Slashdot Mirror
BT Seeks Moratorium On Internet Piracy Cases
myocardialinfarction writes "In the wake of widespread criticism of ACS:Law and its business model, British Telecom has asked for a moratorium on sharing customer's data in cases of alleged illegal file sharing. 'BT lawyers asked for the adjournment, saying that the firm needed to see details of the security system that would be used to store its customers' data before it could comply with any order. ... "We want to ensure broadband subscribers are adequately protected so that rights holders can pursue their claims for copyright infringement without causing unnecessary worry to innocent people."'"
Yes... Trust the corporate master to look out for our interests...
That's the winning strategy!
And the ISPs do not like that, because it will cost money. And that is why they are trying to fight it. This way they can say it is not secure, which will give them more leverage if they are asked to hand over the data to say no.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This government given opportunity for blackmail cannot be wasted. Grandmothers are already being accused of sharing porn and made to pay under the mere threat of a lawsuit - just imagine when their ability to connect to the Internet, where all sorts of services, public and otherwise, have been moved to, is on the line.
I suspect that within less than a month of the law comming to be, whole ranges of IP addresses will be receiving spurious accusations of copyright infregement and blackmailed to pay "or else". (After all, there are no courts involved in deciding who is guilty and who is innocent - the connection is just cut on the 3rd strike).
Give it 6 months of countless newsarticles about grandmothers, single mothers and members of the church loosing their connections for "sharing Brittney", everybody knowing somebody whose connection has been cut and people suing the government right and left because essential services have been moved exclusivelly to the Net and they cannot access them any more and the backslash will be huge.
Defending Cheryl Cole's right to make millions is all kinda *yawn* until your Internet connection is taken down by a slimy lawyer blackmailing you for £1000 - then it becomes personal.
We couldn't have asked for a better way to make the common people aware of the evils of Copyright Laws and the influence of the Media cartels in politics.
BT's concern for their customers' privacy is entirely proper and creditable. If only they'd shown the same concern when they were secretly allowing Phorm to intercept their network traffic (while publicly maintaining that this wasn't happening).
It's a very long procedure that requires rights holders to go through a huge number of hoops, including becoming "qualified copyright holders" (for an undisclosed fee -- don't know who decides who's "qualified" and who's not, but I can take a guess), to register their copyrights with the ISPs, to specify a bunch of details about the work, the notices, to give painstaking details about the data collection processes, and of course the technical details of the infringement as well as legal statements certifying everything is accurate and the infringement is real (oh jolly trolly). Most non-technically-minded artists won't know where to begin with all this, so if they want to participate they are forced to depend on third parties... And guess who the third parties will be! ACS-style lawyer firms and record labels! Yay for making them legit. Hooray for democracy~!
"Charging reasonable rates to cover costs" will only bring negative reactions from all sides, IMHO.
First, if they are required to produce this information by an order of the court, they may not be able to recover any costs at all.
Second, from what I've read, it seems BT is a favorite target for all kinds of accusations of evilitude. It seems very plausible that an "official" price list will cause some lawyer office to complain that legit requests for information are "blocked" by "overcharging".
Third, publishing a price list for processing information requests "officially" sounds like they're in the business of selling customer data. Such step will certainly leave me, were I a customer, with a severely bad aftertaste, even if the company swears it's only in response of "legitimate" requests.
Finally, and most importantly, even if they can charge some amount for processing such requests, and recover the costs, the unit that will be doing this work isn't going to be a profit center.
I still see only costs and no merits.
And the whole "proof" of "filesharing" is collected by unlicensed private investigators, working behind closed doors, using who knows what methods. And in this case, they are in a different country.
How is such an absurd flimsy bit of "proof" allowed to be used?