Crackdown deal on internet piracy

[halfpint]

Posted this before, Do you think this will in work the UK or will people just move to the ISPs that have not signed up to the deal ? Wonder if they would ever do a similar thing with adult

Internet service providers (ISPs) and the music industry have reached an agreement to clamp down on illegal downloads.

It is thought that around 6.5 million Britons have downloaded music and films illegally over the past year and estimates suggest that the practice will cost the recording industry up to £1 billion over the next five years.

The fightback against online piracy will begin with letters to thousands of the most prolific downloaders to inform them that their activity has been detected and is being monitored.

The Government's departments for business and culture hailed the "world-first solution" agreed by the industry to address unlawful file-sharing.

Britain's six largest ISPs - BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse - signed a memorandum of understanding with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the body which represents record companies in the UK.

ISPs have agreed to commit themselves to developing legal file-sharing services and to ensure their customers know that it is illegal to share copyright-protected music.

It is thought likely that many parents will learn for the first time from the letters that their children are using their bedroom PCs and laptops for illegal piracy.

Business Secretary John Hutton said: "This is an intelligent approach to tackling unlawful file-sharing by industry and ISPs. It tells consumers what they can do, rather than just what they can't."

ISPs and film and music companies are expected to develop a new code of practice together on how they will deal with infringements, and the Government will then look at their proposals and consider how they can be backed up by new laws.

Feargal Sharkey, the former Undertones singer who is now chief executive of British Music Rights, the body that represents musicians, said the industry wanted to co-operate with downloaders to address the problem of piracy.

http://latestnews.virginmedia.com/ne...?vmsrc=pamread

[CarlosTheGaucho]

Originally Posted by halfpint

[LIST][*]Posted this before, Do you think this will in work the UK or will people just move to the ISPs that have not signed up to the deal ? Wonder if they would ever do a similar thing with adult

Britain's six largest ISPs - BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse - signed a memorandum of understanding with the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), the body which represents record companies in the UK.

http://latestnews.virginmedia.com/ne...?vmsrc=pamread

LOL

I have read:

"Britain's six largest ISPs - BT, Virgin Media, Orange, Tiscali, BSkyB and Carphone Warehouse - signed a memorandum of understanding with the British Pornographic Industry (BPI), the body which represents record companies in the UK."

Yeah I guess the psychological way of doing it can do something, people will not move to other providers as far as it's too much hassle but lots of them will simply ignore it.

There would be another way of doing it:

You download pirated stuff your line gets slowed down big time because of violating the terms of use, this would of course have to be UNIVERSAL so no ISP competition would take advantage of the migrating downloaders.

And here we go again..

[duff]

I hope this works... internet service providers acting as police is truly the only way to shut down piracy completely. People aren't giving these companies much of a choice at this point.

If you're not doing anything illegal with your company you have nothing to worry about.

[SmokeyTheBear]

i must still be sleepy , i cant tell what the plan is ? to create their own file sharing program ? how does that help, nobody would use it.

[mrkris]

I love how the music industry claims $X in losses when people download. If someone is prevented from downloading, that doesn't mean they are going to go BUY it.

[severe]

Originally Posted by CarlosTheGaucho

You download pirated stuff your line gets slowed down big time because of violating the terms of use, this would of course have to be UNIVERSAL so no ISP competition would take advantage of the migrating downloaders.

how do you distinguish illegal and legal use? i dunno about englang but here if i own a cd its legal for me to download the songs online. however not to distribute. what if your downloading a free program, or some update. theres no way an isp can distinguish the packets. some of the companies already do p2p bw throttling as an fiy and if ur doing absolutely nothing illegal, you get penalized.

[testpie]

Originally Posted by duff

If you're not doing anything illegal with your company you have nothing to worry about.

That's always a dangerous assumption that people in favour of any new authority make - be it ID cards, a potential "three strikes" rule for downloaders and etcetera. The problem with the statement is that you have to implicitly trust your ISP to become judge, jury and executioner with your actions - and considering most ISPs can't even bill 99% of their customer base correctly half the time, do you really think they can be trusted with deciding whether what you download is illegal or not?

