UK IP Chief Wants ISPs To Police Piracy Proactively

An anonymous reader sends this report from TorrentFreak: The UK's top IP advisor has published recommendations on how Internet service providers should deal with online piracy. Among other things, he suggested that Internet services should search for and filter infringing content proactively. According to the report, ISPs have a moral obligation to do more against online piracy. Mike Weatherley, a Conservative MP and Intellectual Property Adviser to UK Prime Minister David Cameron, has pushed various copyright related topics onto the political agenda since early last year. Previously Weatherley suggested that search engines should blacklist pirate sites, kids should be educated on copyright ethics, and that persistent file-sharers should be thrown in jail.

Comments

Seeing as UK police do little else

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to do something. Local bobby on the beat? Gone. Investigate burglaries, assault, vandalism, all on camera - no chance. How about going after someone that said something naughty on twitter, yes, they'll do that. Terrorists out in the open, hate crimes from muslim groups, no fucking chance. They're so lazy today they don't even bother with speed camera behind bus stops.

Anyone visiting from another country would wonder whether the nation has a police force. They gobble up plenty of money, but what they do for it is anyone's guess.

Re:Seeing as UK police do little else

[davester666]

IP is worth approximate a jillion times more than the total value of all physical goods sold for the entire existence of humans on this planet, so yes, it should be the priority of every single human being on the planet to ensure every copy is paid for.

Re:Seeing as UK police do little else

[benjfowler]

Gotta love "intellectual property" accounting rules.

Re:Seeing as UK police do little else

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to do something. Local bobby on the beat? Gone. Investigate burglaries, assault, vandalism, all on camera - no chance. How about going after someone that said something naughty on twitter, yes, they'll do that. Terrorists out in the open, hate crimes from muslim groups, no fucking chance. They're so lazy today they don't even bother with speed camera behind bus stops.

Anyone visiting from another country would wonder whether the nation has a police force. They gobble up plenty of money, but what they do for it is anyone's guess.

It's so true. Basically reporting any crime that isn't worthy will get a default response of "we'll check the cameras and let you know", which is code for "fuck off, you annoying pleb".

There is an upside to the lack of police on the beat though, at least you're much less likely to be beaten to death by cops in the UK than in the US.

Re:Seeing as UK police do little else

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Now, let's be fair here. Big Media need all the help I can get. I mean, how many movies we think of as blockbusters never actually make a profit?

Moral obligation?

[ashkante]

ISPs have about as much 'moral obligation' to filter pirate content as do power grid companies to filter electricity used for the same. And it's about as hard to implement, I'd imagine.

Re:Moral obligation?

[Anonymous Coward]

ISPs have just as much moral obligation to filter pirate content as IP holders & lawmakers have moral obligation to make all IP go into the public domain within 5 years.

Re: Moral obligation?

[Dan1701]

Britain is currently about to have a general election, at the start of May. We apologise for the loss of sanity and indeed coherence from our political classes; they are currently competing to see who can be the most entertainingly inventive liars.

Normal service will be resumed mid-May.

Re: Moral obligation?

[PPalmgren]

Only 1 month? I'm impressed. I wish that kind of malarkey only lasted a month here. Election 'season' starts before half a term is over for our scumbags.

My two cents

[Anonymous Coward]

American here.

I agree that ISPs should monitor our traffic and deal with it appropriately. I agree so much that I think we should extend the idea to traffic on real-life roads. Yes, we should have roads policing us. Not cops, but roads. If a road detects someone doing something criminal (we need to design the right of kind A.I.), we can program it to stick spikes up from itself to stop us.

And I want to punch this twit in the face.

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean... as long as "want" goes!

Piracy will not cease

[shihonage]

... until software stops being so expensive and TV shows stop being delayed and locked down by DRM. It's that simple. Let me buy a cheap subscription, let me convert it and stream it to any device I own... or bust.

Re:Piracy will not cease

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a particularly badly thought out response. Of course there will always be people who are prepared to pirate in order to avoid spending $.99, but these people would not have spent the money in the first place, so they are of no consequence. What matters is the people who would pay regularly and substantially but who are so inconvenienced by DRM or who perceive that so much of what they are paying is going straight into the pockets of middlemen that they choose to pirate instead.

There are lots of pieces of software which are effectively donationware, and if a developer gives an easy method of donating and acknowledges those donations then I will be happy to send a few dollars - indeed, where a developer provides both a Google Play store version and a downloadable APK, I choose to download the latter and then send money e.g. by PayPal to them, because I'll be fucked if I'm going to accept someone taking a 30% cut for payment processing and adding to an automated catalogue. Just because your thought processes are based on regulations rather than values, it doesn't mean that most people choose to offload responsibility like that.

Re:Piracy will not cease

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, where IS that evidence?

Go on, all you did was tell us to look at it, you never supplied.

Why not look at the greatest "pirates" were the biggest buyers, or how when the biggest filesharing network was canned, the increase in revenue by the music industry fell into a decline within six months.

How about we look at that evidence?

Not to mention the evidence that the "IP industry" have already broken the contract, so I feel no obligation to feel the slightest twinge of guilt at their "loss" even if it killed the entire set of intellectual property and dropped millions into poverty.

