Ofcom Unveils Anti-Piracy Policy For UK ISPs 234
krou writes "Under plans drawn up by Ofcom, UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who infringe copyright, logging names and the number of times infringement took place. Music and film companies will then be allowed access to the list, and be able to decide whether or not to take legal action. '"It is imperative that a system that accuses people of illegal online activity is fair and clear," said Anna Bradley, chair of the Communications Consumer Panel.' The Panel, in partnership with Consumer Focus, Which, Citizens Advice, and the advocacy body the Open Rights Group, has released a set of principles it believes should govern the code of practice. The principles say sound evidence is needed before any action is taken, consumers must have the right to defend themselves, and the appeals process must be free to pursue. The code shall come into practice by 2011, and initially applies only to ISPs with 400,000 customers or more." Update: 05/29 09:11 GMT by T : As an anonymous reader points out below, that's 400,000 users, rather than 40,000 as originally rendered.
How about... (Score:2, Insightful)
First of all, I don't live in the UK.
How about limiting damages to thrice the MSRP value of the infringed content for the first offense, and subsequently doubling (6 times the MSRP for second offense, 12 times the MSRP for third offense, and so on...)
This way, people's lives won't be ruined the first time they get caught infringing.
So, if the MSRP is $29.95 for a given movie (think how expensive Blu-Ray is), then on the first offense, that's $89.85. Or, maybe multiple movies were pirated on the first offense. Well, that is 3 times total MSRP sum.
How? Passive traffic analysis? (Score:5, Insightful)
Encryption will make this difficult. It'll be right back to making unsubstantiated claims that some IP address was serving up copyrighted content then demanding to know the subscriber details.
That's fine... (Score:5, Insightful)
It is great that people who create content might get paid for doing so (*genuinely). The real issue here is the publishers who's 1980s business models cannot adapt to the 2000s with high speed internet in every home and multiple mobile devices per person. In the long term these publishers will go out of business but not without dragging their feet ruining it for everyone else in the mean time.
Why can't I buy online instead of a DVD and get all the extra features?
Why does online content cost more than a physical disc?
Why when I buy online content can't I put it on my iPad, Google Phone, Laptop, and PC?
Why can't I watch Hulu and YouTube in another country? What's this international border junk doing on the internet?
Why is content priced unfairly between different countries (*even taking into account taxes, duty, and cost of living)?
Publishers claim they can't compete with free/"stolen" and while for the poor that is often true, there is a large percentage of people who would LOVE to pay for content but literally cannot. For example if I slept through last week's episode of a TV show, and cannot watch it online in my country -- what other options do I have? Wait for the DVD a year from now?
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:2, Insightful)
That's the point. Everyone is a criminal -> no one can stand against the system.
This is simply wrong (Score:5, Insightful)
"Under plans drawn up by Ofcom, UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who infringe copyright, logging names and the number of times infringement took place. Music and film companies will then be allowed access to the list, and be able to decide whether or not to take legal action."
No, its not those who infringe. It is ONLY those who are ACCUSED without proof of any kind in any forum which is legitimate to establishing the truth of that accusation.
We should consider similar cases. Do we want to draw up lists of those who three people accuse of speeding, and on the fourth accusation, take away their driving licenses?
The utterly ridiculous and anti-democratic aspect of this is the following: there is a move in this particular case to substitute accusation for proof. This is wrong. We need to treat all violations of law in the same way: require proof before sanction.
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously I feel like no matter what I do Driving, browsing the internet, or taking photographs I feel like at any given moment I'm breaking the law
Well that's because you probably are; the laws about driving and copyright are so rediculously broad - and lightly enforced - that you're breaking the law most of the time, but simply aren't prosecuted for it until you appear on someones radar.
What I consider worst about this legislation is that major ISPs are going to have to monitor *all* traffic passing through them, make a judgement on whether it is 'infringing' then put you on a list, then hand that list over to the major label music industry to decide if they're going to take civil action against you. So not only am I having my privacy massively infringed by my own ISP, I'm paying them to do it, and act as enforcer and bearer of all the costs as evidence gatherer for another industry entirely - one I happen to be boycotting.
Thanks a bunch ex-labour government for pushing that little law through at the last minute without debate.
a short explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
Although I'm not an expert, I wouldn't be surprised to discover that a convicted rapist has a less onerous punishment placed on them than someone in the grips of these film studios.
