UK ISPs Hatch Plan To Block the Pirate Bay and Other File Sharing Sites

An anonymous reader writes "UK Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are already in talks with media rights holders to block around 100 file sharing and cyberlocker websites, it has emerged. The move comes as ISPs BT and TalkTalk won a Judicial review of the Digital Economy Act (DEA) resulting in a 2-year delay on its implementation. The voluntary code is a planned workaround to the delay in the DEA and rights holders attempt to curb file sharing. If passed the code would see rights holders pass evidence of websites that 'facilitate' illegal file sharing to ISPs who would then block access to the sites in question. However, ISPs are reluctant and are pushing for a high court judge to approve any site blocking. ... Amongst the 100 sites is the worlds most resilient Bittorrent site, The Pirate Bay and Usenet's reincarnated NewzBin2."

Comments

One month

[Manip]

One month, that is how long I give it before this gets used to block sites for non-piracy reasons. Like a site that talks about BitTorrent community activity or a competitor who infringes a patent for two random examples. Make my words, this will be used for political suppression even if it isn't the government doing it.

Re:One month

[1s44c]

One month, that is how long I give it before this gets used to block sites for non-piracy reasons. Like a site that talks about BitTorrent community activity or a competitor who infringes a patent for two random examples. Make my words, this will be used for political suppression even if it isn't the government doing it.

First they come for the pedos and no-one defends them.

Second they come for the movie pirates and few people defend them.

Then they come for anyone who expresses a non-approved opinion and we are all buggered.

Re:One month

[jimicus]

One month, that is how long I give it before this gets used to block sites for non-piracy reasons. Like a site that talks about BitTorrent community activity or a competitor who infringes a patent for two random examples. Make my words, this will be used for political suppression even if it isn't the government doing it.

You're over two years - possibly much more - too late. The UK ISP industry already has the technology in place to block more-or-less any site they like and to administer that blocking from a single, central location which then gets pushed out to most of the big providers. The thing is it mostly went under the radar for two reasons:

1. It wasn't widely publicised.
2. It was mostly centred around blocking of child porn.

Odds on this is about adding another category to the list of things they consider acceptable to block.

(For those who didn't know about this: Citation 1 Citation 2 - and the actual organisation responsible for this list)

The thing that did come up around that time was that not only are ISPs blocking dodgy material, many are doing so in a fashion that ensures the end user is blissfully unaware it's happening - either by resetting TCP connections or intercepting with an HTTP 404. At the time this all happened, one ISP was putting up a message saying "Sorry, I can't let you see that" (so the technology used does make that possible) but that ISP was in a minority.

Re:One month

[pinkishpunk]

well we have this system here in denmark, dns based blocking of child pronograf sites, then allofmp3 was added to the list, thepiratbay was next.
Now "illegal" gamling sites, aka we have single monoply for gamling in danmark, Next up sites selling medicin....

all this controlled in a none transpart way, just like the politicians like it.

Fight it, any way you can, onces its inplace its too late, and it WILL expand to block things others than its original purpose.

Re:One month

[Xest]

There seems to be a lot of gaps in your understanding of the IWF:

"You're over two years - possibly much more - too late."

Yes, much, much more. It's been around since the mid 90s so more like 15 years, rather than two. You may think this is irrelevant but I'm not sure it is. Whilst there has been noise over the years, the IWF has never really been extended outside it's remit, and whilst it's stepped outside it's bounds and screwed up a few times it has quickly backtracked. I think it's important to note that the IWF has generally not strayed outside these bounds because there's recognition by politicians and the like that by extending the IWF's remit you also risk increasing the amount of anti-IWF sentiment meaning the IWF as a whole might end up being a target of criticism putting at risk it's existence even for censoring child porn. There hasn't historically been a lot of serious political will to change the IWF's remit for this reason. That may well change of course, but it's a point worth keeping in mind.

"The UK ISP industry already has the technology in place to block more-or-less any site they like and to administer that blocking from a single, central location which then gets pushed out to most of the big providers."

