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UK's 'Three Strikes' Piracy Measures Published
judgecorp writes "UK regulator Ofcom has published details of plans to disconnect illegal file-sharers. It is the 'three strikes' policy which ISPs unsuccessfully appealed against, and it requires ISPs to keep a list of persistent copyright infringers (identified, as usual, by their IP address). ISPs will have to send monthly warning letters to those who infringe above a certain threshold. If a user gets three letters within a single year, the ISP must hand anonymised details to the copyright owner, who can apply for a court order to obtain the infringer's identity (or at least, an identity associated with that IP address)."
VPNs will be the order of the day!
In other news: First Post! :P
I really, really want it to become a trend to deliberately download red-flagged content from IP addresses other than your own. Do it over poorly-secured Wi-Fi, or public access or whatever, but do it to prove a point.
That seems like the natural activist thing to do.
Troll around the neighborhood looking for open WiFi access and torrenting a bunch of random crap.
Wouldn't this make onion routing potentially illegal?
We have the darknets ready to run.
Should not it be called "The Taken Wicket Policy"? What is this "Three Strikes" non-sense you speak of?
Off for a spot of tea...
What about all the false positives from people who have no clue how to work wifi? Throw away the key! They teased us in school. I'm sorry but it really is a temptation to enjoy this.
If you want free copyright material, there is usually a way to get it with a magic marker, some duck tape and a deep voice. No jail time!
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Shouldn't that be "alleged persistent copyright infringers"?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
There might be some traps I didn't notice but this seems fair to me. It notifies the accused, forbids the ISPs from sharing the data they collected of them and has due process. Altough if they really want people to respect copyright laws they should concentrate on fixing them first.
Yes thats right, even though it is only an accusation, it will cost the innocent £20 to deny the accusation! telegraph article
End-to-end encryption. Your ISP should should only know what services you are connecting to, not what you are transferring.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
For every three strikes policy there should be a home run policy. A home run would be a crime of such complexity and grand proportion that its perpetrators would get off free and clear. The US seems to have an unspoken home run policy that is frequently applied to those who work on Wall Street. The UK has a similar policy in their own investment banking sector.
So, what would be a home run in this instance? Uploading the top 10 movies and songs of 2012 onto every web-connected machine?
Of course I jest.
I use it legitimately every time I want to download a new Linux ISO. There is nothing inherently illegal about the technology.
I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!
From the BBC News:
So now you're automatically assumed guilty .. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Well, the trap is that they could be mislabeling infringing content, there could be content you own that you're uploading/downloading to a cloud service they're unaware of that they could flag, they don't know who's using the computer at the time, nor the IP address really. Could be automated by a trojan for all they know.
Twinstiq, game news
Soon we will see just how many David Camerons, Tony Blairs and Gordon Browns there are in Britain...
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
"...to those who infringe above a certain threshold."
The sliding window approach allows ISPs to harvest just enough infringers to keep big content supplied with a steady stream of lawsuits with ready-made payouts. Not that big content is suffering in any measurable way from copyright infringement to begin with. The problem with these approaches is that they falsely assume that every download is another lost sales opportunity. The flaw in their reasoning here is that people's pockets don't suddenly get deeper as soon as they have no choice but to pay for content...they just view less content.
and eclipse etc., I make a special point of using BT whenever I can for legitimate porpoises
sag
It's interesting when you think about it. The media producers are pushing for the so-called pirates to be punished by removing their ability to pirate or assist others in doing so by uploading.
If they were truly motivated purely by profit, wouldn't they be pushing instead for massive civil penalties, or perhaps some sort of tax?
Banning pirates from the internet does little to increase profits even IF you follow MAFIAA logic that every single pirated file equates to one "stolen" sale, because where are people most likely to buy music? Online.
This leads to several possible conclusions (ranked in order of probability (by my analysis), descending):
1) The entire music/film industry is basically panicking and is unable to think straight due to the massive upheavals caused by the Internet, and they're lashing out like a scared animal.
2) They actually do not care about pure profits, but are instead concerned primarily with maintaining control of distribution, making this as much an attack on iTunes as The Pirate Bay.
3) They are fully aware of how ineffective this will be at curbing piracy, and plan to use this as a stepping-stone to something bigger and worse ("Look, even with the Three Strikes law, we're still making only billions of dollars per minute, we need a law that taxes people by the megabyte to use the Internet because they might use it for PIRACY!").
4) They're just a pawn in someone else's Evil Master Plan.
