UK P2P Fight Brewing 244
forunder writes "Zeropaid has been covering a very hot topic going on in the UK right now. The government, prodded by entertainment lobbyists, has gotten six UK ISPs to agree to help police piracy on their networks. A leaked government letter says they are looking to cut internet piracy by 80%. In the same week Microsoft released a study which found that some 54% of UK file sharers are between 11-16. The UK's Green Party has already spoken up, calling the new policies an 'Attack on Civil Liberties.'"
It's all a PR excercise by the ISPs (Score:2, Interesting)
Keep your torrenting to a reasonable level and ignore any complains from the ISP (and maybe install peerguardian or something). They really don't give a damn what you do.
Re:It's all a PR excercise by the ISPs (Score:2, Interesting)
Protect yourself (Score:3, Interesting)
On another point, I think its naive to think that if your ISP send you one of these "informative" letters that they wont pass on your personal details to the BPI, who identified your IP address in the first place. The next logical step after is you end up in court fighting a copyright infringement case against the BPI or one of its "partners".
Re:Unfortunately (Score:3, Interesting)
THE ARTICLE HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THE BRITISH GOVERNMENT IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM APART FROM THE ARTICLE ABOUT THE LEAKED GOVERNMENT LETTER
There - fixed it for you. Geez - I know this is /. but at least RTFS before commenting about TFA. Then again, you got modded insightful - by the same mods - so I don't know what you are complaining about.
Error in summary (Score:4, Interesting)
The summary says that 54% of filesharers are children, when the linked article says that in fact 54% of children are filesharers, which is actually much more interesting.
Re:It's summer, and Slashdot is trolling (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How to cut internet piracy by 80% (Score:3, Interesting)
'So any Beethoven CD you can find in the shops today, or any Beethoven record your grandparents might have in the attack, is still subject to copyright, and that copyright will outlast you just as much as Beethoven's would, were he still alive.'
In the UK this isn't true about the records in the attic, unless you have young grandparents (see comment above). It _might_ also not be true about the CD if the original recording was made >50 years ago - see 'COPYRIGHT IN REMASTERED SOUND RECORDINGS' here:
http://www.copyright.mediarights.co.uk/ [mediarights.co.uk]
Re:It's summer, and Slashdot is trolling (Score:3, Interesting)
Please. These are no "wild shots in the dark". If they were, they wouldn't work and wouldn't hold up in courts. As we've seen from cases in the USA and elsewhere, this is done algorithmically first by analyzing the shape of traffic to see that it is indeed p2p (by which ports it uses,etc) and then it uses a hash lookup table to identify known infringing files.
You need to pay closer to attention to the court documents that NewYorkCountryLawyer has excerpted here and on his blog. Your description of how the MAFIAA goes about suing people is FAR from accurate. For one, they do not use any traffic analysis - they just connect to bittorrent trackers like thepiratebay and/or user's own machines running limewire, etc. And two, they don't use file hashes, they just use keywords in filenames without even downloading the file themselves to check content. Yeah, I didn't believe it either until he posted some 'expert' testimony by one of the MAFIAA's 'expert' witnesses describing the process they use about a year ago.
The only reason their shenanigans have held up in court is that the relatively few people who have actually taken the gambit (the choice they offer is pay ~$2K now or they will take you to court for at least $10K and most people take the $2K fine rather than spend more than $2K on a lawyer and risk losing) have not had enough money or connections to bring in real experts to decimate the MAFIAA's piss-poor evidence collection.
If i don't, I have a mechanism to change this, which is to elect people who will change laws in ways that are amenable to me.
You must be awfully rich to be able to afford that kind of influence, the MAFIAA has contributed over 26 million dollars to politicians so far this year. [opensecrets.org]