The key term here being of course "most". The IWF block list is optional, to change that would require legislative changes, and even if there was backing in parliament for this to go ahead it would take years to get legislation through and enact it by which time either attitudes will have changed and it'll be scrapped, or the technology community will have long worked around it anyway- just as they have with the Digital Economy Act and it's focus on P2P when most sharing is done via less public methods now (encrypted VPN, physical trading, direct downloads, IM transfers).

It's also worth noting that there was a lot of noise from ISPs about dropping out of the scheme even when it fucked up with the whole Wikipedia debacle.

"1. It wasn't widely publicised."

If you haven't heard of the IWF in the UK then you're obviously not an IT professional. I find it hard to believe anyone in the IT world in the UK can not really have heard of the IWF.

"2. It was mostly centred around blocking of child porn."

Where mostly = only.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the IWF, largely because it costs public money to run and I'm not convinced it solves anything because it does nothing to stop sharing of child porn through encrypted private channels, VPN, or on physical media and so forth, and certainly does nothing to actually stop real world physical child abuse. I'd certainy much rather see the money spent on a couple more specialist officers who have the power to go and deal with that, than I would a bunch of overpaid people who sit adding and removing a few URLs to and from a list each day.

But let's stick to the facts, you make the IWF out to be some secret stealthy organisation that's come onto the scene recently and that blocks arbitrary content. That simply isn't true, it's a well known organisation that has a predefined remit which it has for most of it's existence stuck to with only a few fuckups. I don't like the orgnisation, but I'm not sure complete and utter misinformation about it will allow for helpful and rational debate about the threat of unwarranted censorship.

There's nothing secret or subversive about the IWF in it's 15 year history thus far, and it's blocking methods are neither high tech or particularly centralised or mandatory. It's implementation relies on distributing a list of child porn sites to ISPs who then choose whether or not to implement that blacklist, and how they implement it. Some simply just remove the given domains from their DNS servers and leave it at that.

Again though, the IWF is a pointless waste of space regardless and I agree it has the potential to go to far is stupid politicians get involved, I'll give you that. I don't expect it to be anything to worry about however because it's methods are so primitive and pathetic as to be irrelevant to anyone with an ounce of technical ability anyway.

Bunch of luddites

[Kethinov]

Oh no! The existence of some internet website undermines my business model! We need to eradicate this technology quickly! Technological progress is bad for business!

Re:Bunch of luddites

[L4t3r4lu5]

I lose patience writing this over and over again.

A shoplifter deprives the store of property, which it then is unable to sell. A person who downloads unlicensed media deprives nobody of anything. There is no guarantee that the person would have bought the media had it not been available online. There is no such thing as a potential sale, or potential profit.

Re:Bunch of luddites

[abigsmurf]

There are thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people who bought a Nintendo DS and an R4 (or other type of flash card) and have not bought any games since. Are we supposed to believe that they bought a $150 piece of gaming hardware and would never have bought any games for it?

A pirated copy does not always mean a lost sale but it is equally wrong to assume that no sales are lost due to piracy. Overall a pirated copy from a statistical POV represents a fraction of a lost sale.

Do you get outraged when people say "I stole a kiss from her"? When people describe something priced cheap as a steal are you overcome with rage? Words have a wide of uses and their meanings are altered by use and context. Not only that, definitions evolve and change over time, the english language is defined by use.

Re:Bunch of luddites

[Richard_at_work]

Ooh ooh ooh look, someone jumped on the "copyright infringement isnt stealing!!!" bandwagon, as I well and truly knew they would.

I never said it was, I compared two aspects (the original posters and mine) of how actions can undermine various business models - and yes, copyright violation does indeed undermine a business model just as shoplifting does.

As I said in my original post, a copyright holder has every right to try and make money off their creation - they don't have the right to make money, but they have the right to try. You, The Pirate Bay, ISOHunt or anyone else does not have the right to deny them that attempt to make money OFF OF THEIR PROPERTY.

There is no guarantee they will make any money, there is no guarantee that the people downloading it for free would have bought it, but there is also no guarantee that they wouldn't have - its the opportunity to sell to these people that the copyright holder has a right to, and that is the right that you are violating.

But go ahead, jump on the obvious bandwagon for some mod points, works every time. You can sit up there on your throne content in the knowledge that copyright infringement has no negative effect at all.

By the way, who are you expecting to produce the content when your view wins through and everything is available on torrent sites for free?

