UK ISPs Profit From Coughing Up Customer Data

nk497 writes "ISPs in the UK are charging as much as £120 to hand customer data over to rightsholders looking for proof of piracy, according to the Federation Against Software Theft. While ISPs have to hand over log details for free in criminal cases, they are free to charge in civil cases — and can set the price. 'In 2006, we ran Operation Tracker in which we identified about 130 users who were sharing copies of a security program over the web,' said John Lovelock, chief executive of FAST. 'In the end we got about 100 names out of them, but that cost us £12,000, and that was on top of the investigative costs and the legal fees.'"

Comments

someone always profits

[Anonymous Coward]

someone always profits from coughing up data, especialy customer data

GBP 85 / hr

[afaik_ianal]

GBP 85 / hr doesn't seem outlandishly expensive to me if you consider it a professional IT service. What would surprise me, is if there were ISPs valuing their time at less than GBP 50. What would concern me, is if ISPs were spending 10 minutes on these requests and just giving out data willie nillie.

Re:GBP 85 / hr

[Dr_Barnowl]

Flamebait or not, Time Warner ISP in the states does just this, claiming they can only process one of these requests PER DAY.

Re:GBP 85 / hr

[Peeteriz]

In processing such requests, IT service is not the primary expense - the request validity and rights to publish data have to be vetted by lawyers, and 85/h sounds quite reasonable.

Re:GBP 85 / hr

[lattyware]

And this is Barry, our anti-piracy department.
Barry: Huurrrrrr Derp

I hope they follow the law

[wvmarle]

As long as those ISPs follow the law regarding the disclosure of this personal data, I have nothing against it. Actually I would be all for it: let those rights holders pay up! After all they are losing so many billions in sales lost to piracy, that paying a few quid to get those evil pirates' names (and the rest of the population to go back to buying all those songs they are now sharing top-dollar on CD) should be no problem for them. And after all as we know it the record companies are always right in their accusations, suing only actual evil pirates, right?

Of course ISPs should only disclose personal data when the law requires them to do so. Potential profiting from non-compliance poses a danger of course. Oh well as long as the penalty for improper disclosure is high enough (preferably including throwing out court cases against alleged pirates) then they will.

Re:I hope they follow the law

[Spad]

On that subject, everyone's favourite UK-based law firm ACS:Law are being investigated by the ICO over the data that was leaked when 4chan carried out their DDOS.

Turns out that in addition to all the internal documents, letters and other crap on their webserver they also had a load of Sky broadband subscriber information in plaintext on there; I quote "You rarely find an aspect where almost every aspect of the Data Protection Act (DPA) has been breached, but this is one of them," said Mr Davies [of Privacy International]".

Re:I hope they follow the law

[Rogerborg]

I do not quite see how does the data protection act authorise you to give the data in question.

What, you can't read the Act?

29 Crime and taxation

(1)Personal data processed for any of the following purposes--
(a)the prevention or detection of crime,
[...]

are exempt from the first data protection principle

Go on, argue that copyright infringement isn't a "crime". Then read the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988, section 107 1, (e)

107 Criminal liability for making or dealing with infringing articles,
(1)A person commits an offence who, without the licence of the copyright owner--
[...]
(e)distributes otherwise than in the course of a business to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright
an article which is, and which he knows or has reason to believe is, an infringing copy of a copyright work.

That's the controlling statute. The only argument to be made is whether sharing a file constitutes "distributes [...] to such an extent as to affect prejudicially the owner of the copyright".

Now, we can have an informed debate. Go ahead.