As far as I'm concerned, if you're running BitTorrent you deserve to go to prison. I'm not sure why ISPs don't just monitor for BT traffic and report those users to the police right away. This technology has only ever been used for piracy. I've never encountered a legit use for it.
a hhttp://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
Assuming they want to retain their customers, this should spark a competition between ISPs to demonstrate , ironically, their incompetence at implementing relevant monitoring processes.
The next time a lawyer asks them for a user's data transaction list, they should be saying "Oh sure, here is a list of PING request sent from this users connection since January...."
Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.
Sorry, I broke the link. Should have been: http://www.debian.org/CD/torrent-cd/
Don't forget that this is all done to "protect the Artists" (we all know the truth, but most don't).
It is therefore reasonable to attack the artists that come out in favour.
The Telegraph article has a photo of Adele. Don't know her opinion, but either they come out against soon or they are presumed in favour (though for 20 quid I will review their case) Boo outside their concerts. Use "xxx Kills The Internet!" Or, organize a public "CD burning" (have some real ones, have a bunch that you printed covers with a quality colour printer). The point is: make it personal. It's no longer the Grey Anonymous Regulatory Organization that is the bad guy. Give them a face.
But: make sure to not bother those artists that come out against, to the contrary, support them.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
This is sort of like people getting parking tickets when they are not responsible for the infraction. If my 18+ grandchild parks my car illegally, I get the ticket even though there is no proof that I parked it. Things like this happen all the time, but I wonder how. Maybe a parking ticket is not considered a criminal offense like a moving violation??
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Well sure, of course you'd only use BT for legitimate seafood - it's like the Sea Food Association of America PSA says; "You wouldn't eat Flipper..."
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
World of Warcraft patches, though yeah, nobody plays that anymore *rolls eyes*. Actually quite a few MMOs are now using their own custom bit torrent clients to share patches instead of having an unneeded patching infrastructure in place. Also yeah; Linux, Open Office, Eclipse. It's a shame that nobody has compiled a list so we can just c&p the counter argument to that common hyperbole.
and with a ticket you have the right to court and there needs to be a standard of evidence.
Download all the crap you want within a single calendar month, then get one letter. Wait 6 months till you need more stuff and repeat, getting 2 letters in a year and not enough to trigger the restrictions.
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
WTF?! If you are fluent enough in these acronyms to parse that sentence, then you didn't need to read it in the first place.
"Oh you've got evidence that this person was infringing? Well, it's a dynamic IP, so we can't guarantee that's the same person..."
(a week goes by)
"Oh right, so you've somehow worked out that it is? Yeah, I guess it does look like it fits a pattern of a single user. Is that definitely copyright-infringing material?"
(a week goes by)
"Yeah fair enough, you can apply for the anonymised details. Just sign here... and here... and here... and have your solicitor sign here... here... and, uh, here... Good. And how do you want to pay for that admin fee? Ah, we don't take Amex."
(a week goes by)
"Right here's your anonymised data"
(a month goes by, while the court paperwork gets filed, lost, refiled, buried in a peat bog, posted to Azerbaijan and eventually found in the ruins of a disused hospital somewhere near Glasgow)
"Oh, the contact details? Sure, just need you to sign here, here, and here... cool, and your solicitor needs to sign here, here, here, here and here... Lovely. Now, how would you like to pay the admin fee?"
(a week goes by)
"Oh, the contact details? Sorry, it's run over its time limit and we've wiped them. Would you like me to send out new forms?"
As far as I'm concerned, if you're running BitTorrent you deserve to go to prison.
I seeded the book I wrote, BT is the only place it's available (unless I email it to you). I also share a few Linux distros, Star Wreck, and movies that the makers want shared.
I've never encountered a legit use for it.
That's because you're a fucking dumbass with a two digit IQ who doesn't belong her. Now go away, MAFIAA shill.
Free Martian Whores!
It's only a matter of time before everyone gets banned from the interwebs for 'piracy' and ISPs go out of business. Another brilliant idea. It makes me almost angry enough to move to Papau New Guinea and forget I ever knew about teh interwebs.
The ISPs have to keep such records for anti-terror purposes. Terror, child porn, piracy, hate speech, libel... It is all getting muddled together, and a method for dealing with one of them is very tempting to use for one of the others, even if it doesn't particularly fit.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
I am not a number, I am a free man!
How do I get the first of my three strikes? Please provide links ;-)
(Absolutely seriously, how does the ISP know what to log, and what to is infringing, and what thresholds, etc?)