[CarlosTheGaucho]

Originally Posted by severe

how do you distinguish illegal and legal use? i dunno about englang but here if i own a cd its legal for me to download the songs online. however not to distribute. what if your downloading a free program, or some update. theres no way an isp can distinguish the packets. some of the companies already do p2p bw throttling as an fiy and if ur doing absolutely nothing illegal, you get penalized.

Dunno, making a global list of sites that contain, enable or benefit from copyright violation and then monitor the usage?

[duff]

Originally Posted by testpie

That's always a dangerous assumption that people in favour of any new authority make - be it ID cards, a potential "three strikes" rule for downloaders and etcetera. The problem with the statement is that you have to implicitly trust your ISP to become judge, jury and executioner with your actions - and considering most ISPs can't even bill 99% of their customer base correctly half the time, do you really think they can be trusted with deciding whether what you download is illegal or not?

If it's between allowing millions of people to continue to freeload and dismantle the recording, movie and adult industries. Or letting my isp decide if what I'm doing is legal or not, yes I'm willing to trust them.

It's a pretty black or white decision for them. They can see what you're downloading and where it's coming from, it should be pretty easy.

I'm open to better suggestions on how to handle the issue though...

[testpie]

Originally Posted by duff

It's a pretty black or white decision for them. They can see what you're downloading and where it's coming from, it should be pretty easy.

Really? So what happens if my friend in Australia makes a piece of music, encodes it as an MP3 and distributes it via P2P, with both of us using the encryption functionalities of BitTorrent? All my ISP can see is that I'm downloading something from a P2P application, thus it must be bad and I should be banned?

[duff]

Originally Posted by testpie

Really? So what happens if my friend in Australia makes a piece of music, encodes it as an MP3 and distributes it via P2P, with both of us using the encryption functionalities of BitTorrent? All my ISP can see is that I'm downloading something from a P2P application, thus it must be bad and I should be banned?

I see your point and there are definitely lots of cases similar to that. But, I think that they would further investigate after you've done that repeatedly. Most people who pirate don't just download one song or movie every week right?

I do get where you're coming from and I think it would be a huge undertaking for any ISP, but if they don't do it, nobody will.

[gornyhuy]

The phone company isn't in the business of monitoring what people are talking about on the phone (e.g. planning crimes, trading credit card numbers, whatever)... google isn't in the business of monitoring search terms and censoring them.... the power company doesn't monitor if you are using your electricity for grow lights or a hot tub or an electric chair. Why should an ISP be any different?

[MattO]

People don't understand!! We're ENTITLED to free music, movies and pornography on the Internet! It's all about freedom and blabbity blabbity blahhh

[marketsmart]

Originally Posted by MattO

People don't understand!! We're ENTITLED to free music, movies and pornography on the Internet! It's all about freedom and blabbity blabbity blahhh

you got that right...

[CarlosTheGaucho]

Originally Posted by gornyhuy

The phone company isn't in the business of monitoring what people are talking about on the phone (e.g. planning crimes, trading credit card numbers, whatever)... google isn't in the business of monitoring search terms and censoring them.... the power company doesn't monitor if you are using your electricity for grow lights or a hot tub or an electric chair. Why should an ISP be any different?

Can be called to action anytime there is a suspiction that you are about to commit anything illegal, and especially in these after 2001 era you are more than evere liable to be monitored.

Google in Germany censors sites that don't comply with legislation and recently gave away in Brazil personal data to crack down on a bunch of cp users, google currently posseses more complex information about the global PC users worldwide than any other commercial entity.

If someone provides a service he can put in his own rules of using it, especially to comply with the jurisdiction.

Such as Arabian IP providers are blocking xxx content or chinese IP providers are blocking certain sites or you can't load porn on the internet connection provided in certain hotels as they would canibalise the revenue from their PPV.

