UK ISPs under pressure to stop file sharing

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Martz

Martz

Staff member
May 26, 2001
5,707
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Great to see our taxes going to a worthwhile cause.
The government turned up the heat on internet providers today, warning that laws to force disconnection of illegal filesharers are already being drafted for a parliamentary debut in November.
Lord Triesman, the minister for intellectual property, said that if ISPs can't agree a voluntary scheme with the music and film industries by the end of summer, he will press Gordon Brown to introduce legislation in the next Queen's speech.
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http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/08/triesman_isps_legislation_timetable/

Well, if he needs to pass a law - it can't be illegal. Nice spin on words there. Seems we are pushing to turn copyright infringement into a criminal activity (since it obviously supports terrorism, kills puppies and makes children sick). Protecting the interests of the global mega corps, mostly based in the USA, by legislation is just stupid.

I think its not blatantly obviously to everyone that the CD and DVD are pretty much dead. It's easier, quicker and cheaper to download a music album these days. And the industry won't embrace this approach, even though it is a natural progression.

So expect your ISP bills to go up considerably when the providers have to buy and licence expensive technology which will catch people downloading copyrighted material. Expect your service to slow down as packets are inspected. Me? I'll be using encryption and ever trick in the book to avoid any detection. Just like drugs, downloading and torrents will go even more underground and become even more difficult to control and monitor.

Of course the democratic choice will not be offered to the public, since they won't support laws which stop prohibit technology. There will be no public outcry until after the laws are passed and we're all getting randomly disconnected for downloading anything from the Internet. Either due to us downloading stuff we shouldn't, or because of false positives where someone is incorrectly disconnected for downloading a linux ISO or free software.

That means we have until Christmas to download everything you've ever wanted, all those album back catalogues of music, FLAC rips, best of albums. After that, support free music and indie labels. The time has come for the music industry to die, and for music to revert to being all about the passion of making music and performing live - regardless of reward.

So fuck you government, whatever happens I won't be forced into supporting the entertainment industry by legislation.
 
Couldn't agree more, there are no need for middle-men in the record industry anymore.

DVD's imo are different, I prefer to go to moviebank or the cinema or buy a dvd. Usually because you can buy most good films for £5 if you shop around for places doing deals. e.g. amazon atm has loads of good titles for £3.75.

Moviebank lets you rent a lot of films for £0.99 if you take it back the same night, and as I usually only want to watch a DVD once I'd prefer to do that than to wait a few hours for a download.

Also the cinema experience is great .. shame you have to share it with chavs and fat people crunching popcorn loudly in your ear.
 
@Joko the DVD is a form of data transport, as I'm sure you know. If you had 100-1000mb internet connection you'd be able to get that data much faster that going to the shop. We already do it with MP3s. Using current tech I can download music faster than I can listen to it.

It might seem far fetched to think we'll every get those speeds to our homes. However most of us remember being on dialup and ISDN. We achieved speeds of 5.4 kb/s and 12 kb/s if we were prepared to pay for it. Now with consumer ADSL being available in most areas we are looking at speeds up to about 1600 kb/s which is more than 100x faster than ISDN.

Give it 2-3 years and maybe we will see another 10x to 100x speed improvement, and that puts us in the right area.

Then consider storage space, Sky+ has a 40GB disk built in for recording. Back in the ISDN days, I can't remember for sure but I think disks were around 8-10GB. Again, we've experienced another 100x increase in the size of the capacity. It wouldn't be too much to expect disks to be up to 10TB in the next 5 years.

Sky Anytime works this way by "downloading" films broadcasted and saves them on your box in the hope that you migtht be interested in them. In the future I wouldn't see why Video on Demand couldn't download every single available film to the 1TB hard disk - and you pay for the one you want to watch. Available instantly, since its already been prefetched and encryppted by the Sky+/PVR box.

I also think the cinema experience is dying too, unfortunately. As you said, why pay about the same price as the DVD for 2 people to watch a film when its released in a bad environment? Home theatres have been growing in popularity for many years, and when I watch a film/movie at home I get to pause it, smoke, drink alcohol, sit in my boxers, fart and chomp popcorn as loudly as my girlfriend will permit.

