The entertainment’s industry isn’t P2P-friendly to say the least, and their lobbying goes far. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/30/cnvirgin130.xml
UK broadband provider Virgin Media says they’ll be the first UK ISP to voluntarily track their users’ pirated material transfers, and will terminate the accounts of repeat offenders. The “three strikes” policy, which could go live in a few months, would suspend user accounts on a second offense and terminate their connections on the third warning. The British government earlier this year said they’d create mandatory ISP piracy laws unless providers came to voluntary agreements with the entertainment industry by April,
This is a clear invasion of privacy and takes away freedom of speech, to many people died over the last few hundred years for “freedom” rights, this just throws it away.
So the UK’s fastest broadband and only cable supplier,is going to terminate paying customers internet,so they go to their competitors ? I know Richard Branson is an oddball,but unless this is made law,I will believe it when I see it.
I haven’t read the article but I would think that Virgin Media are more concerned with the bandwidth used by those downloading whatever it is they think is pirated, than any moral/legal concern.
A game i play called “World of Warcraft” releases its patches through p2p which is perfectly legitimate, but still they will have to invade my privacy too see what i have downloaded…
The bottom line is ISPs already successfully throttle p2p downloads to keep bandwidth under control which i think is fair considering it doesen’t not invade my privacy.
I pay nearly £100 a month to virgin media for there package, i guess they feel it would be better for me and others like to to give that £1200 a year to BT.
Hell i remember making a recording of a TV program a few years back and then showing a friend of mine, maybe they should come around my house and take my car since it was used to travel to my friends house (clearly aiding and abetting)
As you may be able to Tell from my above comments, I’m not to amused.
How can they know what you are downloading is illegal? Seems to me it would take a lot of processing power to match signatures of what belongs to these british record labels.
Or more likely what they are going to do is just call all P2P traffic Piracy.
It would require a huge amount of processing power, to sniff every packet downloaded and cobble them all together to find what was downloaded.
Unless they are going to use a broader brush and just consider IPs as likely/containing illegal content. Even that would be difficult with p2p swapping between dynamically the assigned IPs of users sharing files. This would tar the next to be assigned that IP as a pirate, I can just imigin the legal minefield.
The whole thing can be done much easier, just make up a white list and a blacklist, Get your blacklist and white list govt stamped and you are where entertainment industry want to take us all. At the moment they still have to go into all the trouble of uploading faked (malware ridden) content to frustrate the possible perpetrators.
The other way to do it is asking all to pay an additional fee on top of what they pay their local ISP to make up for piracy losses to the content industry, this is an actual proposal of Warner Bros.
But basically yes it will be alot of work, but when an ISP is told by the government they have to then they will have no choice (England has a firm “can’t be bothered” attitude so none will fight against it), the government plan on passing laws to force ISPs to track the content downloaded/viewed by customers by April 2009 if I’m not mistaken (i could be wrong) which is IMO invasion of privacy.
I can just imigin the legal minefield.
The idea of this is to bypass courts, so effectively the BPI will controll who is “guilty”, which IMO is wrong since it will just turn into a sort of “witch hunt” of the modern ages, maybe a little melodramatic, but things always have a habit of getting out of control in life :-\