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High Court Orders UK ISPs To Block More Torrent Sites
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "The website blocking phenomenon has continued today in the UK, with the High Court adding three major torrent sites to the country's unofficial ban list. Following complaints from the music industry led by the BPI, the Court ordered the UK's leading Internet service providers to begin censoring subscriber access to Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy."
Unlike when the Pirate Bay was blocked, none of the ISPs contested this. They did, however, refuse to block things without a court order. Looks like the flood gates have been opened. On the topic of filesharing, Japan arrested 27 file sharers, using the recent changes to their copyright law that allow criminal charges to be brought against file sharers.
Suddenly six strikes that end with a slap on the wrist doesn't look so bad.
The law has obviously not caught up to the Tech Community...
There Can Be Only One...
When the law begins to not represent the morals and wishes of the people. The Australian tax payers are building a high speed fibre optic content distribution system that will allow content producers to sell us their copyrighted product and they have the gall to claim that we will be using it for piracy.
FUCK you content producers, I'm going to lobby the government that we should be taxing copyrighted content to subsidise the delivery system that the people have paid for,
Or possibly sneakernet. You can get 1TB external USB drives cheap now, and can fit a lot of piracy on one of those. Every school, college and workplace will have a Knock-Off Nigel ready to swap drives.
Are these sites pulled from those ISPs' DNS servers? Do they block the IP address (which could easily be changed)? Non-Brits want to know.
It's a little more complicated than that in practice, but the general idea is sound.
If you a) don't download infringing content in the first place; and b) do not ever share your internet connectivity with anybody else who might, I might suggest that you'd be pretty safe from harassment.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Actually, it just means less piracy, which in turn will mean more money for the entertainment industry to use to bring us great movies and music. Sure, the mooching parasitic pirates will be upset, but the rest of us, who are willing to pay hard earned money for high quality entertainment, will be much better off.
I have good reason to believe that criminals use the telephone system to distribute plans to commit crime. It is time to shut down these criminal aiding telephone systems.
You're willing to go to jail rather than pay $13.21 (approx)? Are you insane?
They now have external USB drive enclosures with built-in wifi now. Check out the Startech S2510U2WF. You don't even have to find Nigel, just look for the WIDROP SSID.
And the roots of the next step in the evolution of non-corporate-sanctioned file-sharing began.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
This is a blessing in disguise - Its a chance to stop stealing content (lets be honest here) and buy stuff through legit channels. The reason I started pirating in the first place is that a 700 mb xvid was vastly more convenient than going to the store, bringing home a dvd wrapped in annoying plastic with easytear perforations that never work and sitting through an FBI warning with nonsensical forced previews. This is all resolved, Hollywood has listened and there are tons of ways to stream movies (only the movies and non of the crap). Piracy is gone in my world, I thank Hollywood for listening to us.
There is a very easy way to avoid being arrested for file-sharing ... don't do it.
Currently this is modded Score:0, offtopic. How on earth is it offtopic?
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
Not downloading is no protection or excuse. There are countless examples of people wrongly targeted. BBC Watchdog covered it a few years ago and had an expert example the computer and router of an elderly couple who were accused to make sure a) they didn't do it and b) they were not hacked. The detection system is broken and targets people at random.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I don't buy music CDs or movies until I have downloaded and sampled them first. The harder they make it for me to download the less I will buy, or at least the less of their wares I will buy. Those other guys who give away their stuff freely get my attention and money instead.
Yeah, I'm the immoral bastard who gets up and makes coffee during advert breaks instead of being glued to the screen paying for my free entertainment. What a dick.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
An easy solution (for now at least) is to change ISP.
Unfortunately Virgin has a monopoly where I live. I am 2.2km from the BT exchange and ADSL/ADSL2 don't work. The most I can get is about 5mb but it is unstable and cuts out every few minutes.
I regard a VPN as part of the cost of internet access because Virgin has been broken for a long time now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.
For those who do not know it And that is only part of it. The whole thing can be found here.
I hope they also block this torrent site They seem to be collecting a lot AND it is a UK site.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I still cant phantom why the ISPs should work for free for the lobbies of the media corporations.
I'm in a similar situation, max 8mb estimated with BT line, get a pretty consistent 100mb with Virgin.
I'm considering a VPN - AirVPN and VPNUK are a couple I've been recommended - AirVPN looks to have a control panel to setup port forwarding, which is nice for torrents. How do you find yours in terms of speed and ease of use?