Granted, it's not a social experience. However it seems that the social part of going to the cinema is dead. Nobody speaks to each other, everyone gets annoyed at everyone else because of their bad habbits.
 
Oh I agree things will change for sure but imo DVD's are a long way behind CD's on the green mile.
 
Martz said:
Great to see our taxes going to a worthwhile cause.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/08/triesman_isps_legislation_timetable/

So fuck you government, whatever happens I won't be forced into supporting the entertainment industry by legislation.
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Sadly, you need to look at a larger picture and zoom out a little bit.
IFPI: ISPs Should Block BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is trying to convince European lawmakers that ISPs should take extreme measures to fight piracy. They suggest that ISPs should block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay, and block filesharing protocols, no matter what they’re being used for.
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The problem with this is that all the big companies, businesses, etc etc have their groups like this to back them up, to lobby for them. To use a shitload of money for their own goals. I don't think there are any consumer groups to protect the interest of the masses. And if there are such groups, I doubt they have equal money to spend on politicians. Although the biggest problem is that such groups have that much power, putting "Lets block all P2P" on the EU Agenda, this shouldn't have happened in the first place.

Martz said:
So expect your ISP bills to go up considerably when the providers have to buy and licence expensive technology which will catch people downloading copyrighted material. Expect your service to slow down as packets are inspected. Me? I'll be using encryption and ever trick in the book to avoid any detection. Just like drugs, downloading and torrents will go even more underground and become even more difficult to control and monitor.
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The Pirate Bay Sees a Future Without BitTorrent

Another reason for a new and improved protocol is the massive number of spammers and anti-piracy organizations that abuse the BitTorrent protocol, either to make money or to bust people who download infringing material. The new protocol will be designed with these potential problems in mind.
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It's prolly gonna be some lightweight Tor cloud with BitTorrent like methods of distributing it all. That way everyone is anonymous and it's all encrypted. If properly implemented, this would reduce P2P snooping/lawsuits/etc to virtually 0.

Martz said:
It might seem far fetched to think we'll every get those speeds to our homes. However most of us remember being on dialup and ISDN. We achieved speeds of 5.4 kb/s and 12 kb/s if we were prepared to pay for it. Now with consumer ADSL being available in most areas we are looking at speeds up to about 1600 kb/s which is more than 100x faster than ISDN.

Give it 2-3 years and maybe we will see another 10x to 100x speed improvement, and that puts us in the right area.
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Comcast Promising Ultra-Fast Internet
"Comcast's CEO Brian Roberts gave The Associated Press a preview of his speech for the Consumer Electronics show, and said that Comcast expects to demonstrate a technology that delivers up to 160 megabits of data per second over cable. At that speed you could download a high-definition copy of 'Batman Begins' in four minutes. The technology, DOCSIS 3.0, will start rolling out this year."
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Cisco Demos Long-Awaited DOCSIS 3.0 Cable Modem

While Comcast is the nasty ISP in the US that is currently blocking torrent uploads (seeding), it does show that they are rolling out new technology to keep up with bandwidth demands. Also I work for a Dutch cablecompany and I know we have a roadmap to DOCSIS3.0 aswell. So yes, speeds will increase. Which is hardly a suprise to be honest, everything will just keep getting faster, better, etc.

Overall, while some stuff is kinda worrying, I think in the end pirates will win.
 
The problem with the UK is that Parliament as a whole have nothing to do so they tinker, poke and prod into peoples lives

so they come up with shit like this and the drugs laws

Sharing will continue whatever they do
 
Addendum:

ISPs To Filter Traffic For Copyright Holders?
"At a CES forum, representatives of AT&T and other ISPs discussed the need to filter traffic at the network level, to stop the transfer of copyrighted material. An AT&T spokesman said they 'would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. "We've got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there's no doubt about it," he said.'"
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Seems it's catching on like a wildfire. :\
 
Not everything on p2p networks has had its copyright infringed by being copied / cracked, so how can they possibly make p2p illegal altogether? Make it illegal to share files? Yeah, right, fuck off. Same goes for torrents and every other file-sharing thing, as far as I know. Are they also going to outlaw rapidshare.com, megaupload, etc?

