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"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."
Who said you can block what I can see? This aint Egypt!
google
bing
Yahoo
*torrent
torrent*
isohunt
youtube
megavideo
Megaupload
RapidShare
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.
There are no details of how the two panels would be made up, but the importance of the proposals mean they could have wide-ranging impacts on civil law
So, before it's ratified, no one (the general public) will have any idea that it's made of shills and stakeholders.
Wonderful...
I copy my files onto a mountain of 3.5" floppies. Try and stop THAT, government!
They're nuts. It's like pissing in the ocean, just what do they think they'll accomplish? Is there anyone in any government anywhere with a brain? I look around and see people out of work, rampant crime, war, and these asshole have time for this stupid shit?
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.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Don't doubt experts - they know more than you and are capable of making dispassionate, informed decisions and are morally capable of making unpopular judgments. Remember, citizen, opposition to the opinions of the educated is anti-intellectualism.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
A government agency in charge of deciding which sites to block. I can't imagine anything going wrong here, no way.
When someone says "expert body", I reach for my gun
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
'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.
MAFIAA: austerity my ass, we don't give a fuck about UK deficit (to surpass the Greece one), you just take care I still receive my money
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
You can't solve a social problem with a technical solution.
Our culture doesn't get smarter, it just finds new ways of being retarded.
This will be bought off by the copyright cartels before it even forms.
Remember, The RIAA has damages in excess of the entire planet's GDP*. *According to the RIAA
Perhaps it's time we demanded of these so-called rights holders - "rights" which We The People GRANTED to them - to conclusively prove to us that granting them these copyrights has actually done anything at all to encourage further creativity? If they can't prove that, then we should revoke their rights and let them scratch in the dirt for a living like the rest of us. We've been presuming for far too long that copyrights (and patents) actually function as intended.
The record and movie industry pundits must be laughing, instead of them having to protect their IP like every other industry the UK tax payer now has to fork of funds so some smack sniffing BMW M series driving record industry exec can screw the artists and the public.
out of an expert body.
What an insightful comment. People fail to see that piracy isn't as much a lack of technological protection but the social reality that information cannot be controlled.
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.
Awesome! That's honestly funny, and so true...
Mod parent up!
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.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
... as that allows the bribery money to be concentrated amongst just a few people, and makes it easier to buy the results needed.
Your comment is right-on and reminds me of the now-put-to-rest checklist which was posted over and over again, replying to people who thought they had a technical solution to the problem of spam email.
We see now that all of these technical solutions, which dealt with technical details of how email worked, could never eliminate spam itself, which has now mutated and is a cancer infecting all the varied forms of digital communication which now exist. Why? Because it is a social problem (enough people are dumb enough to make it worthwhile), not an exploit of a particular technical weakness of how email works.
The interesting thing is... if you treated copyright infringement much like we treat marijuana here in Australia, things would get a lot better.
A little bit of weed doesn't do a lot of damage and is kinda fun every now and then. A lot of weed is pretty bad, but as long as you're only using it yourself, eh... not a huge issue, but clearly you should cop a fine for it.
But deliberately growing warehouses full of weed, for the express purposes of selling it is pretty bad since it's usually tied to organized crime. Even worse, deliberately manufacturing *cocaine*, a much worse drug, is clearly bad and should be punished heavily.
So we understand that there are "less bad" and "more bad" scales on these things. But now, what if the cops (or vigilante groups with huge congressional power posing as cops) are mass-producing cocaine? Surely they should be fallen upon from a great height and made an example of, right?
http://gizmodo.com/329648/mpaas-university-toolkit-taken-down-for-violating-copyright
http://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-steals-code-violates-linkware-license/
That's just the top two results on a quick Google search. Other examples exist, I'm sure of it.
Now, the MPAA in both cases didn't just download an illegal copy of Photoshop. They stripped out the licencing and branding, rebranded it as their own, and then used it an profit making enterprise as though they themselves wrote it. THAT is the kind of copyright infringement that SHOULD be punished- it's literally taking someone else's work, pretending it's yours, then making money from it. They didn't just shoplift a copy of Photoshop from a store, they claimed they wrote it themselves.
