ISPs Dragged Into Swedish File Sharing Battle 120
paulraps writes "Swedish internet service providers may soon be required by law to take greater responsibility for unlawful file-sharing. Although rejecting the ludicrous idea of an overarching broadband fee which would be shared out among copyright holders, a government report published on Monday called for internet providers to be 'bound to contribute to bringing all copyright infringement to an end'. Under the proposal, copyright holders whose material is being shared illegally would be entitled to compensation from ISPs which did not ban users. Needless to say, the country's ISPs are not happy."
Isn't this akin to... (Score:5, Insightful)
Make telephone companies responsible then... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's making legitimate internet users pay (Score:3, Insightful)
Ludicrous? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's kind of sad to see people attach spit words to anything they disagree with, without telling us why...
language (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, I feel instantly safe! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, why not? It's exactly the same. They mustn't look what's inside and are liable for it.
Re:False perceptions (Score:2, Insightful)
ssh remote login will stop working (Score:3, Insightful)
This is very dangerous for freedom on the 'net. The only way to "ban P2P traffic" effectively is to ban all traffic that can not be verified to be something else.
This means for example that ISPs would have to restrict ssh remote login to hosts on a whitelist.
The perfect temporary solution: (Score:5, Insightful)
It's just a silly debate (Score:3, Insightful)
- For starters, where do you draw the line? Is downloading one song enough?
- Who is going to pay for all the incredible amount of data processing?
- How often can one be 100% certain that it is in fact piracy?
- How are they going to disprove that an ISP isn't doing what's expected?
- How are the ISP:s expected to keep up with the fast pace of anti-anti piracy prevention methods?
- Why is the ISP supposed to police its customers, when it is clearly the police dep's job?
- How is this filter going to work and how will they make sure that the customer's privacy rights are preserved?
Good luck. It's probably a media stunt by some lawyer with a fat paycheck from RIAA.
Is not e-mail basicly peer to peer? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Isn't this akin to... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:ssh remote login will stop working (Score:2, Insightful)
This is what all governments want, anyway. After all, who wants the common person to be able to instantly communicate his ideas to any amount of people in the world? That would be DANGEROUS.
Re:Make telephone companies responsible then... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. How are they even going to successfully monitor their activity and avoid getting busted for it? I would not be a happy ISP CEO if I actually tried stopping this, much to my customers' fury, and still got busted, which will most likely happen if they just look at the customers. There's always some group of people doing illegal activities on their network.
2. If successful (which I doubt this even can be) -- won't their customers just risk opting for a cheaper, lower bandwidth offer? The ISP's risk losing tremendous amounts of revenue. In extension, ISP's could then try to raise the fees, but that could make Sweden regress its Internet presence and have a harder time convincing users of adopting high bandwidth services like Internet TV. I don't really think I'd like to see that sort of progress. I think that piracy is helping out a lot in increasing high bandwidth demand, and that can indirectly benefit other, more clean, service providers.
Re:Obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, exactly right. That is all they are doing: they don't host the offending files. If you want to control what they are indexing, well, now you're talking censorship to one degree or another. In some countries that would be fine, in others it will run into trouble. Google is an index, and it points to a lot of content that many would find objectionable: at what point do you decide to tell Google, "Sorry, you can't index this stuff." That's already happening in places like China, and frankly I don't want to see it happen here.
You decide which is worse: copyright infringement or the loss of the greatest medium for communication ever invented. Because that's where this is going.
Re:Make telephone companies responsible then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ludicrous? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Uh oh... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ludicrous? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why many who feel like that, would like nothing better than to herd EVERYONE as much as possible into the large, crowded ghettos otherwise known as big cities. There it is much easier to make people utterly dependent on Government. Try having a decent vegetable garden when living in a high rise of a large city. Of course, there it is also possible to force people to be dependent on public transit, which is cost effective in such places.
Re:And if people are compelled to pay? (Score:2, Insightful)
You meant **IA and its ilk will be paid; thousands of independent artists won't, and their own artists will almost not.
Bad idea, if only that the wrong people get the money.