Re:That's fine... (Score:1, Insightful)
1. lying about obscene profit and claim to be losing money to priracy.
2. stealing gouvement and artist by employing clever hollywood accounting.
3. stealing, as in depriving the public domain, from its culture by copyrighting expired publication and ever extending copyright duration thru 4.
4. corruption, by lobbying for theire immoral need, they are undermining democracy.
I dont claim that pirating is moral, but i just dont care anymore. And neither should you since they dont care themself.
I see two problems with this (Score:3, Insightful)
First, most P2P protocols work by the idea of "pushing" instead of "pulling". I.e. a connection that I establish is used to "push" my content towards the receiver. The idea is to discourage people from using NATing routers to simply block off those that would like to download from them (because, well, that way you'd be blocking the incoming content, not the outgoing).
But that means I'm not downloading anything. I provide someone with the ability to upload. If this is illegal, anyone running an insecure FTP server (knowingly or unknowingly, like, say, a Linux bos being run by an idiot who can't configure it properly) is due as well. Anyone here willing to join me in a port scan of politicians' machines to see whether we find a server that accepts incoming connections? And then fill it with ripped midget porn? Or, can anyone provide midget porn, I didn't have any use for it 'til now.
Aside of that, it smells a lot of "guilty until proven innocent". A list gets assembled and the MAFI-UK can pick and choose who to sue. Anyone else feeling like this gets rubberstamped "guilty" fairly easily unless you somehow manage to stand up in court against it?
Re:Proxy, proxy, proxy (Score:1, Insightful)
Paying for piracy kind of defeats the whole idea of stealing stuff for free.
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, while I agree with your overall points and philosophy, there are a few things that DPI could do to make things really annoying for ISP customers:
1. They can probably detect http headers that have a GET line that includes a filename of something that seems to be infringing. Better not view any websites with photos of artists named "Mariah Carey - singing Name-That-Song.jpg" on them... Or, if you're going to post mp3s on a website maybe you should rename them to .jpg files once they start filtering those out...
2. They could detect http response headers that have a mime type the record industry doesn't like, such as a torrent file or mp3.
3. They could detect non-encrypted torrent traffic, or non-encrypted mp3s/etc in general. Assembling the packets would be hard, knowing they're being sent is probably not.
4. When "suspicious" traffic like any of the above is detected, they could probably start logging full packets and assemble full streams for further analysis - if you only do that on a small percentage of traffic and don't keep the captured packets around forever it may be practical.
Sure, all of the above will probably hassle lots of people who do nothing illegal, but I don't think the recording industry really cares about that. Don't want to prove your innocence? Well, just don't use bittorrent. Oh, we're not banning it - anybody can keep using it as long as they don't mind proving their innocence in court every six months (make no mistake, in the end the burden of proof will end up on the defendant since the industry will have some nebulous report output that has their name on a list).
As far as not being able to catch all of it - I don't know that they really care. If the ISPs give the music industry 1000 people to sue every year, or 1000 people who they can ban from the internet every year, that would be a victory for them. Once people are afraid to click on links lest they accidentally go to a "bad site" and end up with a ruined life then they will be happy. That's why I pretty-much don't browse the internet from work - with the laws in the US as they are all it takes is one misclick or typo and a zealous log monitor and you can be in VERY deep water.
Re:"Music and film companies" (Score:3, Insightful)
a) Whatever film and music companies want. When in doubt, record it. Until someone takes it and uses it, there won't be any harm in recording that movie.avi was sent from A to B. Huh? What is that "privacy" you're talking about?
b) Whoever inserts sufficient coins.
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, given how your rights are being violated by those industry thugs, and how your government will not protect you from the because they've been bought and paid for by the industry (which, by the way, is going to see megabucks in enforcing its own brand of private justice upon the netizens), isn't it high time to take the matter in your own hands?
Pass the word that for every user that is turned over to the industry mob, a price will be exacted: an office will be firebombed, an employee will be stabbed to death in a dark alley, an exec's family member will be kidnapped, tortured to death and the body never found. Have the message sent out that the streets are not safe anymore for these people. Yes, I know, you people in the UK have no firearms anymore but it only takes an IKEA steak knife to end someone's life and they would be begging for a bullet before the day's done.
If you really value "your rights online", understand one thing: those who want them taken away are powerful and will not stop at anything, they are winning and they know it; they see no resistance, they expect none. They are strangling the Internet by forcing the ISPs to cooperate through the use of their massive economic and legal power.
