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)."

Comments

Please, Please, Please start a trend.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend.

[The_Wilschon]

Best would be to spoof the ISP's identification mechanisms so that IP addresses belonging to MPs, ISP executives, music and film industry executives, etc appear in their logs.

Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend.

[cpghost]

These influential guys will be added to a whitelist of allowed copyright infringers. Do you really expect anything else?

Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

The key difference is that driving recklessly is a physical danger to other motorists, downloading of copyright material has zero physical impact.

Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend.

[Andy_R]

The thing that stops this is the proposed claim process, which is insanely complex. It requires copyright holders to accurately predict in advance how many claims they will make, take part in a blind dutch auction over how much they are willing to pay per claim, and the cost of claiming more than doubles if you are claiming against someone connected to the 4th or 5th biggest ISP.

The does not to allow small copyright holders such as independent musicians, journalists or photographers to pursue actions. Ofcom's consultation shows that the only people pointing this out and insisting that this would be wrong were the Pirate Party UK â" we don't like the DEAct, but if we are going to have it, we want it to be fair.

Your Wicket is Taken

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Onion Routing

[Githaron]

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..

£20 to appeal

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes thats right, even though it is only an accusation, it will cost the innocent £20 to deny the accusation! telegraph article

What about a home run policy?

[ravenscar]

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.

Guilty until you pay up

[Mr_Silver]

I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!

From the BBC News:

Suspected internet pirates will have 20 working days to appeal against allegations of copyright infringement and must pay £20 to do so, according to revised plans to enforce the UK's Digital Economy Act.

So now you're automatically assumed guilty .. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!

Re:VPNs

[cpu6502]

This 3-strike deal is just the latest in a series of dumb decisions by OfCom. They are also planning to turn-off the FM radio band.

No firm date has been set, but they proposed 2018 in their meeting minutes, after which listeners will be dependent upon the barely-functional MP2 DAB (digital audio broadcast). The switchoff of analog television was also handled poorly by these bureaucrats with many citizens unable to receive the new digital channels.

Very telling

[gman003]

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.