That all is happening already.

[Clean_Franck]

too bad, the internet as we know it is dissolving before our eyes.
of course I think that illegal file sharing is bad, but when isp's become the police? its sets further precedence for other things. I see the internet's final solution becoming something similar to way cable tv conducts its procedures unfortunately.

[duff]

Originally Posted by gornyhuy

The phone company isn't in the business of monitoring what people are talking about on the phone (e.g. planning crimes, trading credit card numbers, whatever)... google isn't in the business of monitoring search terms and censoring them.... the power company doesn't monitor if you are using your electricity for grow lights or a hot tub or an electric chair. Why should an ISP be any different?

Because this problem is so wide spread and growing at an incredible rate. I think the number of people downloading songs, movies and porn illegally slightly outweighs the people planning rob the 7/11 over the phone. Like Matt said, people don't even think they are doing anything illegal. Somebody needs to get them in line.

[V_RocKs]

I am a butt pirate so I have nothing to worry about.

[mikesouth]

The answer isnt more government regulation. The answer is technology. As much as I disdain piracy I disdain giving power to the government even more.

Look at the recent Cuomo strong arming of ISPs to drop cp usenet newsgroups. Now we can all get behind that presumeably, never mind the fact that the effort is meaningless. But how long will it be before they are strongarming them to block adult sites

[Socks]

Surely something has to give. I did a search for a milf model yesterday in Google, Misty Vonage.. I opened up maybe the first 50 or so links as tabs in firefox, and had a look at the pages that were ranking.

I'd say around 80% of the top 50 ranked pages I saw were blatantly letting you download full several hundred meg videos, stolen from websites and DVD's. A few of the sites listed 10 or more full videos on the same page. Some of them even broke it down by which paysite the videos were taken from.

Someone should class action google, saying they're too smart to not know better. To me that's the single biggest problem. If google simply de-valued sites that used the words "torrent" "crack" "warez" and the like, shit would get a lot better.

They don't do it because people would search elsewhere, and they'd lose market share :/

[Socks]

Originally Posted by duff

It's a pretty black or white decision for them. They can see what you're downloading and where it's coming from, it should be pretty easy.

Can't stop SSL though. SSL could be any kind of traffic, and is pretty secure. The ISP sees nothing but encrypted packets, and it's not P2P.

[Brad]

Personally I think the music industry needs to figure out how to make money these days. It's been what a decade since napster came around and they are still doing the same shit. They need leadership and ideas. Blocking people from downloading at this point is not going to help them sell cds. The average person now does not buy as much music as they used to because there is so much competition for out entertainment dollars (video games, DVDs, etc). Not to mention, they have allowed clear channel to fuck their industry over by playing only a small cross section of new music. Couple that with the fact that there is no longer music videos equals less interest in new music.
Bottom line is they need to figure out how to get their customers back and blocking downloads will only hurt the artists more I think.

As for the motion picture industry...I don't understand how people can watch movies in crappy quality (I doubt many people know how to download an iso and then burn it). Totally ruins it for me. But, seeing as they just broke the opening weekend record I don't think they have anything to complain about. Not to mention the fact that DVDs are killing it for them. they are making so much more money than they ever have.

In short. The record industry needs to look a it self and figure out how to make money and stop blaming everyone but themselves. The movie industry should shut up and keep out of this since they are still making money hand over fist.

[rowan]

I had a friend (yes really, it wasn't me) mention that his ISP sent him a stern note saying they'd had a complaint about him downloading pirated software via torrents. I presume because of the two way distributed nature of the torrent protocol it's fairly easy to run a bot and automatically send off complaints to the ISPs associated with infringing IPs.

BTW: anyone older than 30 immediately think of "You Little Thief" in relation to this issue, and seeing the name Feargal Sharkey?

[mike-al]

Originally Posted by duff

I hope this works... internet service providers acting as police is truly the only way to shut down piracy completely. People aren't giving these companies much of a choice at this point.