All you have against this is plain old violence. But you are cowardly geeks and will not do anything for fear of being pummeled.
What an irony if the loserboy nerds' playground, the Internet, will end up being saved by muscular, strong-willed jocks who will rip the industry goons' throats out and shit on their dead faces.
Re:a short explanation (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed. What's wrong with a $200 fine like you have with speeding? It isn't like people go flying down the streets at 200mph with impunity since they don't mind paying the fines 3 times a week. Really, even just a slap on the wrist will tend to moderate bad behavior when you're talking about stuff that isn't all that serious.
Suppose a 15-year-old downloads some songs - either they or their parents are at risk of a seriously damaged life (and I mean effects that will last decades even with bankruptcy "protection" / etc). If a 15-year-old stabs somebody with a knife the penalties are FAR less onerous. The parents won't be prosecuted at all, and the child will be tried as a minor and will have an expunged record in many jurisdictions. If the kid turns himself around he could still have a fairly normal life. A 15-year-old who commits homicide might end up in worse shape, although I suspect a 15-year-old rapist could do better. We're effectively placing teenagers downloading music in the same category as aggravated assault, rape, and murder. I looked up somebody I knew who was convicted (as an adult) of simple assault and associated minor crimes (first time conviction) and they paid $4k and a year's probation.
Blatent abuse of their power (Score:4, Insightful)
Ofcom are a telcoms regulator. Their job is to ensure competition in the telcoms sector in the UK. They were set up to keep the privatised BT under control to stop them abusing their dominance (they still own a lot of the UK's telephone network).
Their job is not to assist in copyright enforcement.
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:1, Insightful)
warez is a problem and the creators need to be compensated for their work just like everyone else
Yes, it takes a lot of effort to produce high quality warez.
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest flaw is not so much the difficulty in gathering evidence but the fact that in the end the copyright holder still needs to sue the accused individual.
The law in the UK makes it quite clear that they would need to sue the person who did the infringement. Good luck figuring out who that is in a household with more than one person. Being a civil matter they can't seize your PC or anything like that.
Even if they do somehow figure out who it is the chances are the evidence they have will not stand up in court. Even if it does they won't be able to ban people from the internet because it would infringe on their human rights. Without the internet you become cut off from your friends, unable to do your job, unable to use many mobile phones. The real kicker is that if you share a connection with someone else then they would loose their access too which is clearly unjust. No court would ever allow that.
Anyway, the current government said they would repeal. I know, manifesto promises... But at least they are in principal against it.
Only a matter of time... (Score:3, Insightful)
Infringing copyright is not illegal (Score:1, Insightful)
"Under plans drawn up by Ofcom, UK ISPs are going to draw up a list of those who infringe copyright, logging names and the number of times infringement took place."
That's fine. They can go ahead and log whatever they want on their network system, as long as they understand that there are circumstances where infringing copyright is illegal, such as when fair use applies, if the copyright holder says it's okay, etc. If they want to spend the money to log stuff, why not? But they've got to realize that simply logging the passage of copyrighted material over their network does not determine anything about the legality or illegality of that activity. "Infringe" != "guilty". Furthermore, from a technical perspective we all know that what they're going to get (IP addresses) will be pretty meaningless anyway. "Names", "those who infringe"? Don't make me laugh.
"Music and film companies will then be allowed access to the list, and be able to decide whether or not to take legal action."
That's not fine. Why should select copyright holders have the right to see such lists, and why music and film companies? I personally have loads of things on the web for which I have copyright -- pictures, text, program code, all sorts of things. In principle, why shouldn't *I* also have the ability to contact my ISP and ask them who is downloading my copyrighted stuff? Why should "music and film" get special attention? And if they do get special attention, why shouldn't *THEY* be the ones to pay for the logging costs?
They shouldn't have access to that information unless they get a court order on a case-by-case basis, just like I can't call up the phone company and ask them for the list of people who have been dialing 867-5309.
Re:Take a leaf from Gandhi's playbook (Score:2, Insightful)
Gandhi didn't "beat the Brits". The Brits saw that it was better for them to let him be and let go of India than antagonize the entire world opinion. Some decades earlier he would have been quietly disappeared. Nowadays he would be labelled an EEEVUL TERR-OW-RIST (GASP!) and be disappeared, deported or executed among the cheers of a pant-crapping populace. The media would be against him, so he would automatically lose.
