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UK ISP Disconnecting Filesharers
bs0d3 writes "A small VPN service, Koppla, has had its service terminated by its host, Santrex Hosting Solutions. Despite actively advertising their services to be oriented toward file-sharing including torrents and XDCC, even going so far as to put 'Seedbox Hosting | An Effective Solution' in the title of their contact page, the UK based Santrex will independently act to terminate users who are thought to be distributing content that they don't own the copyright to. This is regardless of whether the infringement is done by a third party, as is the case with a VPN service such as Koppla."
This is so wrong and such an invasion of privacy. The Internet is meant to be a bunch of dumb-swtiches, sending out packets to all of us, and none of it monitored or regulated. It's time that someone take a stand and show these mother fuckers who is really in charge here.
I am not quite sure what the story is here. Okay, so it is a bit rought that a business was put out of operation because it was being used to VPN up some torrent files - but it certainly didn't look like they were trying to hide it.
I mean "Hey, we offer great ways to avoid being caught when uploading torrents..." then "Awww.... we got shut down for uploading torrents..." really aren't to far apart in any business plan that starts with the first.
On the upside, the article points out that new EU rules take any sniffing out of the requirements for an ISP. So maybe this won't happen again.
I am really unsure which side to take here. I don't support the ludicrous fines and penalties that all of the **AA goons are trying to enforce, but I also don't support a business model that seems to be basically aimed at people breaking copyright of others.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Filesharing is not synonymous with copyright infringement. For example a host could put up torrents of Linux ISOs. So advertising support for file sharing and kicking off folks engaged in copyright violations are not mutually exclusive. I am not saying this ISP is doing so in the best possible manner, just that advertising filesharing does not imply they are going to look the other way regarding copyright violations.
Except that the one advertising "Seedbox hosting" wasn't Koppla, it was Santrex, the ones who DID the disconnecting.
I'm thinking Honeypot, but I'm the paranoid sort.
This is funny because Santrex itself sells bittorent hosting services called "seedboxes". What purpose do they think seedboxes serve other than sharing copyrighted material? I know, there are many legitimate uses for bittorrent, but I have a feeling that the kind of people in the market for anonymous bittorrent seedboxes are not the kind of people who are seeding legitimate torrents.
Those scumbags? I'm amazed the money grubbers didn't purposely disconnect them so they keep the money and run like they do to so many other customers. Or at least provide them with shit slow service. At least now all their low end seedbox customers will cut and run. Please, if there's any company deserving of crashing and burning these rats are it. Nastiest and slimiest staff and management in the universe!
That crazy company actually threatened to sue me over my paypal dispute over $25! Really! They have the time to waste on that bullshit! Worse, they somehow have in their TOS that if you pay by paypal you get sued by them if you open a dispute!
I decided I'd keep their scumbag crap in my backpocket to release once it could do the most damage. This looks like a good time!
Damn summaries and articles - or perhaps damn my comprehension ability today. I read that about five times as well as reading the article to try to work out why it was an issue.
If it is the parent company that is advertising itself as a pirate friendly ISP, then it's a bit of kettle and black pot, but at the same time, if Koppla is nice and clean, they will no doubt have zero problems switching over to another ISP with next to no problems or downtime for their customers.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Except that the one advertising "Seedbox hosting" wasn't Koppla, it was Santrex, the ones who DID the disconnecting.
You're right.
This is the worst written blog article I have ever read (hopefully, someone will read this entry and fix it). They need to qualify who's doing what instead of using ambiguous pronouns for everything. It's only once you read the rest of the blog article that you understand what happened.
How about the ISP hosting Koppla as their service was also being used to do file sharing. It should not just ripple up and stop at Koppla, but all the way up to the very backbone that the data traveled on or it does not make any since. It would be a way to take out those that wish to control the net.
They advertised being seedbox friendly, not pirate friendly. Or are you saying that torrents can only be used for copyright infringement? Because that's what slashdotters have been claiming for years. Now that the claim is used against pirates, it's suddenly not true anymore.
They'll have to open all the mail in Britain to ensure that they aren't "distributing content that they don't own the copyright to". Convenient excuse, anyway; seems almost inevitable.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Also, this HTML document is a file and Slashdot is sharing it.
That's OK. The copyright notice at the bottom of this page indicates that slashdot (well, its parent corp) holds the rights. :-)
It's false advertising anyway. Because every other ISP supports filesharing. It's pretty much the same thing that happened with the mineral water that prevents dehydration a few weeks ago.