Re:Bunch of luddites

[Richard_at_work]

You do realise that you do not have to buy anything of theirs, don't you? You can seek out alternatives that better fit your moral or ethical position, or business model requirement, or were you not aware of that?

Just because your opinion of them is negative does not mean that their business model isn't worthy of protection, there are always alternatives.

But the irony is that you don't want alternatives, you want their products - but you want them on *your* terms. So you are infact the one propagating the current situation, by giving them the opportunity to say "our product is wanted".

Re:Bunch of luddites

[Richard_at_work]

There is significantly more to it than just the "original product". No matter how much you like to tell yourself otherwise, creativity is not easy, and production is not cheap and most of the things you enjoy require significant investment of time and money - but those get conveniently ignored when discussions such as these come up, and apparently copyright infringement is no threat at all to these things.

Because certainly, people will still invest time and money into epics such as the Lord of the Rings movies when the chances of them recouping costs are minimal due to unfettered and legal availability of the easiest part of the process - the distribution of the .avi file...

Re:Bunch of luddites

[Anonymous Coward]

There are thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of people who bought a Nintendo DS and an R4 (or other type of flash card) and have not bought any games since. Are we supposed to believe that they bought a $150 piece of gaming hardware and would never have bought any games for it?

If so, I think it's more likely they wouldn't have bought the gaming console in the first place if there were no pirated games available.

A pirated copy does not always mean a lost sale but it is equally wrong to assume that no sales are lost due to piracy. Overall a pirated copy from a statistical POV represents a fraction of a lost sale.

Actually, the studies that have been made say that the persons who pirate stuff also buy more. This actually means that piracy increases sales. What the media industry are raving about is really the loss of control over the market they have had previously.

Do you get outraged when people say "I stole a kiss from her"? When people describe something priced cheap as a steal are you overcome with rage? Words have a wide of uses and their meanings are altered by use and context. Not only that, definitions evolve and change over time, the english language is defined by use.

One of the most effective ways of steering a debate is changing the meaning of what's debated, that's whats he's raving about. If you turn the debate from piracy to stealing, you've basically won already.

This alone wont stop people in the UK

[Drake_Casanova]

People will proxy and tunnel around this easily. The mega website torrent scene is getting a beating with the final blow being the US legislation which hosts most of these sites. A new distribution system for torrent files will come along, but maybe it not being so mainstream will be a good thing.

It's quite simple

[l2718]

These sites support the rapid free sharing of information, thus reducing the ability of authors to profit from the books they write, of singers to profit from the songs they sing, of directors to profit from the films they create. In turn, this reduces their motivation to create such works, and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.

Note that this isn't a silly argument -- we really need to make a tradeoff between our desire to freely deal with information (especially to do new things with old ideas, but also to profit from the creations of others), and the need for a regime where creators have a way to get paid. This tradeoff is called "copyright laws".

Now the current system is so terrible (because the incentives of the people who write the laws are very different from what average citizens want to get out of copyright law) that I don't think blocking these sites is a good trade-off, but when you discuss copyright it's important to do so in these terms.

Re:It's quite simple

[funkatron]

Hang on, hang on. On the one hand we have censorship infrastructure going on our internet connection on the other we have:

might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.

Guess which one of those isn't scary?

Re:It's quite simple

[cheekyjohnson]

Trading in illegally copied material is not protected speech, in America or anywhere else.

Where does it say that in the first amendment? These additions and exclusions appear to be complete fabrications.

Re:It's quite simple

[Errol backfiring]

... , thus reducing the ability of publishers to profit from the books they did not write

There, fixed that for you. Off course, blocking those sites also blocks the authors who want their work copied because they want to reach an audience. But as there is no money involved in that it is not important. Because it isn't culture if it isn't paid for. Did it ever occurred to you that the free authors, the real bringers of culture, could stop as well if they are bluntly censored by the hollywood pulp industry?

Re:It's quite simple

[funkatron]

In what way is blocking access to certain information NOT censorship. Censorship is a restriction on any speech. Establishing categories of "protected" and "non-protected" speech is merely the management process behind censorship; it's choosing what you want to censor.

Re:It's quite simple

[Kulfaangaren!]