As for most of the stuff on p2p networks / torrent sites / rapidshare sites, etc, I couldn't give a toss about it. Yes, it's nice downloading a new PC game from rapidshare, but not if it doesn't work - a 6 gig game took me all night to download and it didn't work (cheers Daemon Tools), and although this is uncommon I would much rather just pick up the game off eBay or something. Then I know it will work and I know I will have the proper support for it. £15 or whatever isn't much for the odd game, especially if you only buy one or two every couple of months, as I do.

This goes for music (I listen to the same music for YEARS - always have and don't really get new stuff at all), films (I have all my favourites and it will be no big deal renting (and copying) the odd new one from a rental store - I'd rather do this than spend ages downloading an ISO at my slow speeds. The only 'illegal' thing I'd truly miss is software, which, being far smaller than almost everything else on p2p, is the easiest to distribute and is therefore the most likely outlawed area to be continuously revived by the pirates.

Piracy has taken a kicking a few times in the past but I barely notice a difference. Googling for anything you want these days is almost bound to get your results - if this p2p network doesn't have it then this one will, if newsgroups don't have it then RS will. As far as I'm concerned Lex is right, the pirates will always win, especially if the politicians can't get their heads out of their arses and take an intelligent look at what's going on. Knee-jerk cries of 'this must be outlawed!' are at best temporary setbacks, and comparisons to the ineffectiveness and (as I learned from Martz's posts) actual counter-productiveness of the drugs prohibition stuff are inevitable.
 
In france, we have an ISP that provide free access to newsgroups (binaries).
And since a couple of months, it has been obliged to "ban" about 15 french groups where mostly DIVX were posted.
We can still access them if we pay for servers like giganews tho.
Still, it sucks :mad:
Some people started to post in random groups where we can get in , tho .. lol :P

btw, here in Paris they have started to implement optic fiber till ur house, it's quite a pain to get as they need a whole new install (for the fiber cable), but once u have it, u get a 100mb up&down for like 50 €.

And when u have fiber, getting new DVDs and stuff won't ever be a problem anymore since bandwith will improve more and more as the technologie goes (the fiber media got close to an infinite potential ..).
 
@Lex great post and references. I think I've read and been inspired by a lot of those links already, excpet I didn't know TPB's stance on bittorrent and the future. The EU has already tried to pass laws which would hurt free open source software and protect the interests of global corporate IP holders. I wrote to my MP who represented the UK in the EU about this 3 years ago and had my point of view heard and acknowledged in letters. At that time the law was not passed and I claimed a little victory. I'm not saying it was down to me, but I wrote a letter and the outcome worked out the way I wanted. I felt like I had an input, even if I didn't really.

The internet offers opportunies for democracy to really become a reality. We have the infrastructure for voting and to have a referendum on everything. I suppose governments are voted in to represent the people since it wasn't feasible to have the entire population in the House of Commons arguing over right and wrong. The 'net changes all of this again by allowing all of us to have our voices heard and our votes counted. Of course politicians would never allow this to happen since they would lose control and we would of course become a true democracy, not what they want.

We, the internet/information generation, should be asked about our opinions on if we want our communications filtered. I doubt many people would support it.

@Useless - yes your arguments about filtering are the same as many other people on slashdot and the like have claimed. "How do you know what is and isn't copyrighted?"

Everything is automagically copyrighted, including all the posts in this forum. Free software is still copyright protected, as is freeware/shareware. People can give up their right to the copyright if they wish and place it in the public domain.

I place this post in the public domain and permit anyone to copy/edit/redistribute it without any conditions.

It's hard to imagine how much traffic the ISPs handle, and how expensive it would be for them to implement filtering at this level. I think the government would like a "Great Firewall of China".. like China.. where they try and restrict access to information. This doesn't work for them, people still get past it using proxies and encryption and other methods. However these people are criminalised.

So the UK wants to implement the same policy and technology as a communist country. Not that I have anything against communism personally, however again it's an emotional label which whiles the average Sun or Daily Mail reader into a frenzy. We can't spout the words democracy in one breath and filtering for everyone in the next.
 
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