And yes, they should be punished far worse than any individual. They pretend to be the ultimate authority on copyright enforcement, and treat it extremely gravely- Jamie was sued into bankruptcy for downloading mp3's for personal use. Surely their own actions, however, which are so much more malicious in nature, and so much more damaging to a society as a whole (and again given their position as de-facto "copyright cops") should be treated far more harshly. An individual who is busted for speeding gets a fine, a police officer who is busted for speeding can lose their job. And these particular police officers aren't even cops, more like shopping mall Rent-A-Cops arresting 13 year old kids for possessing a bit of weed while simultaneously running a commercial grade meth lab in their basement.
Yes, the MPAA's incidents are not nearly as numerous as the huge amount of copyright infringement that goes on everyday, but their actions are so much *worse* given their circumstances. They should be punished accordingly. If anyone should understand copyright infringement and copyright law, it should be the MPAA.
So, given this, I propose the MPAA and all its affiliatories, sister companies, shell companies, parent companies, CEOs (present, former and past) and anything to do with them should be purged utterly from the internet to make an example of them.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Maybe if more people like yourself who are supposedly against it would stand up for what they believe in instead of hiding behind the AC Mask.....
The C is there for a reason!
That seems more like an environmental problem with a regulatory solution to me. A better analogy would be if the people really loved drinking out of the Thames and the government put up a fence to try and stop them.
...to generally solicit. What else do you expect from our leadership?
Vote accordingly.
For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. - Publius
Music and film industries make money out of us to lobby for laws that are only beneficial to them. The government taxes us more to enforce this piece-of-crap legislation. The ISPs will milk us dry again to cover the cost of this extra "regulation". For Pete's sake, we should be born with KY jelly sprayed on our orifices.
A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.
Cos its big business that has big bucks!
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Slashdot. News for pirates. Stuff that's anti private property rights.
If this site is going to keep featuring stories that are only of interest to the Marxist thief contingency among us, then just go ahead and make it official already.
You are missing the real point.
1) They block the child porn. Few people will defend that.
2) They block 'copyright material'.
3) They block whatever they feel like, suppressing critical stories on themselves and allowing critical stories on their political enemies. After all they really do believe that they know what's best for the public and they desire power above all else.
4) The country is in the hands of a few corrupt people who will abuse the situation for all they can take out of it. - Massive profit!
They have setup their infrastructure at stage 1 and are now working on implementing stage 2.
Ken Clarke is having all his sensible proposals stomped on by the Tory Right, who are increasingly resembling the Republican nutjobs. Nadine Dorries resembles Bachmann more and more every day (is that libellous?). Just like the US, the far right is actually a minority - but very vocal and supported by Murdoch.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Ursula von der Leyen (Zensursula) tried to introduce this in Germany. The BKA (Bundeskriminalamt) was supposed to run lists of domains to be blocked by German ISPs. There was so much protest, that the CDU (probably biggest political party in Germany) had to put her down and put her into another position within the government (I am still not sure why that woman is still in politics, she should leave the country as our former minister of defence did.
That secret list, proposed by the CDU, was leaked at Wikileaks in Germany. That's when the BKA raided Wikileaks's offices in Germany in search for child porn and confiscated most of their machines and the domain (the site was down for ~1 month). Those were the methods they used to silent them...
This all happened beginning 2009 and the members of the Pirate-Party Germany increased by ~1000% in a couple of months, they are the 6th biggest party atm.
I am wondering if the British do/try the same now?
Yet another no-trial, no-evidence extrajudicial solution. Copyright infringers don't respect the law, and neither do the authorities on the evidence of this, so what's to choose between them?
Floppies are no longer made, so you have been taken care of.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Really? Because that's basically what's happened in the media business here.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
Better. In this case, they'll put up a series of scattered three foot wide by two foot high sections of fence, with signs on them saying "Please do not climb over or go around this fence".
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
And the additional red tape can be used to further reduce our Scandinavian sanitation budget.
Let's hope it's not a body which spends a lot of time playing golf, having lunches, enjoying yachts etc which belong to, or are paid for by, anyone who could be described as having vested interests in this regard.
They're nuts. It's like pissing in the ocean, just what do they think they'll accomplish? Is there anyone in any government anywhere with a brain?