Also, I could easy call it entrapment.
It will take some time but the EU will pass a few laws that will really cut them at the knees. We'll see who's laughing then.
Koppla was an ISP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-level_ISP
Anyone offering hosting etc. services of somekind is one kind of an ISP. ISP stands for: Internet Service Provider, whether that is access to internet, or service within internet meant for somekind of communication (ie. webhosting, vpn, shell accounts, remote desktop, dedicated) is an ISP.
Once again, this issue is not about legal technicalities or technical workarounds... If you put up a service like the pirate bay it's laughable to claim that more than 1% of the usage is for non copyright infringement purposes. The "but you can use torrent to share Linux ISOs too" argument won't go very far in court (or with business relations like this case). Neither does the "Google can also be used to index torrents" argument. While technically correct the society is rigged to avoid technicalities in rules and take decisions based on intent. The intent of this service was clearly to profit from copyright violating distribution.
The actual problem is that non-commercial file distribution is not regulated. This is counter intuitive to the Internet as an invention and needs to be changed. The Internet has made such regulation incompatible with fundamental human rights. File sharing is not theft - it's how people will discover new information and consume culture from now and in the future. Business models will have to evolve from utilizing physical scarcity to utilizing distribution-as-a-service. When people finally start to see beyond the "file sharing is theft" and "allowing file sharing means artist shouldn't get paid" arguments/distractions we can have sensible debate and lawmaking. What would change if non-commercial file distribution would be legal/unregulated tomorrow? Think about that. The file sharers are already file sharing. Pandora's box has already been opened.
No, every other hosting provider most definitely don't support BitTorrent because it drains the network because of the amount of connections it opens. Not with a single customers, but if you get bunch of them. This is even more true for sharing hosting, because it drains the server resources immersible fast.
It's not entrapment either (and this is private company to begin with). Offering hosting is not a request to violate laws.
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rewriting history since 2109
The "but you can use torrent to share Linux ISOs too" argument won't go very far in court.
However when combined with "we disconnected clients identified as copyright violators" it will likely go much farther.
From Slashdot TOS:
With respect to text or data entered into and stored by publicly-accessible site features such as forums, comments and bug trackers ("Geeknet Public Content"), the submitting user retains ownership of such Geeknet Public Content; with respect to publicly-available statistical content which is generated by the site to monitor and display content activity, such content is owned by Geeknet. In each such case, the submitting user grants Geeknet the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.
No, every other hosting provider most definitely don't support BitTorrent because it drains the network because of the amount of connections it opens.
You need to go back to network school if you think open connections themselves inherently create drain on a "network".
If you're doing SPI or DPI, why should I care what that costs you if I didn't ask for that service in the first place. Even if I am sharing the server with others, then you I suppose we can agree on some kind of limitation on sockets, but that's another thing entirely.
Not exactly. It's a store refusing service to someone who just happens to hang out with people they don't particularly like in their spare time.
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The GP referenced the file in its entirety and that is copyright geeknet.
No, not at all. There are linux torrents, world of warcraft patches and wikileaks insurance policies that are perfectly legal uses for torrents.
Having said that, if I asked just about anyone I know what torrents they last downloaded - it would be rather unlikely to be one of the three examples above and it would also be unlikely that they were not downloading torrents containing copyrighted material.
While there are many legal uses for torrent files and peer to peer, I would really love to see a true (read: not produced by **AA or torrent*****.com - both of which I assume would be biased) percentage breakdown of illegal vs legal torrent use. If the numbers are overwhelmingly in favour of pirated material (which I think they likely are) then advertising a business as "seedbox friendly" is by definition somewhat clouded (at least in my mind) by their perceived potential market - no matter what their intentions are.
To pop my thoughts into a car analogy - You can put a massive super powerful engine into a normal car because you like the sound, but much more likely you want to go faster.
Again, as I said in the original post here - I don't support piracy, but I am dead against the stupidly over the top litigation that record companies are bringing against people for downloading a few songs. Two polar wrongs don't blend to make a right somewhere in the middle here.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
World of Warcraft uses bittorrent to distribute updates.
Pando Media Booster uses bittorrent to distribute updates, and is used by quite a few other games (League of Legends, Lord of the Rings Online, etc, etc).
Linux ISOs are hardly the biggest legitimate use of bittorrent.
Not a sentence!
