UK ISP Says No To Music Industry Pressure

siloko sends us to the BBC for the story of one ISP standing up to the music industry. (But note that this ISP is one of the ones said to have worked with Phorm on plans to track customers' surfing.) "The head of one of Britain's biggest internet providers has criticized the music industry for demanding that he act against pirates. Charles Dunstone of Carphone Warehouse, which runs the TalkTalk broadband service, is refusing. He said it is not his job to be an internet policeman."

Re:Love the guilt laden language they use...

[Anonymous Coward]

EU law takes precendence over UK law if the UK does not reject a particular directive. There's currently no EU law that would force any country to carry out the kind of monitoring that the BPI are looking for.

That said, they do have the politicians from both of the major parties in their pocket and currently involved in a competition to see who can out-do each other in terms of linking file-sharing to some "despicable act".

Talk Talk: bit torrent throttlers

[sjwest]

If you read the customers of talk talk tales of woe site http://talktalkhell.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com] you will note that wow players (uses b/t) are penalised since they use b/t and are so deemed bit bandwidth eaters and bad for his business. Dunstones attempts at running an isp mean that most consider his first enterprise talk talk a failure, his next venture was to buy aol in the uk.

Phorm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth noting that Carphone warehouse/ Talk Talk are the only ISP to confirm a true opt-out from Phorms profiling. Phorm claim that the cookie based opt-out is sufficient but that prevents users receiving targeted ads, it doesn't affect the **cough** unlawful interception **cough** profiling. As for their position on disconnecting P2P users, kudos.

Perhaps if the BPI and friends weren't so stupid and greedy, this situation would have never arisen? There is a discussion to be had concerning renumeration for "artists" or anyone who traditionally relies on royalties as a major part of their income. I see no reason middlemen like the BPI, RIAA and friends should be relevant to that discussion.

Re:Neutrality?

[makomk]

To be fair, at least they were pretty quick to say they'd be including an opt-out that didn't send all your traffic through Phorm's equipment after it became clear how controversial it would be (unlike the other two ISPs). I don't think they're exactly going to be making any lists of P2P-friendly ISPs any time soon either, though.

Re:Talk Talk: bit torrent throttlers

[Tony Hoyle]

They're a bottom end ISP. The kind of people who are their target customers surf a couple of times a week and maybe send email... hence they're extremely cheap, but their service is crap when compared to others.

They're going for publicity here - good for them. I don't think they're really standing up to anything.. ISPs are reluctant to do the kind of thing the BPI is asking without a court order anyway, so it's all noise right now.

If the government tried to legislate that ISPs are effectively censors of the internet there would be a bit of a stink. Not least from the ISPs themselves who could suddenly become liable if illegal downloads/kiddie porn/etc. were found on their networks.. at the moment they're no more liable than the post office or british telecom are for these things.

Re:Amazed

[timftbf]

Actually, credit where credit's due, she asked the people operating the social-networking sites popular with children what could be done to keep paedophiles off those sites. They offered the facility to ban people from registering with black-listed email addresses. ISPs are simply not in the loop.

The weaker part is getting the paedophiles[0] to register their email addresses, in the same way as they have to register their physical address. We all know it's easy to create new email addresses, but the point here is that for said paedophile, creating / using a new email address becomes an offense (or at least a cause for investigation) in itself, in the same way that registering one postal address and being found to be living at another would be. The assumption is that they wouldn't need a new non-registered address unless they were planning to do something wrong.

It's not a perfect analogy, but it seems to me a pretty reasonable attempt to do something, involving the right people - users of web sites and admins of web sites - without stomping all over everyone else's use of the Internet.

[0] For whatever definition of that is in the measures. Not all paedophiles are on the Sex Offenders Register, and not everyone on the Sex Offenders Register is a paedophile.

Re:Eh, whatever.

[badfish99]

All UK ISPs already filter for child porn; the government forced them to all "voluntarily" install blocking software by threatening to make it mandatory if they did not.
Of course, the (secret) list of blocked sites, maintained by an organisation called the IWF [iwf.org.uk], now includes other things as well as child porn, such as "racial abuse". If the government decided to have a crackdown on file sharing they could easily force ISPs to add other sites, such as (for example) the Pirate Bay, to the banned list.

Re:Love the guilt laden language they use...

[Psiren]

and the cigarette companies should "educate" smokers that they're probably going to die prematurely.

Well over here in the UK, they do just that. Granted they've been forced to by government legislation, but nevertheless, you can't buy a packet of cigarettes with a message on it saying you're going to die horribly, or something similar.

Re:Eh, whatever.

[peterbye]

Do you have a reference for that?
My isp http://www.aaisp.net.uk/ [aaisp.net.uk] has not been forced by the government to do any such thing.

Re:Eh, whatever.

[janrinok]

I'm afraid I must disagree. If what you say is true, then it would be impossible for any individual to access banned sites and then to download the material which they contain. The number of cases in the UK where individuals have been taken to court for having material that contravenes some law or other (e.g. terrorist material, child pornography etc) which has been downloaded from the internet suggests that such blocking is not taking place. I admit that the government would probably carry out such blocking if it could but there is nothing to suggest that it is currently taking place on a widespread scale.

The link that you gave does not state that any blocking is taking place, it simply serves as a focus where complaints can be sent. In fact, the page showing the 'relationship' between the IWF and the police is blank! Similarly, the page showing the relationship with the Government simply gives information on those politicians who support the IWF. As far as I understand it, there is no legal remit for ISPs to monitor the content of your internet traffic in the UK. It can be done for individual cases where the police or relevant agency can obtain a warrant suitably authorised under current legal and judicial rules.

Re:Love the guilt laden language they use...

[Laukei]

EU law overrides any laws of the country. It's the priniciple of supremacy [civitas.org.uk] of the EU. If a member state contravenes EU law it can be punished with fines.

Oh, and IANAL.