other people's objects.

The basic rule for speech--generally respected by democratic governments--is you can say what you want and you can hear what you want. You also have some privacy rights in your speech.

Now the internet has inextricably and irreversibly enmeshed these two very different frameworks. Things that used to be objects (CDs, DVDs, etc) can now be moved around by acts of speech (FTP, BitTorrent, etc.).

Copying infringes the content owners property rights, and they are enraged. They have responded in three ways.
Social : convince people that copying is theft, and hope that people's natural moral aversion to theft will dissuade them from copying things.
Technical: DRM
Legal : copyright enforcement; ISP regulation; 3-strikes, etc.

Socal doesn't work. People don't think that copying is theft (because it doesn't deprive the owner of a tangible object), and you can't rewrite people's ethical systems with a PR campaign, no matter how slick or how insistent.

Technical doesn't work. DRM doesn't stop pirates, it just annoys your paying customers.

Legal responses necessarily infringe people's conceptions of their own speech rights. What used to be a free and private act of sending and receiving signals over the internet is how subject to review, judgement, and punishment by the the government and corporations.

Just as you can't convince ordinary people that copying is theft, you can't convince ordinary people that speech acts are morally wrong. Not the kind of wrong that really guides people's actions. The kind they learned as children: don't hit, don't steal, don't lie.

So people see the legal responses of the content owners as grave infringements of their own legitimate speech rights. And they get enraged.

So we have two groups of people, each enraged, each convinced of their own right, and working from incompatible premises.

I don't know how we get past this.

Re:Reality shear

[JockTroll]

You make good points but in the end it boils down to a simple fact: the populace is setting a trend, the technology is setting a trend, and for the first time in history the party that wants to maintain the status quo is actually succeeding.

They are turning the clock back, and moreover they've launched a fear-mongering campaign designed to scare the majority of people into compliance. It's like if in the beginning of the printed page era, printing presses had been banned, their possessions made into a crime and houses been subjected to periodical sweep searches for illegal equipment - all to keep the monks who copied books by hand into business.

If they succeed, it's over: the internet will become TV 2.0, and we'll be entering into an age of fear. Fear of doing the "wrong thing". Fear of being disconnected from a network on which our everyday lives will more and more depend, fear of being labelled as a "digital rights violator" and being denied employment, fear of simply thinking "wrong".

Moreover, privatization of justice must not be allowed to happen. It will become a rich source of revenue for greedy law firms who will blackmail citizens at will, knowing that they don't have enough money to fight but enough to pay up without a fuss.

And in the end, the connivence between government and industry must be broken at all costs. With one side holding the power to make even breathing illegal - and to ENFORCE such power - and the other wielding the economic power to buy any law they desider, the perfect tyranny is forming.

It must be fought at *ANY* price.

Re:Reality shear

[Znork]

Copying infringes the content owners property rights

Copyright infringes the object owners property rights. Copyright is a limitation in what you can do with the property that you own. 'Content owners' have no property right; they have a monopoly right.

I don't know how we get past this.

Either copyright is abolished, perhaps replaced with a system that simply pays the creators directly based on popularity of their works straight out of government budgets like any other benefit system.

Or copyright gets rendered meaningless by f2f darknet migrations.

Either way it's dead. And good riddance.

Re:Reality shear

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod the parent up. Its sadly one of the best descriptions I've seen about where we are all going.

The Internet has transformed many industries and even wiped out old companies that failed to adapt. The problem we have is the media industries are so powerful they are not changing, and the bad parts of them (the distributors) are not dying out, so they are instead using their money and power to force everyone to conform to their wishes and the governments are helping them to the point they are dictating the law not the people. The government are our representatives, they are not suppose to be media industry puppets.

When a business controls what people want or need then they get very rich. The media industries core business model has always been based on this concept of media distribution control and as a result their money makes them very powerful. (The news parts of the media industry (papers and television media) can even destroy the careers of politicians so they won't stand against anything the media industries want). So we are getting this slide into literally a police state to spy on everything we do *just in case*. They are determined to take control of us all.

The distributor companies have to die out. Its coming down to them or us. Either they are wiped out or they wipe out all freedom and liberty in their need to control us all.

There has always been very good reasons why throughout history, people all around the world have tried very hard to protect their privacy, liberty and freedom from state interference. Fail to learn from history and we walk right back into the same problems again, only this time, with the power of ever better (yet ever more abused) technology, the state is becoming more powerful than at any time in history and yet the people in power have shown countless times how their kind cannot just be trusted with ever increasing power. Their actions have to be policed or they become part of the problem. Yet just about every day we have example after example news showing how its slowly getting ever worse. Worse still they are allowing corporations to do effectively private policing.

As for the media distributors argument for their existence, actors, musicians and films will still exist in the future and they will be more profitable than ever. Why because for centuries before recorded media ever existed, musicians and actors earned their living from their performances. That same business model can work again on the Internet only this time with audiences for premier performances counted in millions of people. I think as Internet bandwidth increases the long term is for the media industries on the Internet to go back to that performance centric business model. In such a business model they will want to encourage a fan base to grow to get people to sign up to see new performances. This works for music and it works for films. (Imagine a film premier being watched by 1 billion people each paying only $5 each. That is more money than any film has ever earned in history yet that will be possible on the Internet of the near future).

I think technology holds the key to wiping out the distributors. They have got to be utterly destroyed. Frankly the media industries are not so important in society that we are all subjected to this ever increasing Orwellian fascism. But we don't have to loss the media industries, we just have to destroy the control freak arrogant Narcissist distributors.

