"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?

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...

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

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.

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.