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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.
400,000
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.
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.
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.
I've been using his open wifi for years to download stuff
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?
UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who are suspected of infringing copyright
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Just make sure all your windows are closed when you play the radio in your car and you should be OK.
No sig today...
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?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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!
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
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? 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...."
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
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.
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
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.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
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 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.
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.