Still, it's drain on the network and system on top of the legal issues. Many hosting providers rather just skip those customers and provide better service for rest of their clients. They are free to do so, too.
Other companies also don't allow porn for the same reason. It's a huge bandwidth hog. You say they should just get more bandwidth? Well, that would mean increased prices and might not even be possible everywhere. It's a lot easier to just refuse certain types of clients.
Many companies also refuse IRC servers or even IRC clients on their network, or they have a separate network for those clients, because of the possibility of DDOS. While non-IRC clients might get DDOS too, it's not as usual as with IRC. And if you do start to get DDOSed every day so that it affects the whole network or even brings it completely down, most companies will cut you off as you're causing lots of troubles.
Torrents are used all over the place. I think you would be surprised at the break down of infringing vs non-infringing. I can tell you with certainly the last torrent I downloaded was not infringing. I am actually a little lost as to why I might use a torrent these days for infringing content when there are legal methods which hide the fact you are infringing much better. I'm referring to legitimate file sharing hosting operations.
If ever you want to see if an idea or concept is ludicrous or not, imagine yourself trying to explain it to an Alien race. You'd seem so petty and selfish for insinuating that you charge for information and claim complete dominion over things such as melodies, rhymes, sequences of tones and harmonies. Our race would not have achieved what it has if it weren't for every single contributing factor in the grander scheme of things. No one 'invents' anything alone, it's about time we start freely sharing what we have with anyone it can benefit.
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
From the TOS...
That basically states: /. can do whatever it likes with whatever you write, whether you like it or not.
In all essence, you lost all copyright control on a post when posting it on /. because you cannot control a "perpetual, irrevocable" license.
The whole paragraph is a basic rubber-stamp boiler-plate formulation that makes a mockery of copyright.
Looking at the Internet i don't have the feeling that finding a hoster for Porn can be very hard....
No. But 99% of filesharing is infringing. Or crap put out by porno studios to get you to buy full-length films.
And Linux ISOs? What is this, 2002? It hasn't been even moderately hard to get Linux ISOs through http/ftp for *years*.
Yes, it's not hard. But still some companies don't want to deal with it. It was more true maybe 5-6 years ago when bandwidth was more expensive, and especially so with shared hosting.
The more connections that are open, the greater the chance for bufferbloat to come into play. It's not really so much "inherent drain" as it is "shitty router implementations" but nonetheless, it can be a factor.
FC Closer
Having said that, if I asked just about anyone I know what torrents they last downloaded - it would be rather unlikely to be one of the three examples above and it would also be unlikely that they were not downloading torrents containing copyrighted material.
Try asking your friends. Maybe you'll get a surprise, especially if you remind them about the WoW updates.
The last torrents I participated in were Linux distributions (Ubuntu & PCLinuxOS). In each case, I kept seeding until the traffic had essentially died away - that was after about 50GiB uploaded. In the most recent release, I restricted myself to Lubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu torrents, and left out the poxed Unity/GnomeShell Ubuntu. Mind you, I still run 10.04 on our home systems.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
ISPs should not be making the decision to cut a customer off based on the content they are retrieving and distributing, but only if they are attacking the network or otherwise trying to harm the network itself (or if there is a court order to disconnect a specific customer). What next, some ISP gets all "morality police" and starts banning customers for accessing porn, illegal drug information, or even political/social material that someone with authority at the ISP decided they didn't want to pass across their wires?
It'd be like the phone company disconnecting your service because you like to call phone sex lines, or the postal service refusing to deliver your mail because you subscribe to skin mags.
FC Closer
> it would also be unlikely that they were not downloading torrents containing copyrighted material
After world harmonization with Berne, that would be practically all material, so... I think you rather meant "unlicensed, copyrighted material".
That analogy seems rather stretched... It seems more like Mr A ISP going into the store with a big bag, grabbing a pile of stuff, walking out without paying, ducking into an alley, giving it to an anonymous individual, then when the store refuses to allow Mr A ISP on their property, he says "But I did not steal the goods, I'm just a carrier, you cannot punish me, I was an innocent party getting paid to do it!".
The actual problem is that non-commercial file distribution is regulated*
I suspect the root cause of this will turn out to be OVH. They've become VERY anti-proxy in the last few months, and will frequently null route a machine for 'security' concerns such as port scans originating from a device... you'll get alot of these running a publicly accessible VPN endpoint.