Cheers
I do not buy CDs or DVDs. I download. But if I were unable to download, I would still not buy them. So I am not a lost sale either. I am a no sale.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Because GP's voice is counter to the belief some Slashdotters hold which conflates piracy of games/movie/software and other consumer media with sharing of knowledge and information. There's a vocal (and popular) contingent among us who would elevate the act of downloading and consuming the latest movie without compensation to the level of scientists freely sharing data or dissidents networking with each other without encumbrance.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Movies I can understand, but music samples are everywhere on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
On the internet all it takes is one hole. One weak link in the chain.
This will achieve nothing. It will solve nothing.
Determined users will find ways around it if they have not yet. This will not generate revenue and just feed the hate for the MAFIAA
It's not even about legality. Look at any banned substance, if there is a demand for it, there will be a supply. This ruling follows a token law that has no bite, has no teeth and is actually counterproductive. I did not even know about those other two sites until today.
Maybe the way forward is to also take out a super injunction not to make the ruling public. That'll make sure no one knows.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
We used to do this with Commodore 64 floppies in high school back in the day...
Might sound funny, but we'd do this with vic20's on cassette tapes. Then again, BASIC being what it is, you can also just write things out on a sheet of paper or several dozen of them and hand them off to someone.
Om, nomnomnom...
How on earth is it offtopic?
file-sharing != copyright infringement
Unix is user friendly, it's just selective about who its friends are.
Yep!. Im currently building a movie sneakernet for my family. WAYYYY easier to hand out hard drives at family events then to setup digital distribution over internet, dealing with intrusions, connectivity, spying. Last family gathering i gave out 4 Micca players @ ($40/ea) and now i can just mail them cheap disks that they can pop into their players or they can grab it from my Master Movie repo. Its easier then putting in a DVD.
Good-bye
Actually, it just means less piracy, which in turn will mean more money for the entertainment industry to use to bring us great movies and music.
Even if I buy the second part of your argument, I'm not sure it's worth it. Torrrents are used for tonnes of legal things. Creative commons movies and linux distros for example. Torrents are a great alternative to ad-filled slow upload sites. If you have a multi-megabyte file that will be interesting to ten or more people, they're just the best option.
Granted, this story isn't about blocking the bittorrent protocol. The problem is, however, that many of the "pirate" sites run really nice public trackers that anyone can use. And these are blocked too. Torrents can work without trackers (sort of starting on the way to what the GP is talking about), but it all seems so unnecessary
Which basically defines the people with at least a modicum of common sense, and obviously excludes you.
hehe, back in the day my locker partner and I both joined one of those music clubs and made sure we didn't duplicate any choices both for the intial stuff and the required 3 purchases. They aren't such a bad deal under the right conditions :)
PS, most of those cassettes lasted longer than much of our digital stuff will ... still have some over 30 years later. I think the extra few cents i spent on good tape was worth it.
At the rate we are going the pirates will have become shoplifters to minimize risk ;O
720K disks. Not that they were up to date even then, but I had a cubic meter of them. Quite literally. An old Atati ST collector gave them to me: A box one meter on each side, filled to the brim with 720k floppies. So many I could just give them away. So I did. Loaded with (via spanned ZIPs) mostly pokemon stuff. Website rips, roms, emulator, whole episodes in realvideo format. It was the in thing back then.
That was at school. Now I'm in employment, and it still goes on. The technicians exchange 1TB drives. I also have it from a very reliable source - a friend who works for some Big Media Company they can't name, but to judge by their knowledge of chroma key algorithms they know enough to plausibly hold the position - that among the rank-and-file tech staff of the place, piracy runs rampant too. Though he also says that if Management ever found out, heads would roll.
Well, I know what's going to be duct-taped to a bunch of li-ions and sitting in my bag at a future furmeet.
But hey.... if it makes you feel better, you are feel perfectly free to shout at me that I was wrong if that turns out to be the case. Until then, however... wait and see.
I expect the number of genuinely false allegations (that is, innocent people whose networks go completely unused by people whose actions they are not prepared to be held accountable for) in this particular system to be relatively low.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hey, I'm pretty sure if we GOT great movies and music for our hard earned money, few would complain. Right now, looking around, the price the copiers pay match pretty much the value of the product.
