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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."
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Don't be silly. This article is about an unimplemented proposal, that in the UK has got only as far as a few rights holding bodies writing a report describing the fantasy world they'd like to live in. Nothing has actually happened yet.
In the meantime, attempts at shutting down websites have actually been implemented in the US - http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/06/13/218206/First-Challenge-To-US-Domain-Seizures-Filed
In destroying freedoms, the US leads and the UK just follows on behind.
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."
Sorry to have to break this to you, but you have it exactly the wrong way round.
This expert body idea is just a deranged proposal from rights holders that will go nowhere because the digital economy bill is already unpopular. There's easy political capital to be made in toning it down, and the bill is starting to have questions asked about its legitimacy in parliament.
Meanwhile, as the post above says, the USA is already seizing domain names associated with piracy. The USA is actively implementing this anti-freedom insanity, while the good old UK is doing nothing but hesitantly discussing it.
And you think this won't be used to block things other than illegal movies and music? Perhaps even things that would make people think if their brains weren't occupied by the aforementioned stuff?
Score: i, Imaginary
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.'
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'.
No, this is private industry deciding privately what is done on its private networks, which supply the public with public information all subsidised at public expense.
The Internet you see, is a magical place, where there are no rules, laws or traditions. And like all magical kingdoms, eventually some Great Witch or Dark Lord thunders over the horizon and conquers the land, ushering in an age of tyranny, oppression, and misery for all inhabitants.
The ISPs have brooded long in their dark lairs, waiting for the moment to strike. Now they have the technology, and the opportunity, and the guards of the internet have slumbered. We'll all be lucky if we can still visit reddit in ten years time.
May the Maths Be with you!
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?