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Music Industry Pushing For BT To Block Pirate Bay
First time accepted submitter mariocki writes "British music industry body BPI has requested BT block access to Pirate Bay. In response, BT say they will only do so if they receive a court order. But after BT recently lost a court case forcing them to block Newzbin, it looks like it's a case of when — not if — this will happen."
Methinks alternate DNS and routing methods are about to get a lot more popular in the UK.
Earn Cash and Prizes, and get free stuff!
Radio was the vehicle for consumers to find new music in the last century. No one listens to radio anymore, except in the car and then not so much. File trading is the way listeners find new music this century. If they succeed in stopping file trading in Britain, the British music industry will collapse, no one will be able to find new music so they'll stop buying.
Have they considered buying the UK equivalent of department of justice, like RIAA did in the US? That's a well-proven method of greasing the wheels to get what you want, and quite cost-effective. A few millions in political contributions lead to billions in profits.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If it takes several months to get a court order to block a site, and only a couple of days to set up a new torrent tracker (piratebay is just the best known out of a dozen or so), it's not hard to see it's a lost cause for the industries, which instead should focus on finding ways of making it easier to pay for content. But what they are doing is trying to cling to their outdated business models of artificial scarcity and market segregation.
The oldest telecom in the world, with 100k employees in its current state, traded on both LSE and NYSE under the name 'BT'. Part of the FTSE index.
It used to be part of the post office. It was owned by the crown until fucking thatcher came along.
Sent from my PDP-11
BT is a major UK ISP. One of the oldest, and, possibly the largest. If not, it's certainly in the top three.
BT - A telecoms company formerly known as British Telecom. It is the largest and the incumbent operator similar to AT&T and the Baby Bells in the USA.
In Belgium ISP's have to block thepiratebay.org. This was ordered by a court a few weeks ago. So know everyone here uses depiraatbaai.be, which is just the name translated to Dutch. Shows the uselessness of trying to block something on the internet...
Of course, we've never had a case of TFS using such acronyms as MAFIAA, SCOTUS, DOJ, DOD, RIAA or POTUS, which mean very little at first sight to many /.'ers who live outside the US. And if you had followed the 2nd link, which you already would have read if you had been following this story, you would have known the answer immediately. Come on, we all have to learn as we go through life. True, the summary would have been clearer to all if BT had been expanded but its not the end of the world. None of my British friends use the abbreviation BT to mean BitTorrent, we simply say 'torrents' or the 'BitTorrent' depending on context. Additionally, CO, CC NB and CoW do not appear to be recognised abbreviations or acronyms anywhere in the context of TFS.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
The market is deciding right now. People want "convenient" and "cheap" and they're apparently not getting it in sufficient quantity to avoid copyright infringement. It's not like people go out of their way to download illegally just to spite the *AAs of the world. (Well, some do, but they're a tiny minority.)
BT is a very large ISP and phone company; the former state monopoly one. BT is their name- they used to be called "British Telecom", but they aren't any more- they're just called "BT". In the same way as "AT&T" is their name- nobody translates it to "American Telephone & Telegraph" any more.
BT is correct in insisting upon a court order.
On the other hand, it is also completely appropriate to request the block on The Pirate Bay. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this site facilitates the distribution of materials against the rights holders wishes. Which is kinda illegal.
Actions like this are, in my opinion, much better than more clandestine approaches since it utilizes information that is made available to the public. (The Pirate Bay openly displays which torrents are available. A rights holder can use a BitTorrent client to verify that it is their material being distributed.) It does not circumvent a person's expectation to privacy since the information is made available in a public manner.
And for those mocking how easy it is to circumvent these blocks: sure it is. On the other hand, they are not trying to stop piracy because they know that piracy cannot be stopped. They are trying to do damage control, and that may just work. After all, they only need to stop the people who *may* buy their products. There is very little sense in wasting resources to tackle piracy by those who will never buy their product.
It used to be part of the post office. It was owned by the crown until fucking thatcher came along.
Yeah, and you'd wait a month to get a new phone line put in. I'm no fan of what privatization has done to e.g. the railways, but BT is one case where it actually worked.
I am trolling
What is a colonial? :)
Actually, I am from a European country where obscure acronyms are not used without explanation.
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
Don't forget having to rent all your equipment from the GPO too, and it being illegal to connect non-approved kit...
AT&T had the same deal, and it was private, although regulated. I guess it's probably more related to stodgy old ways than anything else.