Personally, I'd say they should get some change back for their time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Considering how those file sharing accusations reek more and more like carpet bombing, I wouldn't count on it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Okay, their detection method is fatally flawed for reasons I will present in a moment, but first I'll make the more general point that they have never sued anyone who bothered to turn up and content it in court. They know their evidence is weak and would be shot down, so they rely on people just paying up and drop it the moment you challenge them.
Their system works by gathering IP addresses from a tracker. Many trackers now seed themselves with some random IP addresses to break this. TPB has had doing it for years before they shut their's down. If you pay for the deluxe service they then try to connect and download some of the data from you, to prove it is a real client and not a fake.
So they have an IP address that they claim to have downloaded from, with a screenshot of it happening. Note that you can easily fake these via a handy web site: http://piratbyran.org/bevismaskinen/ . An IP address doesn't identify you, it identifies an internet connection. Maybe, assuming ISP records are correct. Keep in mind that we don't have any process by which they can take your computer or router away for examination, so that is all they have going to court. Maybe more than one person uses that router. Maybe someone hacked it. You are under no obligation to investigate for them. They have nothing, and have been told as much by judges repeatedly.
It's a scam. Speculative invoicing.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
.. I do not know about you, but I am done pirating.
On a more serious note, do the people making those decisions recognize the amount of ill will created by their actions? If I was not so old and did not care the new shiny everyone and their mother needs to have, I would probably start pirating out of spite...I am certain teenagers don't do things they are expressly forbidden from doing..
But maybe I am ageist; I do teach the old folk basic computer skills for my volunteer work. Last week the first question was how do I get the free music on the interwebz..
So mpaa and their equivalents listen up: Tempus fugit... adapt or perish
This post is provided without warranty as to reliability, accuracy or otherwise or fitness for any particular purpose.
You seem to have completely overlooked that I was only talking about false allegations being low with regards to people's networks who go completely unused by people whose actions they are not prepared to be held responsible for.
If they were hacked, or more than one person uses that router and they aren't prepared to take responsibility for that person's actions, then of course all bets are off.
But in typical slashdot pedantry, people here are far more worried about exceptions than they are in noticing that the general rule might actually work for the most part, and the infrequency with which it doesn't (which is still theoretical, at this juncture) may very well be low enough to be manually managed.
One of the major problems I have with the copyright alert system they've implemented (I really only have two, but this one's the biggest one) is that when they make an allegation about you, they don't even make an attempt in the allegation to tell you what it was, exactly, that you allegedly did... it's just a vague form letter that doesn't identify one single thing about the alleged infringement, not even the *TYPE* of content that was supposedly infringing, let alone when, or what, or where.
But, the good news about that is that it won't carry any weight in court for them, should it go that far. The text of the alert makes far too vague an accusation to be usable, even if it *were* true. One might as well make the general accusation that "person XYZ lied" without actually specifying exactly what was lied about, where the lying happened, or when.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We seem to be heading towards the direction of streaming content, both audio and video, where the consumer pays $X per month for a selection of content. That's fine if you prefer that model (and it's a decent model - there's plenty of content that's probably only worth a single view/listen anyway), but unfortunately this seems to be the only legal outlet that's available for legit, digitally-distributed movies and videos from the big guys.
In other words, I still can't legally download TV shows or movies in a DRM-free format to be kept on my server and viewed at my leisure. No-one seems to offer that option for a high-quality file, basically - the answer they give is the streaming services. I like my digital library that's under my own control and not at the whims of the vendor, but most of it is constructed from either pirated material or ripped from DVDs.
Music is fine as there are still plenty of music sites selling legal content DRM-free, but video is mostly elusive. I WANT to buy video to run offline, but it's all streaming these days and I suspect the younger generation won't care after a few years anyway.
Raenex is a dickhead
I don't buy music CDs or movies as doing so would support fundamentally evil organizations which seek to strangle the progress of humankind under the influence of their own greed. I feel guilty even listening to that stuff even if I didn't pay for it, as I feel a better approach would be to support independent artists in the unlikely effort of breaking the cartel. But I do support independent artists, given the opportunity. Magnatune, Jamendo, and Band Camp are great ways to accomplish this.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
"On the topic of filesharing, Japan arrested 27 file sharers, using the recent changes to their copyright law that allow criminal charges to be brought against file sharers."
According to TFA
"Existing legislation against uploaders of copyright content already provided for penalties of up to 10 years in prison and a 10 million yen ($108,202) fine."
Given that all the arrests were for uploading or otherwise making available pirated goods, I would say this comes under the pre-existing law, and not the October 1st update.