Perhaps this VPN 'company' should invest in their own infrastructure and handle their own abuse issues.
I would really love to see a true (read: not produced by **AA or torrent*****.com - both of which I assume would be biased) percentage breakdown of illegal vs legal torrent use. If the numbers are overwhelmingly in favour of pirated material (which I think they likely are) then advertising a business as "seedbox friendly" is by definition somewhat clouded (at least in my mind) by their perceived potential market - no matter what their intentions are.
What is pirated material? There is a huge grey area.
E.g. Is software that break US software patents, pirated software? Software patents are only enforceable in USA and a few other, more insignificant, bribemocracies.
E.g. If an artist use torrents to spread his creations to countries where (s)he doesn't have a distributor; is that piracy because people in countries where he have a distributor may download? Some countries even give the artists an irrevocable right to spread their own creations parallel to any distributor they have a deal with.
E.g. Is a torrent that contains technology that USA have declared should not be exported to some countries, illegal? (Not just cryptography software like OpenSSH, but also e.g. software used in healthcare or basic education, is illegal to export to some countries from USA. In these cases, USA is not supported by any other government I know of, but have forced some of them to withhold US export restrictions anyway).
Internet is international. What constitute IP Piracy is not international.
What I would like to see is a bittorrent tracker that enforce content declaration of who have an IP interests in each torrent. Then let me figure out if that ownership is applicable in my country. As it is now, it is almost always impossible to figure out the content of torrents and often it is impossible to figure out IP ownership of their content even after I have downloaded them (aside from open source software, I mostly use torrents to download academic papers, and obscure, mostly self published, movies, ebooks and music, where IP interests is hard to figure out if it isn't declared in the torrent description or content).
lets sue slashdot
Santrex is not an ISP. It is a hosting company, and a black hat hosting company at that. Almost everything they host is do to with torrents, counterfeit goods, malware and fraud. They host several carding and hacking forums, several of their hosted sites were recently seized by US authorities. A tiny, tiny proportion of sites are legitimate.. but you should read some of the customer reviews of this company for the full story!
Santrex has had a terrible reputation the past few years in the seedbox community. No serious uploader I know uses them. There are lots of scams/kids running so called seedbox companies, and Santrex is one of those people generally avoid if they know better.
What about the Wu Tang Clan inspired Wubuntu, the latest version of Creaky Cow (ie, Mooobunto) and the frankly crap Pubuntu?
I have excellent Karma and I am not afraid to Troll it.
Okay, so it is a bit rought that a business was put out of operation because it was being used to VPN up some torrent files - but it certainly didn't look like they were trying to hide it.
Although they advertised their intent, the very nature of their service makes me wonder how they got busted... I've long suspected that filesharing would move to entirely various VPN-like networks precisely to hide their traffic.
So I have to wonder, did Koppla get the boot solely for its PR, or for actual specific allegations of copyright infringement?
I'm just wondering if Santrex has some kind of forum or any other service where one can post a comment. I am sure that if few people post a comments pointing to "copyrighted material" then it should fall under Santrex' own "Santrex will independently act to terminate users who are thought to be distributing content that they don't own the copyright to. This is regardless of whether the infringement is done by a third party...".
I would be really interested to see how will Santrex deal with "third-parties" trying to bring him down using his own weapons. ;-)
yes... but you are also solely responsible for the content of your posts should you slander or defame someone else - its a have cake/eat cake kinda thing ;-)
And I am wondering how would this type of social attack be usable against other companies like The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), Microsoft and such.
I am sure that other companies facing lawsuits from these trolls would appreciate to have this kind of look-they-do-it-too argument for the court. ;-)
Just to find some catchy name for it...
Okay, I'll be honest, I like getting free stuff via The Pirate Bay. I have been that way all my life, even before P2P came along. I listen to music on the radio and watch movies/programmes on TV for free, then switch channel when the ads come on. Yeah, I rob the stations blind when it comes to not paying attention to ads. Now I make use of free internet services with disposable email addresses, and always have AdBlock turned on. I "try before you buy" via torrents a lot, which I guess makes me a pirate.
Thing is I feel pretty good about it. I still spend money on media and services, more than I used to in fact. Part of that is simply down to having more disposable income as I get older, part of it is down to finding new stuff that I like enough to spend said income on. Now I can listen to or watch what I want rather than what someone else decides to broadcast I find more stuff that interests me. Sometimes friends lend me CDs or I go round to watch their DVDs (public performance), which sometimes leads to me spending money on merchandise and the like.