Hence acoustically coupled modems, and that sort of fun.
The nice part about leasing the phones was they were domestic made, brick shithouses, not like today's basic phone. They also double as an excellent bludgeoning tool. Designed specifically to reduce service calls, I guess.
In my region, we have a state owned POTS/mobile/internet carrier, they seem to compete well, and let you have a modem hooked to the line. So it isn't impossible. I suppose modernization might have sped up with competing carriers, though (although that is unrelated to privatisation). It's sort of like anything though, powers that be have run phones like this since forever, those sorts of mindsets take a while to come around. Letting consumers push data over the lines wasn't their sort of mandate.
Now, did they actually fear third party equipment would damage the lines? I mean that was the reasoning, but did they have faith in it? Maybe helpdesk didn't want to have to support 100000 models, who knows :p
Sent from my PDP-11
First Pastor Niemoller warned us, but we forgot about him. Then the nerds warned us, but we called them Tin Foil Hats. Then when they come for your favorite site there will be no recourse left.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
At least over here the major difference was that before that you could demand that you had a phone line pretty much no matter where you lived and it cost about £50 to get it installed, now it costs £1000 and that is if you already live near an existing line. There was an old lady on the news yesterday, her safety alarm would not work any more because the telephone station in their are were being dismantled.
Yay privatization!
£1000? That's just plain wrong. According to their website it's £30 if you don't need an engineer visit, £130 if you do or free if you take broadband as well.
If you're being quoted £1000 you must live in the middle of nowhere and have never had a phone line before. Let me guess the milkman also doesn't deliver to your doorstep? Either suck it up or move to civilization.
Also prices have fallen 40% since priviatization so you're wrong on that count as well. (http://www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/CPS_assets/174_ProductPreviewFile.pdf)
I quit using them long ago after they made news headlines. There are plenty of other places to go. It's kinda like the "war on drugs". For every dealer you bust, a new one emerges.
Compare the cost of getting a court order to block a site, and the cost of the site switching domain name and IP address. Then they just need secondary sites, like torrentfreak, to list what the site is called this week.
Then when they come for your favorite site there will be no recourse left.
Which means I won't start to care until the day I can't reach Demonoid anymore!
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I was confused as to why and how the music industry could be pushing for BitTorrent to block Pirate Bay.
Cue the Chewbacca defense.
Like blocking the site will do anything. They will simply invent a new name, get a new domain and be back. It could be like the different spellings of "VIAGRA@" in spam emails. One possibility could be "P1RATE BAY", I'm sure that they could get quite inventive. Of course, the new spelling could be quickly spread around the internet. It's like the game "Whack a Mole".
If you go to pirate bay and click top 100 you will notice that almost everything in the list are movies.
Now, if you have ever watched a movie to the end you will notice that there is huge long list of people who worked on the movie and most of these people are not movie stars and directors they are regular joes who, as far as i can tell need, probably deserved to get paid.
Now i know that the movie industry and the MPAA arn't exactly whiter than white, however i know who will suffer everyone decided to pirate their movies.
Pirate music and music will probably get made, pirate movies and new movies simply wont get made.
hmmm.
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/IFPI+Finland+orders+Elisa+internet+service+provider+to+prevent+its+clients+from+accessing+Pirate+Bay+website/1135266471582
http://torrentfreak.com/isp-refuses-to-block-the-pirate-bay-110717
How long does it take BT to put in an ASDL connection?
You guessed it! A month.
Careful, 'they' don't have a fully formed sense of homo(u)r and may not get the irony ;)
This is exactly what I thought...
They're asking BitTorrent to block Pirate Bay?
Allowing nationstates to interfere with the Internet in ways like this will lead to the fracturing of the global network.
I do want to be able to go to whatever website I want to, when I want to. I do not consider it satisfactory that some sociopath in a suit tells me what I can do - even if I have no wish to do any different.
If that does not sound coherent, let me try and rephrase it.
I will decide what my computer is capable of doing. Any organisation that treats the general public as criminals is not an organisation that I want to have any controlling influence upon me.
I suspect that it would require something like Tor to get around this. I have thought about installing this in the past. I just never got round to it. I just think that the more encrypted traffic on the internet there is, the unhappier that bunch of crooks may feel.
I wonder if someone will get it running on the Raspberry Pi.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
I saw that as sarcasm about American English versus British English. Granted, some Americans can't write correct American English either.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Please don't stick the words "fucking" and "Thatcher" that close together, it's enough to give any man nightmares for life.