"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

Doing it wrong

[Sparx139]

You can't solve a social problem with a technical solution.

Decided to update this in relation to Copyright:

[Anonymous Coward]

You/Your company/government advocates a

( ) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting piracy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(x) Pirates can easily use it to discover new upload/download sources
(x) Creative Commons and other legitimate licenses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop piracy for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with your broken system's overhead as you propose another system
( ) Customers will not put up with it
( ) Copyright lobby groups will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from pirates
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many internet users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
(x) Pirates don't care about invalid peers in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for the internet
(x) Open proxies in foreign countries
(x) Ease of searching the tiny alphanumeric address space of all domain names
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in TCP/IP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than TCP/IP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches from ad banners
( ) Armies of worm-riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of Copyright lobby groups
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Copyright lobby groups
( ) Dishonesty on the part of the Copyright lobby groups themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Windows XP

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) TCP/IP packets should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Bittorrent without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Uploading/downloading data should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time domain names are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government monitoring my internet access
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person/company/government for suggesting it.