Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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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.
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!
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!
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
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