They do what the money tells them to.
Deleted
My understanding is that The Pirate Bay just links to copyrighted material and doesn't actually host any. Google links to copyrighted material, and actually hosts an awful lot.
The moment this blocklist goes live I will personally demand that Google and every other major 'net search engine, and any website hosting forums that I can post links to are immediately added and blocked.
This is an unworkable system, I'm not going to tolerate it, and I assure you, my opposition is nothing to do with 'piracy'.
Britain came up with the Star Chamber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_chamber, didn't they?
Let's leave this discussion until proposed or similar instance ACTUALLY blocks a site, where the average user does not in fact use the site as a facilitator of criminal actions.
Citation needed.
I cant fathom how you got modded up.
Its a good piece of history, but it was a technical problem with a technical solution.
There was nothing social about it.
The fundamental problem with this issue is that there is genuine merit on both sides of the argument.
It is clearly the case that certain Big Media organisations have engaged in legally dubious pricing practices over the years and have engaged in hostile lawsuits against innocent targets. It is clearly the case that privacy and freedom from unwarranted state intrusion into our lives is valuable and should be protected.
On the other hand, it is also the case that there are sick people in the world who really do exploit children and vulnerable people, and it is also the case that copyright infringement is illegal today, and for as long as that remains the case, the technical problems with enforcement created by the existence of the Internet require technical solutions on the same scale.
Fundamentally, I think the whole Internet anonymity vs. censorship argument is aiming at the wrong target. If you have to rely on Internet anonymity and technical measures to protect your ability to communicate, you have bigger problems, and it's time to move to the next box (soap, ballot, jury, ammo, in that order, as the saying goes). This is the case in several countries in the world today, but each of them is effectively in a state of civil war, so what is on the statute books doesn't really matter for the immediate future.
On the other hand, if we accept that the basics of civilised society, legitimate government and reasonable judicial processes are in place, I believe we should try to work within that system to fix the parts that let it down. In such a case, anonymity and darknets put those who know how to use them above the law, pure and simple, and not everyone who benefits is going to be a nice person.
Copyright isn't an unreasonable economic tool, and the idea of paying people a fair price if you benefit from their work is OK, but the current implementation of our copyright system is a joke and needs fixing so it has some kind of credibility with the general public. Thus we shouldn't allow large, commercial organisations with a track record of abusing the legal system anywhere near any kind of enforcement action without appropriate judicial process.
On the flip side, as a basic principle, we should have a judicial system where someone whose legal rights are being infringed can take some proportionate action against the infringer. A right you cannot defend is no right at all. The key is to build a process that relies on impartial scrutiny but can act in a timely fashion. And as I said, if we can't do that, we probably have bigger problems to worry about.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Generally stories about copyright infringement and such are packed to the brim with breathtakingly stupid comments in the vein of "I shouldn't have to pay for anything".
[citation needed]
At least, I see posts explaining the conditions in which one is willing to pay, and opposition to their tactics, but that type of comment is rare. And I'm here all the time pretty much. You are grossly generalizing based potentially on a miniscule % of comments exactly like that.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Fuck the 'average' user. Do not cut off swathes of the Internet because of the actions of 'average' users.
Do not implement industry controlled blocklists. Do not trust the media companies. Do not outsource legislation.
Which parts of these are anything to do with criminal actions?
As a Minister he is not allowed to tread on the toes of his colleagues. Our MP is now a Minister and apologises for this - but he didn't make the system.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
No, it was quite clearly *not* a social problem (polluted water? technical problem) and the "solution" was at best half technical. Last I checked, passing laws wasn't a technical solution, and if it had really been a social problem, people would have continued to pollute and drink from the Thames even after it was pointed out that was a bad idea.
Nathan's blog
Social problem: disease caused by unclean water
Technical problem: there's sewage in the river that we drink from.
Social problem: people are dumping sewage into the river we drink from
Technical solution: build adequate sewers.
My point was that technical and social problems are often intertwined so blanket statements like the parent comment are not universally true.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
I adore your utopian view, but the harsh reality is, "the people" will vote for whatever the TV tells them to. It would only take a few programs spouting off idiocy about how without copyright there would be no TV, movies, whatsoever, and what do you think would happen?