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High Court Orders UK ISPs To Block EBook Sites
An anonymous reader writes: The UK High Court has ordered British ISPs to block seven websites that help users find unauthorized copies of eBooks. Under the order, BT, Virgin, Sky, EE and TalkTalk must block AvaxHome, Bookfi, Bookre, Ebookee, Freebookspot, Freshwap and LibGen within the next ten days. “We are very pleased that the High Court has granted this order and, in doing so, recognizes the damage being inflicted on UK publishers and authors by these infringing websites,” says Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of The Publishers Association. “A third of publisher revenues now come from digital sales but unfortunately this rise in the digital market has brought with it a growth in online infringement. Our members need to be able to protect their authors’ works from such illegal activity; writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material.”
I'll have to take a look.
That order also helps to protect users. Sometimes I see a book that I can download for free, and I wonder if I'd break some sort of law by downloading it. It the author really giving the book away for free, or is this website allowing free downloads of the book without the author's permission?
The UK High Court has ordered British ISPs to block a website that helps users find several websites that help users find unauthorized copies of eBooks. Under the order, BT, Virgin, Sky, EE and TalkTalk must block Slashdot within the next ten days. “We are very pleased that the High Court has granted this order and, in doing so, recognizes the damage being inflicted on UK publishers and authors by this infringing website,” says Richard Mollet, Chief Executive of The Publishers Association. “A third of publisher revenues now come from digital sales but unfortunately this rise in the digital market has brought with it a growth in online infringement. Our members need to be able to protect their authors’ works from such illegal activity; writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material.”
Libgen hosts mostly tech/science textbooks and most of the stuff there is in Russian anyway, strange to see it in this list.
It started out with a politicial promise: We won't ever block more than this secret list of child pornography maintained by the "internet watch foundation". In the meantime there's a general porn filter (with weasel wording in the law turning "opt-in" and "opt-out" on their heads), the music industry got a couple blocks in, and so the book industry couldn't stay behind, now could they? More importantly: Who's next?
From TFS:
this rise in the digital market has brought with it a growth in online infringement
I'm willing to bet consumption, both legitimate and illegitimate, is up; so I wonder how much damage this "rise in piracy" is actually doing. At the end of the day I could go and hunt down a pirate copy of the book I need, find a website that actually allows me to download it, avoid the viruses and so forth. Or I could just buy it easily from Amazon, and strip the DRM for backup purposes. You see the legitimate content has a massive advantage here: It's much easier to get and comes with the ability to sync notes etc. with the cloud (if you don't mind Amazon knowing your reading habits), while it's not too difficult to remove the DRM for a backup copy.
If I was a publisher I'd be far more worried that this incentivises me to read older, public domain books. Before I still had to go to the bookshop and buy them, and a publisher could probably get new books out at a competitive price if they wanted, whereas now I can just get them free from Guttenberg (or even Amazon themselves). And with many publishers trying to charge almost the same for a Kindle book as a print book I rarely buy new books for my Kindle, if I want to read one of them I buy the dead tree version instead. But often I just find some public domain reading material and the publishers loose my custom.
How long before all traffic other than Netflix and Hulu appears to originate and end in Eastern Europe? For a few things (like those mentioned) it helps to be inside a specific zone, but for just about everything else, it helps to be outside the heavy-handed, censoring regimes.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
so, is the UK going to have any internet access left once everyone has gotten everything they do not like? welcome to the age of fascism. franco, mussolini, the stasi, etc. would all have huge boners if they were around for this, the surveillance age :)
"To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System"
Fortunately, this can't happen in America. In America, they can only seize the domain, remove it from the search engines, send a DMCA notice, accuse you of hacking, but not block the website.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
It is time for a new law, that specifically states that ISPs can never, under any circumstances, block access to any part of the Internet, or be forced to do so by a third party, unless the customer has specifically requested such a blockade. ISPs are technical facilitators of communication. They transport data packets from and to their customers. They have no business with the destination or the contents.
Unless the publishers go and punish the authors.