So yeah, I'm a freeloader, I "steal" in the non-theft-making-a-copy sense. But artists and media companies also need people like me to survive, and if you annoy me with DRM or legal shinnanigans you can be sure I won't give you a penny. And I do in fact practice what I preach: My hardware designs and software are open source, yet I also sell them and do okay out of it. People will pay for quality and convenience even when they can get your warez for free. The publicity and community support I get from being open/free is invaluable, and you only have to look at the fashion industry or Japanese manga/anime/game producers to see how well it works on a massive scale.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I have been repeated told by other slashdotters that file sharing and P2P is not just for violating copyright and that by far the majority of P2P and file sharing traffic is for legitimate purposes such as distributing Linux. So, if the ISP is only cutting off those who are violating copyright law, where is the problem?
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
This analogy is wrong. In that case the person is stealing something physical and they're directly committing a criminal offence. Whether or not you think filesharing is theft, it's not a criminal offense and the VPN company was just transporting bits anonymously, not sharing or downloading the files.
If you really need to push the filesharing is theft line, It's more like a gas station refusing to fill up a taxi cab of a company that's advertising shoplifting trips to cities. Then of course you're still equating it actual theft. So it's actually a taxi company that's offering trips aimed at people who want to go to shops to copy the things that are in them and a gas station taking a moral stance on that, when really it should be none of their business what that gas is used for.
Most ISPs have any filesharing provisions in their TOS - the reason probably shouldn't be shocking to many of us, and it's not a moral one. Filesharing pushes a lot of a data through their network and that means the margins on these customers isn't high enough to care about keeping them as customers. Most business customers, the ones they actually care about (see margins above) won't give a damn that the filesharers have been kicked out of the ISP, in fact they'll gobble up the line that kicking high bandwidth low value users out will improve their quality of service.
So back to the analogy it's a gas station offering fixed price fill ups to get you to town and you showing up with a big 18 wheeler with "FREE SWAG!" painted all over the side and them saying, no fucking way are we filling that!
Eh? I'm paying more for bandwidth than I did six years ago. Add the fact that I mirror my studio stuff (uncompressed or lossless compressed tracks) to a remote site for backup reasons via rsync, and I'd say the cost has more than tripled for the same amount of latency and bits over the wire.
I'd LOVE to live in a world where bandwidth is cheaper than it was in '06.
grabbing a pile of stuff
Copying a pile of stuff.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
But 99% of filesharing is infringing.
How do you know that? Considering that it's likely nearly impossible to identify infringing content, I don't see how anyone could possibly come up with an accurate measurement.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
using santrex..
I used them once for about a month and I will never look back except for lesson learned.
I wasn't doing anything shady, they just are very shady. With how they run their business.
ie: here is a vps but we don't tell you we limit the file descriptors so you can't really do a dam thing with this unless you upgrade..
I hate thieves of any sort.
The whole paragraph is a basic rubber-stamp boiler-plate formulation that makes a mockery of copyright.
Not really, no. It's a publishing agreement, of exactly the kind that copyright was designed to allow. It is a little unusual in being irrevocable, but that's not wholly unreasonable given the nature of the work being licensed.
Note the rights it *doesn't* grant to geeknet: sublicensing, and moral right. Geeknet have the right to *transfer* their license to somebody else, but if they wish to do so they will have to stop publishing your comments themselves. This basically allows them to sell slashdot if they want to. But they don't get the right to farm out your comments to other sites, unless they're sites they operate themselves. They also don't get the right to strip your identification from the comment and claim it as their own work: they have to continue providing attribution as long as they publish the comment.
You should read a record publishing contract some day. It's almost as bad, and that's stuff peoples' livelihoods and life ambitions depend on.
Whether or not you think filesharing is theft, it's not a criminal offense
No, as always gets pointed out on slashdot, filesharing is not theft, nor any other criminal offence in most countries. It is, however.a civil offence. And in the same way that a company wouldn't repeat a libel (for fear of getting sued themselves) so you can't expect them to condone copyright infringement.
Whether or not you think that libel and copyright infringement should be civil offences capable of being pursued in the courts for damages is another matter, of course.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
The publicity and community support I get from being open/free is invaluable, and you only have to look at the fashion industry... to see how well it works on a massive scale.
If you think the fashion industry works like FOSS you're delusional.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it