Britain's solution: off with their connections!

Across the pond in the UK, the government is considering proposals from copyright industry representatives that punishes offenders from a different angle. As part of the upcoming Digital Economy bill, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills has announced it is considering following France's lead and implementing a law which would see suspected illegal file-sharers given two written warnings before having their Internet connection suspended or cut off.

The French plan, incidentally, was derailed by European Parliament, who ruled 407-57 that cutting off access to the Internet was effectively a violation of the fundamental rights of European citizens.

So it remains to be seen how Britain will deal with the flood of complaints the move is sure to inspire. For starters, the law could be seen to be punishing mainly the lowest-level file sharers, as folks who are seriously into file sharing have already worked out how to encrypt the streams of data, spoof their IP addresses and generally make themselves very difficult to detect.

Then there's the issue that when one Internet connection is cut off, more than just one person could be affected. Entire families could be dropped off the Web because Junior has downloaded a few movies. Worse still, big time pirates could conceivably find ways to use innocent third parties' connections to go about their business, and get them banned.

linky

isp's are saying its not up to them to police the internet, so i don't think it'll hold up. just like it didn't 10 years ago when file sharing started

I thought the 3 strikes idea had been dropped here?

Either way, it'll never take off. Piracy is a civil matter, not a criminal matter, so there's no real hope of enforcing anything, They're just using bullying tactics to try to scare people out of doing what comes naturally these days.

Also, I imagine an ISP would have a case that the govt. is trying to control their customer base by arbitrarily removing customers, not to mention the massive cost and bandwidth bottlenecks inflicted by trying to police that much data, that'll push customers away too.

Also Usenet + SSL= piracy to your heart's content with few logs and little risk.

as a small time dance music producer i should be dead against this, especially as djs are using more and more mp3s and cdr, but as someone who wants to listen to music cheap, i don't know what to think

Bizarrely Virgin Media are doing the 3 strikes thing already!!!!

Oh FFS when are these record/movie industry morons just going to stop making such a fuss and playing the victim?

Do they really believe that people who habitually illegally download, specially the hardcore, do it as an alternative to buying? That if they could eliminate piracy instantly, all these people would rush out in droves to spend thousands on CDs/DVDs? Aaarrghhhh!! Wake up!!

It seems they must obtain statistics of numbers of illegally downloaded files, multiply that by some average amount per song/film to arrive at some rediculously huge number, and then shout to the world that that is what is stolen from the very tables of hard working artists/producers/execs etc etc. Of course in reality these sums are a fiction that was never their money in the first place.

The only money they are losing is the billions they are wasting trying to stop what will never be stopped. Piracy is a sub-culture that always has and always will exist. They'd do well to accept their sales are what they are and largely unaffected by the prevalence of piracy.

All imho of course.

Liam

[Edited on 28/8/09 by Liam]

Doesn't help that they killed services like allofmp3, which while not quite legal, were a bloody great model for people who don't mind paying a bit, but refuse to pay CD prices for overcompressed, low quality music that's been ruined even more by the loudness wars.

Thing is how easy is it to catch someone who downloads the occasional (say one a month) album?

quote:

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Originally posted by Ninehigh
Thing is how easy is it to catch someone who downloads the occasional (say one a month) album?

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I've heard of people that have been under investigation for downloading kiddie porn cos they have unsecured networks, so it is possible somehow..

I think it's only if large amounts show up regularly, but then again how to distinguish what it is...

Presumably that might be through tagged files? Unsecured P2P networks are pretty open to automated scanning by ISPs. Wouldn't be that difficult if you're only scanning a few specific files...

Either way, if it was ruled a violation of the fundamental rights of European citizens, then the government here in Britain would just ignore that anyway.
Similar to forcing you to have a TV license I think.