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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.
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...
If your computer is setup to act as a node on Tor or another onion routing technology and a pirate uses your computer as a exit node, the pirate's traffic would look like your traffic to your ISP..
Yes thats right, even though it is only an accusation, it will cost the innocent £20 to deny the accusation! telegraph article
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 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!
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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
"...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.
Even outside of that, we have old trusty, sneakernet.
I'm a part of an unofficial club that meets every couple weeks explicitly for the purposes of sharing media with each other. A handful of laptops and external hard drives and we're sharing hundreds of gigabytes of shit in a fraction of the time it would take for us all to torrent it ourselves. We've even somewhat specialized our focus to make it more efficient; I'm the music guy, we've got our movie and TV show guy, our game guy, our PC software guy, our Apple software guy (who's also getting tons of eBooks/eMagazines and shit for us now as well).
Until we get a fully P2P internet, it's the best option for us to minimize risk.
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.
If your computer is setup to act as a node on Tor or another onion routing technology and a pirate uses your computer as a exit node, the pirate's traffic would look like your traffic to your ISP..
Indeed it would, but when your traffic terminates in China, or some other place, who gives a fuck?
Note: I don't condone using bittorrent thru Tor either. there are similarly designed protocols for that, like I2P.
Someone using BitTorrent over Tor network wouldn't show traffic going through you to China (or wherever the Tor user resides). An ISP monitoring your traffic would see BitTorrent requests originate at your IP address, and BitTorrent responses terminate at your IP address, simple as that.
When you are a Tor exit node and someone makes a BitTorrent request through you, the actual request to the BitTorrent cloud is made by you (i.e., originates at your IP address) and the response is delivered to you (i.e., terminates at your IP address). At this point, your Tor software running on your system would encapsulate the response that you received and forward it through the Tor network back towards the actual requester.
Now, depending on whether or not your ISP is monitoring Tor traffic (or all traffic) as opposed to specifically BitTorrent traffic, they may very well be able to see a correlation between your receiving some packet (remember, Tor can be obfuscated) and making a BitTorrent request, and, likewise, you receiving a BitTorrent response and sending some packet. If they're smart and if they care to, they may even put two and two together and realize that you're just acting as a proxy for someone else. However, that's on them.
Makes running a Tor exit node as a method of plausible deniability seem pretty appealing though :)