Personal attack aside (nice how our enlightened /. community allows personal attacks on some ideas?), you've not made a counter-argument or explained how media consumption (1 way exchange of information) should be elevated to the same level as idea sharing (2 way exchange of information). In simpler terms, explain how a guy getting the latest Batman movie and watching it in his bedroom is morally and ethically defensible to the same degree as a scientist sharing data with another scientist, or a political dissident passing information to another dissident.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
To distill it even further, explain why you believe information for consumption is morally equivalent to information for collaboration. Slashdotters tend to conflate the two just because they are all "information", but I beg to differ.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Information is information. You can't control ideas no matter what form they take or purpose they were intended to fulfill. The distinction you seem to think is so clear, made based mostly on the intended use is largely irrelevant and exists only in your head. It is even an immoral distinction as it tries to impose upon others what they should do with ideas based on the will of the creator. A creator who used thousands of years of information available in the public domain to "create" his work and feels in the right to take ownership of the result and sequester it from the same public domain that made 95% of the work for him.
You can keep differing as much as you wish, but in the end it is just an stubborn and illogical paradigm you imposed upon yourself.
Additionally, trying to enforce ownership to information is not only absurd and immoral, it is actually impossible in this day and age. Even more the useless efforts to keep trying to enforce this control take huge amounts of public resources which are not used to the benefit of the people who generated them, trample people's constitutional rights and threaten net neutrality.
Copyright has to go and it will go, because most people don't want it anymore, don't think it is necessary anymore and simply won't obey without force, and forcing these many people to do something they do not want is simply impossible.
A question - what are your views on the GPL?The GPL relies on the laws of copyright for enforcement. Should a corporation (say) be able to use GPLd code in a proprietary product because copyright is an " illogical paradigm" that "has to go and it will go, because most people don't want it anymore"?
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
GPL is a reaction to copyright. Its sole reason to exist is to combat proprietary software, which wouldn't exist in a world without copyright. In the absence of copyright GPL has no reason to exist. I see no problem with a corporation using former GPL software in a world where proprietary software didn't exist.
Damned be the Great Goo of Grey Typewriters that are Voters of Habit who distort elections and prevent anything to be done this decade and maybe the next.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
I'd rather risk jail time than pay the absurd prices they levy on media. Have you seen the price of a Blu-Ray in Japan?
IF you are actually in Japan... can you explain to us how their election system votes and how any person under 30 in Japan can vote for a party that supports these draconic measures? I really can't get my head around it and the only explanation I can find is a rigged system where the bigger established parties always win, with the help of the Usual Suspects (old people that vote for a party because they always voted for that party).
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
...so i tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
It's a little more complicated than that in practice, but the general idea is sound.
If you a) don't download infringing content in the first place; and b) do not ever share your internet connectivity with anybody else who might, I might suggest that you'd be pretty safe from harassment.
Try not to feed anoymous trolls. This moron is posting about people being arrested for file sharing but this thread is about sites being blocked which has nothing to do with prosecution or being arrested.
Given the choice between:
1) A campaign of over the top prosecutions on parents just because their kids downloaded something illegally because the kids don't agree with the concept of copyright.
2) Trying to play whack-a-mole to block access to sites that specialise in distributing content they have no legal right to as they pick up market share from the last site that was shut down.
I would much rather they carried on with option 2. It is a mere annoyance letting people who want to break the law carry on doing so, it lets the government be seen to be doing something (even though it is ineffective) and far more importantly it does not involve the possibility of prosecuting people and fucking their life over with a fine and criminal record that is with them for the rest of their life.
I dont read
The GPL is not a reaction to copyright. What it is is a reaction against closed-source software. Even without copyright there would be closed-source software - you cannot force someone to distribute the source code with a distributed binary. The GPL is there to ensure that GPLd software remains open source (i.e remains "free"), and to do this it uses copyright. Indeed the aims of the GPL require copyright.
You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. - Blake
That is a secondary concern, combating copyright and proprietary software is the primary concern of GPL as I told you. Even if you close your source, if there is no copyright to protect it, it can and will be reverse engineered if there is enough interest for that. In the end whatever is achievable with GPL can always be achieved if there is no copyright.
I agree that all source code should be always disclosed. The user has the right to know what a program is doing in his system, but using copyright is the wrong way to enforce it, and an inefficient way to achieve this goal. That is a goal that can only be achieved by regulating the software industry and making the source code disclosure mandatory.