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Project Free TV, YIFY, PrimeWire Blocked In the UK
hypnosec writes "The movie industry in the UK is having a ball, as far as blocking of sites allegedly involved in piracy is concerned, as courts have asked UK ISPs to enforce a blockade on Project Free TV, YIFY, PrimeWire and others. Getting a torrent or steaming site blocked in the UK is a mere paperwork formality, since ISPs have completely stopped defending against these orders. As it stands, a total of 33 sites have been blocked in the UK, including The Pirate Bay, BitSnoop, ExtraTorrent, Torrentz, 1337x, Fenopy, H33T, KickAssTorrents, among others."
Personally I'm not a big user of these kind of services, but it's only a handful of the "big" ISPs who are doing the blocking. I prefer a more personal service so I use a small ISP which offers special geeky extras (full class C, reverse NS delegation etc) and they perform no such blocking. But even if I didn't it's trivial to bypass such blunt instruments.
They've started blocking searches that can lead to kiddie porn, and thus accepted the linkage.
The next step in that is mandatory reporting of any IP addresses that does those forbidden searches. Having accepted the searches are bad, it follows that surveillance of this badness will be the next step. Thus they've accepted the surveillance principle.
Copyright lobby already wants Google to block all copyright infringements from search results. (and read the New Zealand Kim Dotcom indictment, it talks about 'selectors being tasked' i.e. PRISM talk, meaning spooks are now copyright enforcers).
Likewise ISPs blocked these torrent search engines as being equivalent to torrents and in turn equivalent to the copyright infringement, thus it follows that they'll keep being asked to block ever more tangential stuff. For example, sites that list torrent search engines. Sites that discuss torrent search engines. VPN sites, and so on.
These companies exist because the public allows it. The public is getting nothing but censorship out of the bargain, giving these companies carte blanche to do whatever they please to the internet. The world is caving to the slightest whims of an industry that we would survive just fine without.
I think you overestimate the capabilities and patience of a large percentage of the population of the UK. I think these actions will shut down 80% of the movie sharing. It is a right royal pain in the bum, and personally I think the MPAA just don't understand that any action they take will have unintended consequences, but on the whole, it will have the effect they desire - most of the traffic will be gone.
They should just be careful what they wish for.
It's the slippery slope. Once you start slipping, you've lost static friction, and start slipping faster.
Google have already started slipping. ISP have already started slipping. It's the same thing.
Also you ignore the most significant point in my comment: the spooks spying on Kim Dotcom for copyright infringement. That's a mark of how far its gone.
http://img.scoop.co.nz/media/pdfs/1304/AFFIDAVIT_OF_DISCLOSURE.pdf
Page 17: "Secret//Comint/Rel to NZL,AUs,Can,GBR, USA", i.e. 5 eyes spooks network.
Page 19: "selectors of interest"
Page 19: "Kim (unreadable) not tasked due to US domain"
Page 21, "Kim Dotcom selectors - all tasked"
It has nothing to do with monarchy, this is a US corporate thing. They believe they can fix the economy by creating more IP rights to sell, in place of actual goods and services, hence insane patent laws and the NSA & it's five eyes buddies involved in a minor copyright case.
Guess they'll have to route around this damage in the network.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> Few have even heard about these services.
After demonoid ended I couldn't find any good torrent sites. But now my government publishes a list of the best sites every month. I'm really grateful to them for calling my attention to them.
Trackers *are* blocked and taken offline all the time. That is, if there were any trackers left, most are gone. BitTorrent has different methods now to discover peers. PEX, DHT and LDP for peer discovery, Magnet links to replace .torrent files. You essentially can't block bittorrent without extremely "expensive" Deep Packet Inspection, essentially eavesdropping on every consumers internet traffic 100% of the time.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Royal Dutch Shell is not British. It's Dutch. They have a royal family too.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
We gave them an inch, and ... the results were as expected.
No sig today...
So taxpayers should pay to put people in jail to protect the entertainment industry's outdated business model?
The same group who often book their sales in tax favourable jurisdictions should also get to put people in jail at your and my expense? I thought jails were for real crimes? Isn't copyright violation a civil matter in most nations?
Speaking about putting people in jail, how many times have the various recording industry's been charged with abuse of monopoly, price fixing, etc?
Those examples on the other hand are not CIVIL matters and the penalty can include jail time (again in most nations) but no one has ever served it.
Here (canada) they were charged with selling compilation CD's without paying the royalties. Now if a person does this it is considered piracy and in the US they charge you $20,000 per song but what do you think happened to them?
So yeah, lets jail people because laws to prevent people from doing some things always work (cough)Prohibition (cough)... Even the government realized it needed to update its business models....
*This* Industry however is not necessarily the source of all entertainment. There was a time when the industry did not exist, but entertainment still existed.
The entertainment industry in the states dates back to Stephan Foster.