Not a single piece of effort is taken from the author. Not a single penny taken from them. Not a single item of property is taken, not even the imaginary property of copyright (the publishers stole that).
The only ones damaged are the publishers. Not a lost sale. But their power over authors and their consumers (being able to shop elsewhere for that book means you can be a CUSTOMER, and they don't want that, they want consumers, they are merely choosing what to spend their money on, not who to spend it with).
"Piracy" is merely people choosing freely to spend their money elsewhere. That's 100% what we're supposed to do in a free market.
The fact that laws forbidding there being a free market is irrelevant to the moral argument, in just the same way as slavery was immoral even when it was legal.
I think, as a Brit, I can explain the way the law has been structured here...
You see, culturally we love Whac-A-Mole style games. The current decision-making generation having grown up with them in arcades and fairs and there is a massive sense of nostalgia for them.
Hence, when there is an opportunity to enact legislation that has you striking down a website only to encourage dozens of near-identical ones to pop up overnight... well - we go all starry-eyed and start humming old 8-bit arcade tunes to ourselves.
-- Gaxx
Things are going to get exponentially worse in the UK- a model of state Internet censorship is being carefully crafted here in order to encourage oppressive States in the West's sphere of influence to do the same, using Britain as the excuse. The purpose is not really to censor Brits, but to give justification to African, Asian and Middle East hell-holes to 'copy' the 'mother of Parliaments' and remove free Internet access form their citizens.
In Britain, one can just VPN past these minor irritants. In the nations expected to impose IDENTICAL methods, for reasons of political and social control, VPNs are explicitly illegal, but regardless are also blocked by the ISPs.
Britain's new ultra-right-wing government is just about to wage war on free speech and thought crime. Few in Britain will be persecuted under such sick and depraved laws. But regimes in Africa, Asia and the Middle East will quote Britain's clamp down when imposing their own appalling laws limiting the expressions of their citizens- just as the British government intends.
Britain set an example to the world when it abolished the slave trade- without that action slavery would still be legal in the USA. Now we have the same principle serving EVIL rather than good. British demons create laws of pure evil, in order for the same laws to propagate across the planet in the service of evil.
Which of you here can now deny this? Britain and the USA stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the neo-Nazis of Ukraine (which recently created national laws requiring the lionising of WW2 Nazis by all citizens). Britain and the USA stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Wahhabi monsters of Saudi Arabia (that nation where rape slaves were legal and widely traded until 1962 - NINETEEN-62). Britain and the USA created ISIS, as a terror force designed to allow the creation of Greater Saudi Arabia (a bloc designed to encompass almost every current Muslim nation). Forces from the current Greater Saudi Arabia are, with the US war machine, currently carrying out the extermination of helpless Yemen.
So, rather like that recent racist massacre that the US press described as a "parking dispute" because the victims were Muslim, this is NOT really about the piracy of books. That's just the excuse in the UK to allow the rolling process of censorship to proceed.
Quite a few new sites there.
> So basically, they want to turn Europe into the people that left for the "new world" in the first place, puritans?
Let's hope for brexit, or what? I would rally to let the Scots again in, if it comes to that. Perhaps Europe sans England could evolve into a saner place (chances are slim, perhaps a tad better).
Maybe we deserve this world ?
As a poor student who sometimes had to skip meals to get to the next month I had to pay a fortune for textbooks. I always assumed that hence publishing textbooks must be really hard work and expensive, but I recently found out that a lot of the authors are in fact millionaires.
How can you be a millionaire, knowing that the people who read your books are only barely getting by and will be saddled with student debt for the rest of their lives?
"It's nothing compared to what will be thrust upon us once those two trade deals go through."
Also it's "two", not "2"; we might be slashdot, but for god's sake we don't type like 12 year olds!
Court, thanks for the ad. I have not heard about these sites earlier.
Don't you guys care at all?
First they started censoring child porn. This is totally acceptable, child porn is bad. Nobody dared to say anything.
Then they started censoring pirate sites. This was for the children also, I guess. People objecting these changes are mean pirates! Don't listen to them!