Re:Piracy will not cease

[NickFortune]

Take as evidence iOS jailbreakers who do it so they can download $0.99 apps for free. There are plenty of people who are never going to pay anything if they can get away with it.

Well sure. On the other hand, look at iTunes. Before iTunes Napster et all were wildly popular. Then Apple starts offering downloads at $0.99 a track and suddenly they're making a ton of money and the music filesharing sites seemed to lose all traction. Lowering the price may not have solved the problem, but it greatly reduced it while creating a revenue stream that wasn't there previously.

There will always be those who won't pay, granted. With that in mind, the question becomes one of how much do you want to penalise the honest Internet users in the vain pursuit of an unobtainable absolute?

If you think for example that a computer game is too expensive and you pirate it, surely you should put the amount that you think is correct in an envelope and send it to the producer of the game? How many people are doing that? Everyone else is just lying.

Well, if someone was to illegally download a game, they'd be foolish to provide paper evidence of the crime, so to that extent I suppose it's understandable. On the other hand, if the game creators established a channel for this to happen safely, they might be surprised. I mean that's the basis on which Humble Bundles operate and I gather they've frequently been quite successful.

Granted, it's the publisher's decision whether or not to offer work on those terms, but you can't really claim it never happens or that it never works.

Re:Piracy will not cease

[gstoddart]

Tell me again why I am paying $60 for a new release on Steam that didn't have to get stamped, packaged, stored and shipped to a store for someone to place on a shelf for me to purchase yet costs the same?

Due to a fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value (and in acknowledgement of the escalating costs of executive bonuses, cocaine, and hookers) to maximize out synergies and leverage existing payment schemes the board has elected to treat virtual goods as costing the same as physical goods.

The consumer, having been conditioned to expect to pay these prices, will contribute to high-margin sales.

We disagree with market assessments which indicate that diminishing scarcity should also cause downward pressure on prices, as we feel we would be unable to maintain current levels of executive compensation if we were forced to pursue new revenue models. Instead we will continue with established pricing in order to ensure maximal revenues are accrued.

Further, pursuant to discussions at the board level, we continue to pursue mechanisms by which consumers^Wrevenue cows will be required to simply remit 25% of their income to us.

To this end, the fraudulent use of the greatly expanded copyright protection regime will continue to be applied as long as suckers^Wrevenue cows can be coerced into complying.

Forecast estimates indicate we may need to increase bribed^Whonorariums to lawmakers by a small percentage, but this is expected to be offset by existing revenue bloating^Wmaximizing schemes.

Short version: greedy fucking douchebags.

Copyright ethics, he says?

[Stormwatch]

To learn about copyright ethics -- that is, how unethical the very concept is -- be sure to read Boldrin & Levine's Against Intellectual Monopoly and Lessig's Free Culture.

Educate kids on the ethice.

[serviscope_minor]

Damn right they should educate kids on the ethics!

You know about how copyright was about enhancing the greater good by restricting the free flow of ideas temporarily to improve the pool of ideas and how the current insane terms break this contract.

So he doesn't actually mean that, (surprise! he's a liar!) what he actually means is educate kids with corporate propaganda.

MediaDefender

[thegarbz]

Yep I fully agree. I hope they start knocking off all sorts of legitimate media as a result because how the hell are they supposed to identify is any specific website hosting content actually owns that IP? What with thousands of publishers owning the IP rights to billions of pieces of media who knows if Sony has the right to distribute a video they are showing on their own website? Heck streaming a football match on ESPN isn't even certain. Maybe there's a dispute in the background and they don't own the IP there either.

I saw we block everything, starting with all the media companies. Man that would make the internet far more pleasant.

I completely agree

[Alain Williams]

Also:

• * the post office should also check every parcel
• * the train company to check that no passenger is a crook travelling to do a robbery
• * bakeries that no one buying buns is going to put poison in them and so kill old ladies
• * clothing shops that no one buying a mac is a flasher

The word will be a safer place if everyone checked that their customers were innocent!

civil vs criminal

[pr100]

The police should be interested in criminal offences, not civil matters. Copyright is complicated because (in the UK at least) infringement can be both, but the two aspects get conflated. The criminal offences (broadly) are to do with dealing in infringing items for profit, and it's reasonable that the police pursue people committing such offences.

The issue of whether these things *should* be offences is a separate matter. What we don't want is the police deciding which offences they're going to try to enforce. If society doesn't want criminal copyright infringement then that should be for legislators to decide, not law enforcement.

And by strange coincidence, politician paid by

[Wowsers]

By strange coincidence, a politician who wants ISPs to pay for the job the film and music industry should do if they want, is paid by: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/...

Name of donor: Motion Picture Licensing Co Ltd
and
Name of donor: CASBAA (Cable and Satellite Broadcasting Association of Asia)

Re:he wants, or his owners want?

[coofercat]

His owners are the same ones that own all of UK politics: The US.

People here in the UK are supporting the likes of UKIP because they'll keep those pesky Europeans at bay - the thing is, Europe is like a pussy cat compared to the behind-the-scenes back-channel under-the-counter pressure that comes from the US.