"Expert Body" To Decide Which Sites To Block For Copyright Infringement

Barence writes "Rights holders in the UK are proposing to appoint a 'council' and an 'expert body' to decide which websites should be blocked by ISPs for infringing copyright. The controversial Digital Economy Act made provisions for sites accused of hosting copyrighted material to be blocked by British ISPs. 'The cost of the proposed scheme is not indicated, but is likely to be substantial, including the running cost of two non-judicial independent bodies and the cost to ISPs of permanently blocking websites,' Consumer Focus said."

Comments

Freenet

[Anonymous Coward]

Freenetproject.org is one of interesting alternatives to information blocking. Still high-latency (sites opens in 10 seconds, bigger >1 MB files download in minutes) but probably most secure (more then TOR/i2p?) and definitely uncensorable.
Installation takes 5 minutes.
With 5 more you can get addons: Frost, FMS and Freetalk boards&sharing systems.
Btw #freenet on irc.freenode.org - we will gladly assist new users.

How will the filtering even work?

[Necroman]

So the techniques I'm aware of:

1) Deep packet inspect for gets to specific sites.
2) DNS hijacking.
3) IP address blocking of known sites.

1) All 3 of these have workarounds. Deep inspection of traffic can be overridden with the use of HTTPS.
2) DNS hijacking could be bypassed by using DNS servers from outside the country (or setting up your own). Of course, they could filter traffic on the DNS port outside of their network and force you to resolve everything through your ISP.
3) IP address blocking can only be worked around if you route through another IP. This means using a proxy or VPN.

I can tell you if my country did this, I would setup a VPS in another contry, install OpenVPN on it and use OpenVPN when I wanted to get access to more questionable sites.

There are workarounds to any type of blocking they do. Unless they completely lock down the internet for their customers (forced proxy servers or something), people will work around it.

Social problem. Technical solution.

[neoshroom]

That sounds good, but I don't think it is true. Let me give a short example (pasted from: http://www.fidnet.com/~dap1955/dickens/dickens_london.html):

Until the second half of the 19th century London residents were still drinking water from the very same portions of the Thames that the open sewers were discharging into. Several outbreaks of Cholera in the mid 19th century, along with The Great Stink of 1858, when the stench of the Thames caused Parliament to recess, brought a cry for action. The link between drinking water tainted with sewage and the incidence of disease slowly dawned on the Victorians. Dr John Snow proved that all victims in a Soho area cholera outbreak drew water from the same Broad Street pump.

Sir Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the new Metropolitan Board of Works (1855), put into effect a plan, completed in 1875, which finally provided adequate sewers to serve the city. In addition, laws were put in effect which prevented companies supplying drinking water from drawing water from the most heavily tainted parts of the Thames and required them to provide some type of filtration.

Social problem. Technical solution.

Re:Prove or GTF Out

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note that this story is from England, and while England may look a lot like the US, its present government is assuredly not chartered under a constitution starting with "We The People". Other than that, you're largely correct.

Copyright as we know it (a government-established, time-limited, monopoly to each printed work, held by the author) started with the Statute of Anne, as a reform of the previously existing unlimited monopoly on all printed works held by the "Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers" (i.e. the London printer's guild, the MAFIAA of their day).

Of course the publishers, anxious to regain their previous unlimited monopoly in fact, if not in law, fought the effect of the law on two fronts. They sought to have a common-law copyright (of infinite duration) recognized, with the Statute only codifying a co-existing fixed-term right. To support this, they went to great efforts to spread the notion that copyright was a natural right of the author, and existed for their just compensation -- despite the clear statement of the Statute that copyright was a grant of the government "for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books"; thus shifting the question from one of effective policy to one of theft, piracy, and the author's presumed starving children. (Of course, the publishers, then as now, were the ones profiting, usually buying the rights to a book outright, rather than signing a contract with eventual payouts based on sales -- so the benefit to hungry children was and is quite unclear.)

Additionally, they sought statutory extensions to the fixed term when it was about to run out. To quote an anti-MAFIAA pamphlet of the time:

I see no reason for granting a further term now, which will not hold as well for granting it again and again, as often as the old ones expire... it will in effect be establishing a perpetual monopoly, a thing deservedly odious in the eye of the law; it will be a great cramp to trade, a discouragement to learning, no benefit to authors, but a general tax on the public; and all this only to increase the private gain of booksellers.

Unlike their counterparts in the 20th century, they were unsuccessful in getting that first extension at the time; since the USA, after it attained independence, enacted a near-perfect clone of the British copyright law of the time, it's quite reasonable to suppose the sanity and spine of Parliament at this time is wholly responsible for you having any public-domain works available.