Belgian ISP Forced To Block P2P Traffic 207
An anonymous reader lets us know of developments in a case in Belgium that has been under litigation since 2004. The Belgian copyright watchdog SABAM has forced an ISP to begin filtering P2P traffic (PDF). According to the PDF on the SABAM site: "The Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers (SABAM) has just won an important legal battle within the context of the dispute that opposes it to the Internet Service Provider (ISP) Tiscali, which has become Scarlet Extended Ltd. In its sentence of June 29, 2007, the Court of First Instance of Brussels is demanding from the access provider that it adopts one of the technical measures put forward by the expert in order to prevent Internet users from illegally downloading SABAM's musical repertoire via P2P software." The rumor is that Scarlet will be forced to deploy the same software as MySpace uses (Audible Magic) to filter illegal P2P traffic from the legal.
A simple way to defeat this (Score:5, Informative)
TorrentFreak's guide to protocol encrpytion [torrentfreak.com]
Re:Legal VS Illegal (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A simple way to defeat this (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A simple way to defeat this (Score:1, Informative)
So encrypted torrent traffic doesn't make it that much difficult to find out about the protocol used (yes traffic analysis helps). It makes it difficult to find out if it is legitimate or not.
Re:A simple way to defeat this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:This could really hurt the ISP. (Score:3, Informative)
Bad news (Score:4, Informative)
Not Necessary here in Canada (Score:3, Informative)
Rogers Cable throttle _all_ encrypted traffic now, as people were encrypting to get around bittorrent throttling. Your 7Meg line will get about 10KB down on a fully seeded torrent (Linux ISOs or whatever).
No worries, you'd think, in a nice open market you can just go to the competition, except that there is none. If your local copper is incapabable of decent DSL speeds, chances are Rogers are your Only option for broadband.
Go the 'free' market.
Re:A simple way to defeat this (Score:5, Informative)
What about encrypted traffic? How can you tell it's "P2P traffic"? How about traffic from multiplayer games that uses a completely alien packet configuration that doesn't fit any "standard" mold because the company making the game had to design their own packet format on top of TCP/UDP? How do you discriminate between "good" and "bad" packets?
You can't outlaw encryption. You'd get into a serious fight with banks that way (and, trust me, you DO NOT want a fight with a bank). You can't outlaw connecting on "nonstandard" ports, that would open another can of worms you do not want to touch.
So please enlighten me how you'd like to enforce the "no encrypted P2P" rule.
Re:Legal VS Illegal (Score:4, Informative)
It wouldn't surprise me if Audible Magic is owned or otherwise affiliated to people within the RIAA and it's offshoot organizations.
Re:Just encrypt? (Score:3, Informative)
I don't know how the mentioned software works, but if they are going to distinguish between legal and illegal P2P traffic, they will have to analyse the content. If that's the case, I think encrypted content can only be blocked by employing a whitelist containing fingerprints of legal content.
Re:But who gets the money? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't panic yet. (Score:3, Informative)
What I don't know, IANAL : Is Scarlet already obliged to enforce this ass-hat decision while the case is appealed ?
If so, as a Scarlet customer I will have to figure out a way to subvert Le Filtre P2P until I find another ISP. Sorry Scarlet
Tangentially, it's worth noting that SABAM tries to set a precedent by taking on a small ISP (at the time this case started rolling they were quite small compared to Skynet and Telenet).
I don't see them trying to pull this shit on Skynet/Belgacom. Odds are they'd get crushed like a puppy trying to stop a bus. (Wishful thinking)
Re:A simple way to defeat this (Score:5, Informative)
No ISP would be plain retarded enough to block all encrypted traffic, on the grounds that it takes away a big reason for people to use the Internet (and thus their service) in the first place: buying stuff online.
(Christ, I had to give up mod points to point this out)