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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?
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."
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.
Quite a bit less than the whiny "we want to be last to market" bitches that keep suing their customers and otherwise treat them like crap. If you ignore the paid-for "studies" the effect is actually net positive. You have to remember that these are intangible "culture goods" that gain value with sharing.
That is, such goods make more money for the owners if more people have access to them. It's no secret that "airplay" is the be-all end-all for artists on radio and tv. Yet the focus of the big content cartel is on tightly controlling the material.
The late owner of Baen Books did the reverse, giving away for free a number of electronic books, calling it a license to print money.
IOW, if you ignore their own propaganda, the available sources, studies, and indications paint the sharing-decriers a bunch of doodie-heads.
If I was a publisher I'd be far more worried that this incentivises me to read older, public domain books.
Well, there's one reason why copyrights get extended every time the mouse threatens to become public domain. In fact, eg. google books considers re-issues of old, even centuries old, material to come with fresh copyright so things like the Illiad in a recent publication is considered protected under current terms as if it was published yesterday.
Yet at the same time over in Europe there's various countries that have country-wide rules propping up book prices to enable retention of large back-catalogues. So you pay more for every book including new ones because, you know, retaining old books in print is otherwise not profitable, or so the narrative goes. Make of that what you will.
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.
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.
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.
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
Or I could just buy it easily from Amazon, and strip the DRM for backup purposes.
My take on this is that if I'm required to infringe copyright on a legally purchased product in order to make sensible use of it, why should I actually purchase it instead of just infringing copyright and getting it for free from a torrent?
For the record, I don't do either - I've steered away from ebooks entirely until the publishers stop taking the piss. Since books were invented there have been various generally accepted things that everyone did with them that ebooks don't allow you to do: e.g. if I buy a paper book, I can read it, then pass it on to my wife to read, lend it to a friend to read, stick it on the book shelf for years, then hand it onto kids to read, who can hand it onto their kids, or I can sell it, etc. Compare to the T&Cs of Google Play (as an example) which say that I'm not even allowed to lend my tablet to my wife so that she could read an ebook I purchased, let alone actually transfer it to someone else's device. When I can get ebooks with the same rights as I have for paper books, I'll think about buying some.
http://blog.nexusuk.org