I can list a few "artists" that I actually would prefer if they reduced the amount of works they create for "my enjoyment".
* Christina Augilera
* Britney Spears
* All rap artists
* All country & western artists
* Justin Beiber
etc. etc.

Re:It's quite simple

[L4t3r4lu5]

I see your "artists are losing money" and raise you an "artists were never making money in the first place, media conglomerates were".

http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/print.html

Re:It's quite simple

[rolfc]

It is a silly system because the copyright laws are made for the 19th century. What happens when people copy is that business is hit, which is fine for me. It is not to support a media industry that is the goal of the copyright laws.

We have now a system for cheap and rapid distribution of digital media, and the problem is that the media industry want to take all the profit from that. The obvious answer to that would be that the market forced them to lower the prices, but it doesnt work. The industry is using their monopoly to raise their margins instead of lowering the prices. As long as they do that, they will need laws and police to hunt those that try to escape the monopoly.

The politicians need to rework the copyright laws or deal with the media industry abuse of their monopoly. Lobbying has so far prevented our representatives do represent us.

Re:It's quite simple

[Kjella]

You do know there's a copyright clause in the original consitituion right? Among the enumerated powers of government is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.â

These are the very same founding fathers who are writing both the consitution and the bill of rights. If they didn't see a crash here, they probably didn't think there was one. Even if they made the first amendment as simple as possible, I assume they had some sort of (* except libel, slander, yelling fire in a crowded theater, false advertising, death threats etc etc etc). They can't possibly have missed that "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings" would mean others can't freely repeat their writings.

Re:It's quite simple

[Dunbal]

and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment.

Bullshit. People create for the joy of creation, not for profit. It's the publishers that have turned the argument on its head to make you think that creativity is something "rare". Here we go again back to the same old argument of artificial scarcity that has been pushed by monopolies since the dawn of time.

Please tell me, sir, how many billions of net profit have been made by the "entertainment" industries in say, the past 10 years - DESPITE the existence of "free sharing of information". As far as I can tell actors are earning more every year, movies are making more every year, and singers are certainly not short of cash even if they ran out of decent songs a long time ago.

Re:It's quite simple

[h-xman]

we really need to make a tradeoff between our desire to freely deal with information (especially to do new things with old ideas, but also to profit from the creations of others), and the need for a regime where creators have a way to get paid.

This argument is based on assumption that the artificial scarcity is the only way to make profit out of creative work. This assumption is false - there are numerous success stories and studies proving that it is possible to make profit without the need to make your work artificially scarce using copyright, DRM etc. (if you are interested, check out techdirt.com regularly writing about this stuff). Attempts to restrict copying are more about inability/unwillingness of legacy business to adapt. Actually, if your assumption were right we would be all doomed and creative work would cease to exist because technological progress made it impossible to stop copying and sharing - artificial scarcity is a history.

Re:It's quite simple

[Dunbal]

You know they've perverted the meaning of "limited times" to essentially make an end run around the original intent of the Constitution, right? I mean, 99999 years is a limited time, if you consider geological time. Eventually I'm sure Mickey Mouse's copyright will be stretched to this definition.

Re:It's quite simple

[1u3hr]

These sites support the rapid free sharing of information, thus reducing the ability of authors to profit from the books they write, of singers to profit from the songs they sing, of directors to profit from the films they create. In turn, this reduces their motivation to create such works, and this reduced motivation might lead them to reduce the amount of works they create for our enjoyment....Note that this isn't a silly argument

It isn't a "silly" argument, it's a frightening one. That the desire of some people to make greater profits should allow them to dictate what websites are accessible to the community as a whole is incredibly anti-democratic, basically it's fascist. If laws have been broken they need to prove it and take legal action.Not just send a list of sites they disapprove of to the ISP and have a website blocked, without any due process. .

Re:It's quite simple

[Kjella]

Of course. I was just responding to the argument that the first amendment makes copyright unconstitutional or invalid or whatever. There's no doubt "limited times" has become seriously perverted, on the other hand there's little evidence to suggest that reducing copyright back to 14 years would stop people from pirating the latest hit music and blockbusters. You might argue that's just because people see the copyright deal as broken anyway, but I doubt that would mend things.

