"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

They've lost it.

[amiga3D]

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?

Re:They've lost it.

[herojig]

Well that's exactly right: they DO have the time for stupid endeavors, and this is by design. The warlords and crime bosses and bigC's of the world would not stand for government mucking about in their profit-gathering biz, so councils are appointed to keep public servants busy with make-work.

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.

Re:How will the filtering even work?

[bmo]

It will guarantee a two-tiered Internet.

A. Internet for people who know what they're doing

B. Everyone else.

I am not sure if I am against this or not. Part of me rages about the censorship. The other part says "meh, it was better when it took actual skill to hook up a modem and set up a BBS"

--
BMO

Don't doubt the experts

[DNS-and-BIND]

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.

Re:Don't doubt the experts

[blackraven14250]

Opposition to the opinions of the educated based solely on the ground that they are educated is anti-intellectualism.

What's the problem?

[pete6677]

A government agency in charge of deciding which sites to block. I can't imagine anything going wrong here, no way.

Doing it wrong

[Sparx139]

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

Re:No way this can be corrupted...

[Anonymous Coward]

Read it again. It will be RUN by the copyright cartels. That's what "Rights holders" means...

Prove or GTF Out

[macraig]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Great!

[Sasayaki]

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.

Re:Piss Off

[geckipede]

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.