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UK MP Says ISPs Must Take Responsibility For Movie Leaks, Sony Eyes North Korea
An anonymous reader writes that the recent IP advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron has laid some of the blame for the recent Sony hack at the feet of ISPs. Meanwhile, it's reported that Sony is close to officially blaming North Korea. As the fallout from the Sony hack continues, who is to blame for the leak of movies including Fury, which has been downloaded a million times? According to the UK Prime Minister's former IP advisor, as 'facilitators' web-hosts and ISPs must step up and take some blame. Mike Weatherley MP, the recent IP advisor to Prime Minister David Cameron, has published several piracy reports including one earlier in the year examining the advertising revenue on pirate sites. He believes that companies with no direct connection to the hack or subsequent leaks should shoulder some blame. 'Piracy is a huge international problem. The recent cyber-attack on Sony and subsequent release of films to illegal websites is just one high-profile example of how criminals exploit others' Intellectual Property,' Weatherley writes in an email to TF. 'Unfortunately, the theft of these films – and their subsequent downloads – has been facilitated by web-hosting companies and, ultimately, ISPs who do have to step-up and take some responsibility.' Weatherley doesn't provide detail on precisely why web-hosts and ISPs should take responsibility for the work of malicious hackers (possibly state-sponsored) and all subsequent fall out from attacks. The theory is that 'something' should be done, but precisely what remains elusive."
How typical of a politician, and ESPECIALLY one in an English-speaking nation, to insist that everyone, everywhere has to shoulder the responsibility for everything that ever goes wrong.
I agree totally, we should also make sure to hold the government responsible for every road used to commit a crime, as without those roads it would have been difficult or impossible to commit some of these crimes. When are we going to have the government and road transport departments step up and take responsibility for issues that are clearly caused by their roads!
Oooo... That will make them officially guilty... I bet they're officially peeing their pants..
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The movies were stolen? Now they're going to have to film them all over again!
I initiate a hack via social engineering over the telephone. I get ahold of some passwords and information which allows me to access super secret data, and leak it. I suppose the phone company is at fault, also?
What kind of nonsense. Politicians should not directly talk about IT related issues - but rather, allow some representative who isn't ridiculously uninformed to do so on their behalf, save them lots of face.
... Sony is about to declare war on North Korea. This should be interesting.
In other news: construction workers building and maintaining city streets and highways are now held responsible for high speed chases.
Members of Parliament and their corporate-owned hirelings shouting from the rooftops how technically ignorant and ill-advised they are, yet again. Let's lock up every bus driver, train operator staff and all the directors of London Transport, as every thief, murderer and rapist in the last 100 years used public transport at some point to "facilitate" their illegal activities!! I swear if we filled government with trained monkeys, you'd see an improvement in the way the country was run within days.
Bare in mind this MP has a massive conflict of interests on this subject so anything he says should be ignored as it is not anything close to impartial
Look at his parliamentary declared interests http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/24889/mike_weatherley/hove#register
So, when a bank is robbed and the thieves use a getaway car then he should obviously be blaming the roads, or the car companies, maybe the gas station for allowing them to be transported to the bank and away from the scene of the crime.
Why is it that the method of transport is suddenly to blame here? If we always use the car analogy to describe technology concepts then should the roadways be inspecting the contents and destination of all travellers to prevent or detect crimes?
So in this analogy we have criminals who committed the crime and the bank (Sony) where the locks were found to be insufficient and the guards were not watching the right doors. Why does the blame need to extend beyond those parties?
Of course the governments would probably jump at the chance to inspect all traffic and the contents of all vehicles on the road if they thought they could get away with it. To protect the people of course, no other reason.
Who honestly cares who is responsible for a large company not having adequate security measures in place. They are externalising the underlying problem of them being slack. Don't want your movies leaked before release, don't put them on the Internet. Problem solved. I've very little sympathy for Sony here and simply do not trust the "officials" who are going to allocate blame to another country.
Sony could have easily avoided this -- send only physical media around and make sure everyone has a non-networked computer to use it on. Strongly enforce this policy by firing based on non-compliance and folks will learn. Sure it slows things down a little and costs a bit more but the chance of a leak is reduced significantly. I doubt the costs are actually significant compared to the revenue the movie will generate or even the lead actor's payments.
North Korea is the current target of the powers that be, so of course they are "responsible". Sure they aren't a nice government and I'd not want to live or even visit there, but still....