Re:It's quite simple

[Requiem18th]

* Uwe Boll
* Michael Bay
* James Wong
And no more adaptation of Japanese comics or cartoons please.

First they came after...

[JavaBear]

First they blocked child porn.
    And I didn't listen when people complained, because I really don't like child porn.
Then they blocked porn and "violent" games.
    And no one would listen when I complained, because they really didn't like porn or "violent" games.
Then they blocked information sharing sites.
    And no one could listen when I complained, because there were nowhere to complain.

Re:Technology?

[JavaBear]

As long as they can block the "average" user, there won't be much left for the rest of us.

And about breaking "blocks", I do like the one about it being legal to copy media for our own use, but still illegal as it is illegal to break effective anti-circumvention measures. I'm just saying, if they can be broken, they aren't effective...

Half assed

[spectrokid]

Hope they do it like in Denmark, by forging DNS records. Switch your home router to another DNS server, done.

Bye Bye Google.

[idji]

I really enjoyed using a website called Google.com to find stuff on the internet, but it seems that it will be blocked in the UK. Now I will have to find another website to find things.

In other news...

[the_raptor]

In other news UK ISP's have noticed a sudden drop in subscription to high bandwidth/high download limit plans. They fear piracy may be to blame for this phenomenon.

What about google

[Dodgy G33za]

Google have scanned 15 million books without the approval of the copyright owner. They gonna block Google?

Re:Blocking is a barrier, surmountable but annoyin

[Vectormatic]

a fairly good counterexample for your point just happened here in holland.

Brein (the local RIAA/MPAA surogate) won a court case against FTD (a large usenet community with its own spot database etc..), forcing them to close their central infrastructure. Promptly Spotnet gained massive popularity as the replacement. Where FTD required you to first search in the database, then look up the corresponding NZB on binsearch (or equivalent), and input the NZB into grabit/newsleecher, spotnet is a 3-in-1 type program, you search spots in your local database (which is built from data sourced from usenet itself) and can click 'download', next thing you know the files are on your hard drive.

Brein actually made usenet easier to use for the common lay-person, spotnet is (vastly) easier then kazaa/etc.. were, so joe sixpack should have no trouble with usenet anymore

Pointless

[antivoid]

Perspective:
Here's a different way to think about the entire debacle. Some people say piracy deprives others of profit. Others say it doesn't. The end result is always the same. Some greedy megacorporation (record labels, motion picture creators, the government) etc will try to "block" the site[s] in question...

Argument:
My argument is, what is the point? Block it all you like, someone will just find a way around it, create a new site, in an endless cycle. The "problem", if there even is one, is in the minds of the people... Why buy when I can get it for free? -or- I won't watch/listen to this avi/mp3 unless it is free.

Determination:
There are always going to be pirates, there is always going to be piracy. The problem is greed and money. As long as there is money, people with low amounts of money are going to attempt to find ways of obtaining materials with less money or no money.

Solution:
Tor? Host megaupload on a .onion? Decentralize the entire web? Why not?! Put powerful webservers on the tor network. Make Tor the defacto standard. Make companies host their sites on onions. Make companies depend on Tor. Then, Tor will expand. And it won't be taken down because companies use it too for their sites. Then we can squash the pesky net neutrality problem at the same time. ISPs can't block Tor, or they'd block the whole Tor, and all the companies using it. "It won't work!" you say. "There's not enough support, other than a few geeks and nerds!". Well now... Firefox was the product of a few geeks and nerds... look where Firefox is today. The time is coming to oppose these governments and companies who think they can control us. To hell with them. It is our right to do what we want online!

Re:Blocking is a barrier, surmountable but annoyin

[vegiVamp]

Umm... Tor. Even if the ISPs block the sites, that doesn't mean that hosters will, and I would guess a large number of Tor exit nodes are on hosted machines, not home lines.

TPB is also only used to download the actual torrentfile - the tracker can be somewhere else, and the data is on individual computers. Similarly, newsbin is used to download an NZB file, the data isn't actually there - you can get that from most any NNTP provider.

The Internet will simpy route around damage, even MAFIAA braindamage.

Re:I pirate every movie BEFORE I buy

[Shemmie]

Because there is no Netflix in my 'market'.