Then they started censoring youtube videos with "dubious" political agenda. When some people complained, it was "only an option to remove videos", blaah blaah blaah.
Now they are starting to censor books.
While there is still time, I suggest you read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and 1984 by Georgy Orwell. That should give you a pretty good picture where this is going..
More than 120 domains are currently blocked by the country’s major ISPs
so how are they blocking domains? in DNS?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I'd like to see you in court using *that* as your defense.
UK ISPs could buy this technology from China
Since when has blocking some pirate sites been the same as censoring the content? Hysterical, much?
I'm no advocate of piracy, but the principle of allowing government-controlled selective blocking of information (for *any* reason, to start with) sets a dangerous precedent.
Just add "filetype:torrent" to your search or any other filetype you want.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Tomorrow there will be 20 new sites.
I want to thank the high court as well to have alerted me to a handful of sites I didn't know about, to illegally download my books from.
Perhaps even one where I can learn not to finish my sentences with a preposition.
For those too lazy to Google, here are the links to save.
http://libgen.org/
http://en.bookfi.org/
http://freshwap.ws/
http://www.freebookspot.es/
http://ebookee.org/index.php?t...
http://bookre.org/
http://avxhome.se/ebooks
Bah, legislative creep. "This law is for terrorists! Terrorists and paedos! Terrorists and paedos and copyright infringers!" One of these things is not like the others.
I'll just blow the trumpet for small freedom-friendly ISPs that don't block anything.
To be fair, they're blocking access to copyrighted works for which the copyright holder has not authorized a copy. So, it's not really anything new...
(I hate copyright law as much as the next rabid /.er, but just sayin',)
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
“Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I'd never heard of any of these sites before.
"Now they are starting to censor books."
Since when has blocking some pirate sites been the same as censoring the content? Hysterical, much?
"That should give you a pretty good picture where this is going.."
Its simply treating the internet like any other media - ie subject to the law. If you don't like the law vote for someone who'll change it. In the meantime stop whining like some tin foil hat hippy whos just stepped out of 1975.
“The average TV commercial of sixty seconds has one hundred and twenty half-second clips in it, or one-third of a second. We bombard people with sensation. That substitutes for thinking.” Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Well, the censorship goes for the paper versions as well...I guess it is easier to do it in electronic format. My reply is off-topic but I just could not let this comment pass. The book market, being in the hands of corporations suffers from two issues at least:
- General censorship - only authors that are not "too controversial" are published. It is those corporations that decide which author deserves publicity, so you can have excellent books that no-one ever heard of. I have read very serious articles from all kinds of scholars on the subject [publishers, authors, journalists, ect.] and they all agree that our very culture [music, literature, cinema] is steered by corporations. It's a bit like the google echo-chamber where over time you get only the hits that you "like".
- Particular censorship - I have encountered two examples myself. One is the recent, rather popular book called "the Martian". A friend of mine downloaded somehow the last draft just before publishing. We found out that paragraphs and in some cases whole pages are missing in the officially published version. And the cut out parts were all biting, sarcastic comments on the state of humanity [very insightful observations actually]. The other censored book is also an excellent read from a modern Russian author [V. Pelevin]. In his book "Generation P" entitled in the US as "Babylon" 2 pages are missing from the first chapter because....hold on to your chair...it discusses in a very humorous way why only Pepsi was available in the USSR but not Coke, whereas in the the US Coke is bigger than Pepsi. Can you imagine the lengths at which this people will go - to censor a book that would have been read by no more than a few thousand Americans? I know the corporations did it, cause I have a friend whose job is to monitor the entire media [including Internet] of my motherland for mentions of corporations and she reports every single day to them so they can take action if they deem it necessary....they are interest what is written about them in a obscure blog in an insignificant country!!! Disgusting...
I know that this won't be popular here, but good on the Brits.
Make sure you don't visit AvaxHome, BookFi, Bookre, Ebookee, Freebookspot Freshwap or LibGen
Don't visit those sites. Just don't!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I wonder if Ishmael (Daniel Quinn) would get published today? Or 1984 or Fahrenheit 451?
"So long and thanks for all the fish."