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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.
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.”
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.
Sometimes I see a strip club that I could go to, and I wonder if I'd break some sort of agreement with my wife if I do.
FTFY.
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."
Fascism, hypocrisy, etc :) when are we all going to start calling it what it really is? :)
On the other hand, one tends to want security and control for the ones we love (or are responsible for, perhaps more for our sakes than theirs?), autonomy for ourselves. Maybe it is time to realize other people want autonomy too, so we can strike the correct balance?
"To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System"
So basically, they want to turn Europe into the people that left for the "new world" in the first place, puritans? good thing i checked out of society ages ago. dealing with this level of crazy just requires too much medicine vapor without them picking up the tab for it, not to mention forcing people to foot the bill for their misguided actions in every possible area.
"To err is human, to forgive, beyond the scope of the Operating System"
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
Why do you find it strange that ignorant politicians and greedy media moguls are ham-handed in their dispensation of "justice" in the protection of their revenue streams. I'm waiting with bated breath for Edger Rice Burroughs to "innovate" a new series of Ganymede novels wherein the plot goes: hero meets girl, hero loses girl to evil antagonist, hero chases antagonist and saves the girl and they (i.e. hero & girl, not hero & antagonst) kiss (and nothing else!) at the end. I hear Ernest Hemingway is recovering nicely from his suicide by using all that generous royalty income towards the latest medical technology to cure his malady and will be penning a sequel to "For Whom The Bell Tolls" just in time for Xmas gift giving. Let us all fervently hope Roger Zelazny will provide us with a new Amber novel and a astonishing collection of short stories. Would it be too much to ask for another six dimensional Lazurus Long novel from R.A.H.? I have a burning need to know if Mycroft and Athena ever "get it on" and Colin Campbell and Hazel Stone survived to write more "Scourge of the Spaceways" scripts .
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
"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!
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..
How long before Mozilla integrates a TOR client, available by default, for browsing to .onion addresses? It could also have an "Unblock this site" toolbar button which adds a blocked site to a "browse-over-tor" list and refreshes the page. If that's not been done already, that'd make a great plugin.
UK ISPs could buy this technology from China
Using outside DNS doesn't help if the carrier is blocking access to an IP address.
BTW another alternate DNS you can add to your list: Velocity Networks (Los Angeles): 206.126.128.2 - it's not as easy to remember as 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 for sure, but some people don't want to be bound to Google.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
BT don't (and I don't think Virgin do either). They just alter their DNS records to point to a different server.
UK users would be better off using the OpenDNS servers than Velocity's.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
https://piratebrowser.com/
Firefox with Tor pre-integrated and configured. Give the link to your friends.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No but Tor browser does, There is not a site I can't go to on that, regardless what the ISP has "blocked" :D just don't torrent through it, that's wrong, download it and click the torrent file once you have closed the browser :D and to the Government and courts, Fuck you
http://chimpbox.us
The self-published authors would hardly be represented by TPA, right? TPA says "writers need to be paid and publishers need to be able to continue to innovate and invest in new talent and material." -- IOW sure, the authors might suffer, but the important thing is that we can shaft them for money. I mean seriously, what are those "innovations" that the publishers have come up with? e-books? Nope. Self-publish solutions? Nope. Oh, I know -- sales bolstered by the self-feedback effect of bestseller lists, DRM on e-books, and insane regulations for libraries that makes it so expensive to lend e-books that most of them still offer only paper books, even though it should be obvious that e-books would be an ideal solution for libraries.
Of all the authors of e-books I've read, only 3-4 have been self-published (one of them being Cory Doctorow, but he has a regular publisher too); two of them publish using sites where people can pay either before (how much do you anticipate this book?) or after (what did you think the book was worth?).
Face it, the old type of publishers don't really serve much of a purpose in the world of e-books, just like the old type of record companies don't really serve much of a purpose in the world of digital music sales. Lucky for them they have the ear of the governments and don't need to worry about catching up with reality...
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.
Also:“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life.” 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!