You jest, but the police in this country created a massive surveillance network watching our major roads with image recognition cameras. Their favourite excuse for this not-at-all-creepy step? "Denying criminals the use of the roads." Because the criminals always use real licence plates on their getaway cars, you see.
That operation was started without initial formal debate or authorisation from MPs, but has effectively been condoned since. In fact, it has been developed further, by co-opting cameras installed for other purposes despite explicit promises that this would not be done. Fortunately no innocent people have ever been issued with automated fines for something they didn't actually do, because it would probably cost those people more to fight such tickets in court than just paying up.
Basically, looking at how the road network is handled, the people running the show here really do seem to think the way forward for our society is universal surveillance and automated mass penalties for minor infringements of laws based on dubious evidence with no cost-effective means of defending yourself if you are wrongfully accused.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's an outrageous accusation - how dare you suggest that he's not supporting the organisation he's a director for (the Motion Picture Licensing Co - MPLC)
Politicians aren't the right people to be handling this. You can legislate all the laws you want, but they don't fix the problem. It's illegal to burgle houses, but it happens all the time. Sony got burgled. Better luck next time. Buy better locks, build a more secure IT infrastructure, and be thankful that nobody died. Nobody even lost real money, as I read it, except, of course, for the costs of the cleanup.
Although the thought of all those Sony employees filling out paper forms with typewriters is kinda humorous...
It's not really much of an argument.
Maybe if you had no recourse but for Microsoft to fix their stuff, maybe they'd have to... you know... fix it?
I don't buy the "it's better / quicker from the illegal sites" argument in terms of software, movies, etc. The problem is not the speed or ease of access as much as the ease of licensing. When you can't buy a movie in a certain country, or on a certain date, or by a certain vendor, it's almost always a licensing problem. Fix the licensing and the problem solves itself.
Justifying illegal copies floating round PirateBay by the fact that you might use them if your legit copy is unavailable (Sorry, a "key piece of infrastructure" and you don't have the original install disks or a system backup? I judge you and your backup procedures, not Microsoft) is like justifying counterfeit notes as being an acceptable substitute if your local ATM isn't working.
No, it's not. Shout at Microsoft, that company you're presumably paying for the service, otherwise it will never get fixed. And I've had the occasional glitch with MS VLSC... once they had hand-typed in my administrator@domain.com email address as the primary logon and managed to spell administrator wrong (the only things I submitted were electronic, so they must have hand-typed somewhere along the road). You shout at them until they resolve it.
But, then, all my workplaces had every original server, windows and office CD of any volume licensed content anyway. Usually several versions slipstreamed to quicken installation but increasingly now just a plain PXE-deployable image of a clean version of whatever is relevant. Beyond that, I have a Zalman storage device that you can put every ISO on and it "emulates" a bootable USB CD drive with the ISO contents.
But "MS wasn't working" (and I'm guessing it's the security on their VL accounts, which I've also run into but - again - not enough to worry about the waiting time while they send me new logins etc.) isn't an excuse. Especially in business.
Did you check hashes at least? You have no damn clue what you've just installed on your "key piece of infrastructure".
He doesn't understand how the Internet actually works.
CAN ISPs use technology and root out more casual piracy? Probably. But this kind of inspection doesn't STOP the piracy, it just makes discovery easier. It ALSO slows down their networks and requires a substantial investment in equipment and software that IN NO WAY contributes to the company's bottom line.
As such, why should the ISPs be forced to foot the bill? Especially when we get down to brass tacks, they pass it along to the customer and now people are essentially paying to be spied upon.
Had this been a PHYSICAL theft, he'd be blaming everyone who'd seen the criminal for not making an arrest, without knowing that something had been done in the first place. Every cabby, bus driver, friend or random pedestrian on the street.
The only way to get RID of piracy is to eliminate the desire to actually consume that media. But that's like trying to outlaw water because it contributes to drowning. If you eliminate the desire to consume said media, you've just cut your own throat.
As long as there's a desire to consume this content, and there's ANY form of price or availability barrier, there is GOING to be piracy. FLAT OUT. Anyone who doesn't understand this, and that trying to pursue this sort of imbecillic goal of "stamping out piracy" is chasing a fantasy.
The best that can be done is to increase viewer options until piracy becomes too much of a hassle for the majority. The best bet for that right now are streaming services like iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and Netflix.
And we can get there all the faster without mentally stunted individuals like Cameron stirring the pot and injecting idiocy after idiocy into the debate.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!