In 1850, P.T, Barnum paid Jenny Lind $167,600 in advance for her first American tour, plus expenses. That is $4,557,076 adjusted for inflation. The contract would be renegotiated upwards as Barnum's promotion machine built up steam.
There would be profits from sheet music sales, product endorsements and so on.
Barnum's share would come to about half a million good-as-gold tax-free dollars. In the first decade of the telegraph, The first quarter-century of the railroad, Everything essential is in place for the evolution of a mass popular culture rooted in professional entertainment.
I don't like thieves much better than you do. I can't stand the thieves who run the entertainment industries. Unreasonable copyright laws that last beyond the authors lifetime are insane money grabs, that should have been killed thirty years ago or more. Take down notices for works that never did belong to any corporation. Refusing to recognize fair use. Moving works of art from the public domain, into corporate control. Multi-million dollar settlements against common users (as opposed to industrial grade pirating and distribution operations).
I don't know if you've ever read this article:
!Alles in ordnung!
http://striderweb.com/blog/tag/books/
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Actually it's worse than that.
There are real threats to a country's economic, political or other stability. People who actually want to harm a country or companies in said country. Terrorists as well as people embezzling or laundering money, tax evaders and other criminals that actually cause a noticable, real harm to your country. Who in turn do have a pretty good reason to mask their traffic and route it through various means of VPN and other techniques to shield it from surveillance.
Now, these people are few and far between. A sensibly staffed police force with some background in online security can easily spot them, pinpoint them and ferret them out. Why? Because there is very little reason for Joe Randomuser to have a lot of VPN'ed traffic running. You can actually take a quick look at most "odd" connections and examine them.
This option goes out the window when everyone does it. Yes, they're all actually breaking a law. But a law that has close to zero impact on your economy. And yes, even if you're the US. Compared to embezzlement and tax evasion, the loss to the country due to torrents is negligible. But now you have a LOT more people who will act like criminals and you can't easily spot the real, dangerous criminals anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
distribution of stolen American property
That is not true in any way, shape, or form. The AC has a really damn good point that you can't simply negate by saying it's within the NSA's job description.
Having law enforcement involved in simply copyright disputes is highly concerning. The NSA being involved brings it to a level or ridiculousness akin to the President going door to door collecting unpaid dues for the paper boy. "How far off the mark have we gone". Indeed.
No such thing as theft involved and you're continuing to perpetuate a myth that is quite dangerous to freedom and our society. Specifically, that ideas and their expressions can be owned, and that by not complying with the explicit wishes of the owner you are engaged in acts of "theft".
I'll be real simple here. A copyright in of itself is just a container for legal entitlements (aka rights) granted by the people to the creator. Only the creator can ever exercise those rights. It's called legal standing. To "steal" the "property" one must in fact steal the legal standing. That can be only done with fraud and contracts negotiated under duress with the creator. Not from some pimple faced teenager on bit torrent. All that ever happens is copyright infringement . This, the vast majority of the time, involves cases that belong in civil courts. Only the mass duplication, distribution, and profit over copyrighted works is worth the intervention by law enforcement for society's behalf.
What part of copyright law being used the way it's now being used doesn't scare the crap out of you?
- Weak, and often proven absolutely falsified and incorrect, reports and statistics attempting to show direct fiscal damage of epic proportions to justify changes in the law - DMCA, copyright enforcement, CISPA, treaties and negotiations with other countries being examples.
- The creation of laws curtailing our freedoms in ways that were never agreed upon by society at large. Who the fuck thinks they can tell us we can't skip over commercials
with technology in our own homes? How dare they tell me there are Prohibited User Operations on my DVD player? It's my fucking DVD player, my fucking DVD, my fucking money that left MY wallet. Yet, they have the unmitigated gall to stand in my living room by proxy through technology paid for with my money telling me what to do in my own home. Make a televised skit of that shit and see how many people you can get to agree with you to let that happen.
- The dramatic loss of privacy and anonymity through the unprecedented and largely unchecked grabs for mass surveillance capabilities. All of it for.... yep.... terrorists. Yet, not being used against a single terrorist. More and more they use these tools to come to the aid of a single side in a copyright dispute and in some notable cases, arrest and detain people only interested in actions that were damn well known to be fair use .
You bet your ass I'm just as concerned as the AC is about a US intelligence agency being used unfairly in a civil dispute. It may not affect you directly now, but you just wait, keep that line of thinking up and you will have the government you deserve. Then after some time, you will have the country you deserve.
One bereft off a middle class anymore. Just the ruling elites and the slaves. A country run with the abhorrent idea that an idea and expression can be owned forever and that all must prostrate themselves before the elites for the right to use advanced technologies. One where no single person, or group of persons, in a garage could ever hope to build a multi-billion dollar company from nothing since the barrier to entries are so damn high. How could they be low? Over a half million patents in a smart phone these days. Ridiculous software patents will run a muck in your country inhibiting, or outright preventing, innovation by the "small guys". You already have your "who files first" bullshit in the USPTO. That har