If you're not doing anything illegal with your company you have nothing to worry about.

Will never come to be, the minute you snoop my data, you are not only breaking every privacy policy in the book, but open for about trillions of dollars in law suits..

Electronic sniffers are no different then human eyes, and we see what problems virus detection and the false positives that occur. You are not proven guilty until your data is alerted? Then they can view all your data based off a false positive? Controlled by PUBLIC PEOPLE in an ISP? What criminal won't open an ISP just to snoop you LOL. Some people waste their time on thoughts that can never be remotely possible..

This has been going on like this far more than the few past years. I dont get the rush of talk now. The last 20 years, all those fake dvd's you bought, all the free software you got yourselves, all the publicity and fame it created for the publishers of these titles... But now its affects this corner of the world and it's URGENT to take care of business using extreme tactics??? The only reason they are so blatent "in your face" with this theft, is because they know from the past 25 years what they can get away with and why noone will ever be able to do anything about it.

All you can do is change distribution methods.... Unfortunately, just like tube sites, the companies do have some beneficial side effects of this pirated content, you will never of course find argued in court.. "Hello Your Honor, We lost $4.2 million dollars in video piracy last year, but we as a small company, gained planet awareness of free advertising in the sum of $10.2 million dollars.. Money our small advertising budget could never possibly have acheived. But we feel cheated.. Please shut these pirates down and guve us their money"

heh

[duff]

Valid points Mike, but where does it end?

I've heard all the arguments of changing distribution methods, but nobody seems to be able to come up with anything that works.

You're right... this has been going on for years, but never on this scale. Kids growing up today don't even see anything wrong with what they're doing. Firing up bittorrent and downloading is just "how you get music". The thought of stealing doesn't even enter the picture. I don't see how anyone who's ever had anything stolen from them can't be outraged by that.

And how come people can't just walk into Best Buy and steal a new ipod to play their stolen music on? Nobody seems to care if you do it online, so what's the difference? These companies pay security companies (Public People) to watch over their stores to prevent such things from occurring. We've just come to accept that that's the way it is.

I do understand the privacy policy laws as well, but you're talking about privacy laws vs. breaking laws. The argument always ends up back at square one and it's so frustrating.

[halfpint]

The way I see it is they are going to try and stop the prolific downloader and not the guy that downloads one mp3 every couple of months or so. Well I think it will scare some people other users will just move to a different ISP. You will most prob even get ISPs advertising the fact that they dont snoop on what you are downloading now, just to get you to sign up. The scary thing about this is could they do a similar thing with adult websites and ask the big ISPs to block them. That would be a disaster if it does ever happen.

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by marketsmart

you got that right...

[Tat2Jr]

"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety" - Benjamin Franklin

[gideongallery]

People who watch television shows online do so in addition to watching them on broadcast networks, a study by Magid Media Labs for CBS Interactive suggests. The study appears to dispel concerns that online viewing may cannibalize the television audience. In fact, 35 percent of those surveyed appear to use the Internet as a means of checking out shows that they have not seen before and are therefore likely to view them on TV as a result of such exposure. In a statement, David Botkin, head of audience research for CBS Interactive, said that the Magid report confirms what the network had already suspected -- that "online viewing is complementary to broadcast viewing, so making our programming more accessible to people drives awareness, interest and ratings." Meanwhile, a separate study by Jupiter Research has found that "serious sports fans" represent 19 percent of online users, who tend to "spend more time online, watch more video online, and shop more online."

http://www.imdb.com/news/ni0265193/

i suspect that if you did the same study with music you would find the same thing.

torrents have replaced the radio not purchases of cd. someone tells me i should check out song, i don't spend time sitting in front of the radio hoping they will play that song i just hop online and download the song. (which supreme court of canada says i can legally do because of the piracy tax i pay). If i like the songs i buy the album for my collection, becuase the mp3 quality may be good enough for my ipod it is not good enough when i play it on my real home system.