So please mod the parent up.

Re:Reality shear

[Anonymous Coward]

We get past this by recognizing that the real value of those physical objects (CDs, DVD's, etc) is in the speech they contain. The object and the speech were separate things all along, it's just that we now have advanced to the point that everyone can easily interact with them separately. It should still be wrong to steal the physical object, and should still be wrong to censor someone repeating the speech that they heard.

Unfortunately, there will be a lot of resistance to this idea since the physical object without the speech is worth nothing, while the speech without the physical object retains all of its value. It will no longer be possible to make money by selling the speech and the object as one thing.

BPI == UK's version of the RIAA/MPAA

[Dark$ide]

What this shows is that the British Phonographic Institute (that well know protector of all things copyrighted and the authors of that stuff) has bought the outgoing Labour Gov't in just the same way that the RIAA & MPAA have bought the American Gov't.

They're so scared that their old badly formed business model has broken with the digital age that they've had to enlist the help of a UK Gov't quango to do their dirty work.

The folks abusing copyright will just find an alternative way to do it that falls outside the meaning of any of this nanny state inspired Labour law.

Summary misleading?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm looking through the draft code (the full 74 page pdf) and it says that copyright holders will be responsible for finding instances of copyright infringement, and ISPs required to keep a record of that, to be made available to rights holders. It does not say that ISPs must proactively monitor their customers' traffic, which is what the summary implies and most commenters here seem to assume. Or have I got this wrong?

Ofcom Draft Initial Obligations Code

[mattxb]

The BBC article seems to be actually reporting on this Ofcom "Draft Initial Obligation Code"

Summary: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/copyright-infringement/summary/

Full document: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/consult/condocs/copyright-infringement/condoc.pdf

The document says "We welcome responses to this consultation by 30th July 2010."

Also, the OP says "Music and film companies will then be allowed access to the list, and be able to decide whether or not to take legal action."

The full consultation document clarifies this somewhat saying:

ISPs will have to keep a record of the CIRs [Copyright infringment reports] linked to each subscriber along with a record of which Copyright Owner sent the report. A Copyright Owner can request an ISP to provide them with relevant parts of those records on request, but in an anonymised form to comply with data protection legislation. This is called a Copyright Infringement List.

Data Protection Act

[Karem Lore]

Doesn't the passing of my details to a third party without my consent breach the data protection act of 1999?

Legal liability, for ISP

[currently_awake]

Publicly accusing people of criminal behavior without the ability to prove it is slander, and can get you sued. If a British soldier serving in Afghanistan is put on that list then most people would accept that as preponderance of evidence that he didn't do it and therefore was (published list) slandered. The fact that the internet account is in his name on not the (pirate) kids is irrelevant to the accusation of slander because the ISP said it was the guy not the family. This is the sort of liability that will give ISP's cold feet about this whole plan very quickly as shareholders get very upset over risk without profit.

may be off topic, but then may be it is not ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thailand is blocking access to www.softpedia.com, subdomains like win.softpedia.com are still accessible. It is beyond me why a legal and legitimate software download site is being blocked. I fail to see what this has to do with the lese majeste law.

I apologize for this off-topic comment.

If you keep letting your ISPs and governments implement plans like this, then maybe in the distant, or not so distant, future, you will find yourself in the same situation as internet users in Thailand. That one fine day your favorite website is not accessible anymore.

Anybody worry about privacy since the ISP is monitoring your internet traffic? If the ISP wants to find out if you infringe copyright, they must be monitoring your internet traffic. It's a small step from there to censorship and blocking.

I am posting this as anonymous coward, not because I am a coward, but ... well - y'all know why.

End of privacy?

[mrdtr]

I'd like to know how these ISP's are going to know exactly what data being transfered is infringing copyright, without serious invasion of privacy? For any other communication such as putting a wiretap on someones phone, it's up to the police to get warrants to do this info gathering.

Even if someone is suspected of copyright infringement, does it make it ok for some private company to invade your privacy without first getting authorization from a judge? Don't even argue that it's the ISP's system so they have a right to look into your data transfers, otherwise it would set a precedent that will allow the post office to open all your mail, couriers such as FedEx and UPS to open and inspect your packages, and the phone companies to listen in on all your calls.

It's as if the internet has gone from the "wild west" to a soon to be "police state"

Torrents: Name != Content

[hicksw]

Quick! Somebody create a linux distro named "Hurt Locker", and we can all seed its torrent forever.

Why so many MAC addresses?

[hicksw]

Back in the wired ethernet day, having lots of MAC addresses made sense - no duplicates for network admin to worry about, automatic selection of drivers at boot based on manufacturer MAC range, etc.

The WiFi world is different. More than a dozen APs in view cause collisions. Most APs can't really cope with more than a few active clients. In the non-business environment we could cope with a thousand dynamically selected MAC addresses.

With APs varying their names, MACs, and DHCP parameters frequently; with clients sniffing for an unused MAC before trying to connect, we could create an ephemeral WiFi environment, with a bit of anonymity and a lot of deniabilty.

lots of money to go around

[asamad]

I thought the government didn't have lots of money, so they are going to spend enforcing corporate america greed ....

UK the lapdog of the US, heel boy

Accusation = conviction

[dugeen]

Sad to see the brave new coalition retaining the New Labour tendency to treat an accusation (or three accusations) as the equivalent of a conviction.