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."

Comments

Alternate DNS/routing.

[GNULinuxGuy]

Methinks alternate DNS and routing methods are about to get a lot more popular in the UK.

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[justforgetme]

It's still pilfering someone's hard work for free.

I was given to understand that Beyonce is one of the "girls (who run the world)" I wasn't informed that this meant coal mining to keep the record industry going.

No, honestly? Hard work? You really have no idea how media distribution works now, do you? The record companies have a 80% margin on their product 95% of that stays with the record company and only 5% goes to the signed artist (and that is when you stroke a good deal).
So, no. You are not stealing from the artist and since the artists is the only one that could be considered working (via a proxy producer/choreographer/prman usually) You are not stealing by copying that album of the Internet.

If you want to help an artist make money go support a band on kickstarter or buy off some indie band's web shop etc. Also, that's where You usually will get good bang for Your money (limited edition vinyl + flacc downloads, etc).

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[Gaygirlie]

Yep, freetards gotta have their freebees.

And I'm not interested in the whole 'but p2p isn't stealing, it's copyright infringement'. WE KNOW. It's still pilfering someone's hard work for free. If you don't intend on paying for it, don't use it. It's quite simple.

But we've got a generation who expect something for nothing nowadays....

Bring on the DRM I say.

It's not about "freebees", tbh. It's about freedom to express oneself and liability. First of all, should an ISP be liable for stuff that people put on the Internet if the content is not hosted on the ISP's equipment simply because they are providing the means for people to access the Internet? To me it seems like saying that the city should be held accountable for e.g. bank robberies, simply because they are the ones providing the roads to the bank. Secondly, should large corporations be given the right to demand the blocking of one or another website? If it was a small company or an individual this wouldn't even be considered, the only reason this is considered is because the corporations in question have deep pockets. A 10-man sweatshop would in no way or form be able to do the same even if they actually did lose 95% of their income due to piracy, but a large corporation that is still raking on money like crazy and are likely losing something around 5 percent of possible income gets to tell ISPs what to block. Do we really want a future where large corporations are given ever more privileges compared to small ones?

I atleast don't feel comfortable with such disparity in privileges and I am still unsure of what I think about holding an ISP liable for things like this. It seems to me like a huge can of worms that will sooner or later majorly screw people over.

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I just bought some music last week. It had no DRM whatsoever. I had already listened to the music dozens of times on Youtube. If I had checked on TPB, I'd probably have found it. The album artist asked customers to set their own price with no minimum, and I paid $10 for the album. That artist chose not to treat his paying customers as his enemies, and accordingly I joined them. Over the past year I spent some $300 on digital media, which is roughly what I can afford.

0.00 of those dollars went to cartels that view their customers as an enemy by pouring millions into developing technologies that hinder their legitimate and non-violating actions with music they paid for - millions that came out of these customers' own pockets, to further the irony.

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[SuricouRaven]

Huh... only filters port 80? Which actually makes perfect sense - it means that BT have achieved the block by simply adding newsbin to the list of websites hosting child pornography, and so repurposed their existing child-porn filter CleanFeed. If they were doing it by a new IP block, they would have blocked all traffic to the IP rather than just port 80. Cleanfield works by redirecting only port 80 to a transparent proxy. Technically elegant - why set up a whole new filtering policy if you already have the infrastructure in place? - but in PR terms a little embarassing, as it serves to validate the claims by CleanFeed's critics that once a convenient censorship system is built, even for a purpose so widely supported as blocking child porn, it's all but inevitable that it will eventually be put to other uses that that for which it was intended.

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[arkhan_jg]

It was in fact the court that ordered BT to use the Cleanfeed filtering system to block the Newzbin2 domain, IP and any others they start using. This is partly because BT argued the cost of setting up and maintaining a new system to do all-port IP range blocking would be too expensive, and was an unwarranted expense to impose on them considering they're (BT) not actually doing anything illegal.

But you're entirely correct that this validates the concerns that any censorship system will eventually be expanded. Now the courts have decided Cleanfeed is suitable for trying to block sites accused of assisting copyright infringement - and will no doubt add the piratebay to the list, how long before they also agree to order BT to start blocking sites accused of promoting terrorism, racial hatred or even just accused of hosting libelous statements? UK courts have already shut down such sites that were UK hosted, now they've a mechanism for doing so for foreign hosted sites.

That it doesn't block ports outside of 80 - including https! - means it's an entirely worthless exercise for the technically savvy, but the same doesn't hold true once political blogs or forums that the less savvy might read start getting blocked.

(Note for the non-UK residents - BT internet are the biggest consumer ISP, with about 1/4 of all internet users in the UK. BT also runs the copper telephone line infrastructure, and has the vast majority of POTS customers. A number of other ISPs resell BT internet access, and some of them also subscribe to Cleanfeed, the child-porn filter. Virgin and TalkTalk, the next two biggest ISPs have also been involved in the court cases, but have not - yet - been ordered to block newzbin 2)

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes zero sense.

It's so easy for consumers and site owners to use alternate addressing. Wasn't this explained to the judge? If the internet is like water flowing down a hill, putting a rock in the way won't do anything except reroute traffic in the same way that water will flow around the rock. If you build a dam, sure, you'l change things but building huge dams just to protect an outdated business model makes no economic sense; and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that people still can still move data around on either side of the 'dam.'

This is solving the wrong problem.

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[AngryDeuce]

Oh my god, four thousand years?? Your life must be horrible!

Seriously, I pirated them before because here they never showed them at all because it would take an infinite amount of time for them to reach us. Four thousand years is nothing.

(Posting from the event horizon of a black hole)

Re:Alternate DNS/routing.

[hxnwix]

Haha, what's that? Couldn't hear you over the sound of my money accruing. By the way, you missed a spot.

Re:File trading is the radio of the 21st century

[justforgetme]

You really forget one very important fact:

The Music Industry doesn't want you discovering new music! They are afraid that, in doing so, you might actually find the good stuff and stop buying Britney Spears.

Now it's the pirate bay, tomorrow they will want to shut down all the indie bands!

Re:What is BT? What is BPI?

[mirix]

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.

Useless

[ocean_soul]

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...

Sauce for the goose...

[janrinok]

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.