And that's the situation now: the media will not come to your side, and should the Pirate Party manage to get some more seats, Big Money will simply buy the government into declaring the party illegal and to be dissolved by law. They have that power, and they're not afraid to use it. The politicians will never run away from the mighty industry: their billions are worth more than millions of citizens who can be safely ignored anyway. How did those protests against the war in Iraq go, by the way?
But try to jail an entire population, and they'll see.
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:2, Insightful)
How exactly is this supposed to work? (Score:3, Insightful)
How will ISPs be able to tell the difference between infringing and non infringing transfers of copyrighted material? Do they intend to log everything a user downloads and let the copyright holders decide for themselves which downloads and uploads are infringing and which are not? Considering the large number of legitimate downloads and uploads, this would doubtless be a huge privacy violation. Or perhaps they intend to flag only those works that are listed somewhere as "do not distribute except through [domain list]"? Such a system could easily be foiled by encryption and would increase ISP computing costs (to be passed on to customers) as every single download is checked for infringing content.
Any way you slice it, it's simply a bad idea.
Reality shear (Score:5, Insightful)
What we're seeing here are the results of reality shear (props to Neal Stephenson).
Historically, people had separate legal and ethical frameworks for managing tangible objects and for managing speech.
The basic rule for objects--respected by almost everyone--is don't take other people's objects.
The basic rule for speech--generally respected by democratic governments--is you can say what you want and you can hear what you want. You also have some privacy rights in your speech.
Now the internet has inextricably and irreversibly enmeshed these two very different frameworks. Things that used to be objects (CDs, DVDs, etc) can now be moved around by acts of speech (FTP, BitTorrent, etc.).
Copying infringes the content owners property rights, and they are enraged. They have responded in three ways.
Social : convince people that copying is theft, and hope that people's natural moral aversion to theft will dissuade them from copying things.
Technical: DRM
Legal : copyright enforcement; ISP regulation; 3-strikes, etc.
Socal doesn't work. People don't think that copying is theft (because it doesn't deprive the owner of a tangible object), and you can't rewrite people's ethical systems with a PR campaign, no matter how slick or how insistent.
Technical doesn't work. DRM doesn't stop pirates, it just annoys your paying customers.
Legal responses necessarily infringe people's conceptions of their own speech rights. What used to be a free and private act of sending and receiving signals over the internet is how subject to review, judgement, and punishment by the the government and corporations.
Just as you can't convince ordinary people that copying is theft, you can't convince ordinary people that speech acts are morally wrong. Not the kind of wrong that really guides people's actions. The kind they learned as children: don't hit, don't steal, don't lie.
So people see the legal responses of the content owners as grave infringements of their own legitimate speech rights. And they get enraged.
So we have two groups of people, each enraged, each convinced of their own right, and working from incompatible premises.
I don't know how we get past this.
Re:Reality shear (Score:3, Insightful)
You make good points but in the end it boils down to a simple fact: the populace is setting a trend, the technology is setting a trend, and for the first time in history the party that wants to maintain the status quo is actually succeeding.
They are turning the clock back, and moreover they've launched a fear-mongering campaign designed to scare the majority of people into compliance. It's like if in the beginning of the printed page era, printing presses had been banned, their possessions made into a crime and houses been subjected to periodical sweep searches for illegal equipment - all to keep the monks who copied books by hand into business.
If they succeed, it's over: the internet will become TV 2.0, and we'll be entering into an age of fear. Fear of doing the "wrong thing". Fear of being disconnected from a network on which our everyday lives will more and more depend, fear of being labelled as a "digital rights violator" and being denied employment, fear of simply thinking "wrong".
Moreover, privatization of justice must not be allowed to happen. It will become a rich source of revenue for greedy law firms who will blackmail citizens at will, knowing that they don't have enough money to fight but enough to pay up without a fuss.
And in the end, the connivence between government and industry must be broken at all costs. With one side holding the power to make even breathing illegal - and to ENFORCE such power - and the other wielding the economic power to buy any law they desider, the perfect tyranny is forming.
It must be fought at *ANY* price.
Re:Piracy clarification (Score:2, Insightful)
The creators don't need to be compensated for anything. If they can't come up with a business model that gives them money then they should change profession. It's not the responsibility of the general population to bend over and take it from abusive copyright holders, just because they "need" to be compensated.
Really, there are only two possible conclusions of this situation:
I prefer number 1, which one do you prefer?