The Pirates Will Always Win, Says UK ISP 241
TheEvilOverlord writes "The head of UK ISP TalkTalk, Charles Dunstone, has made the comment ahead of the communications minister's Digital Britain report that illegal downloading cannot be stopped. He said 'If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.' Instead he advocates allowing users 'to get content easily and cheaply.'"
They hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)
It is really refreshing to see someone, sometimes, who understands the situation and puts it down this clear in an unbiased manner.
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Charles Dunstone's wording is better when talking to politicians.
Politicians know that new problems will always arise, so it's not much of a deterrent. But they do NOT want to look stupid.
Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't stop copyright infringement but you can inhibit free culture.
Re:Yep you can stop P2P (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P. To me it's easy to spot P2P, the characteristics are: 1) Lots of connections to multiple other IPs 2) High upload AND download So if you see that, you can just leave the first 4 "conversations" that are downloading alone, and the first 2 "conversations" that are uploading, and squish down the rest till the first bunch are done. By conversation I mean IP to IP. Doesn't matter how many TCP/UDP connections between two IPs, it's still one "conversation".
1) What if I open 20 different websites in a few seconds because I happened upon a cool wikipedia article?
2)What if I'm chatting, uploading a video, opening websites and running a dev server? Many many connections.
3) How do you define "high" transfer? Firstly I can tell my torrent client to curb how fast it's going to just a few kilo per second. Secondly, I could be doing something funky, like, I dunno, running an ftp server to share photos and video between people in a design shop.
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Secondly, I could be doing something funky, like, I dunno, running an ftp server to share photos and video between people in a design shop.
Some ISP forbid that in their TOS, at least mine does. They have a clause that says this:
"The client can't use the Internet access service to connect to the Internet WWW, FTP, IRC, Chat, MUD, MOO or similar servers, also not being able to use the service to run bots."
I doubt this has ever been enforced and believe it is only there to route companies to their enterprise oriented sister company, but still it would give them grounds to terminate the service. Stupid, I know...
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So what you're suggest essentially equates to "residential users can load web and email in a rate-limited fashion, so only users with 'commercial' accounts can really use the Internet".
Couldn't P2P users couldn't simply buy the "commercial" plan you suggest that does not have these restrictions? And what's to stop P2P users from wrapping their connection requests in HTTP so it looks like web traffic -- then you couldn't simply dismiss high web usages as "doesn't look like P2P" as you do above.
Also, if these
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2) Once the P2P traffic starts looking like web traffic it stops being P2P, because it ends up with most peers leeching from a few "servers".
Normal web traffic:
Client downloads >> client uploads.
Many connections to few IPs.
P2P traffic:
Many connections to many IPs.
Downloads similar to uploads.
While 2 high speed connections to each IP works fine for HTTP, it doesn't work so well for bittorrent, since it relies on many
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I may, or may not, agree that this probably the case. However, you are automatically labeling all P2P as illegal.
Where am I labelling all P2P as illegal? (Score:2)
Where did I say P2P is illegal? Go read what I wrote. I don't think it's what you imagined I wrote - at least based on your reply.
Just because I show how it can be done does not mean I want it to be done, or say that it should be done. Or I'm labelling stuff as illegal.
What next you're going to say the person I was replying to wants t
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Ah, but the question that comes up is what right does the ISP have to inhibit traffic that isn't illegal? For the ISP to legally be able to throttle P2P traffic just because 'it *might* be used for illegal activity' sets a dangerous precedent, especially since often they describe their service plans as 'unlimited.' This is the entire crux of the argument over Net Neutrality; whether ISPs have the right to shape and manipulate t
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not everywhere in the world, sharing copyrighted material is illegal
Why is this idea that it is automatically illegal to share copyrighted material so prevalent?
It is copyright that underpins the GPL and ensures that we can safely share our source code yet have some protection that it not simply be misappropriated by others as their own.
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>>>Yes it's hard to stop copying, but it's not that difficult to seriously clamp down on P2P.
You're as much of an ass as RIAA. I can understand their desire to stop copying, but not to kill P2P. I download lots of illegal TV shows, yes, but also download some legitimate stuff like Linux, PS3 patches, WoW upgrades, and so on. In fact one time when I had a virus, it blocked all browser usage, so the ONLY way I could get the Virus killing software was via P2P. Without P2P I'd probably still be stu
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Are you also going to say the person I was replying to was an ass for saying: "You can't stop copyright infringement but you can inhibit free culture."
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You should go into politics, you have about the same level of understanding of the issues involved.
Making lots of connections is not illegal, and is in fact likely to become more and more commonplace as more and more services are developed where the combined uploading / downloading power of users is leveraged to provide decentralized and cheaper services. The only reason it is not more prevalent right now is because of retarded bandwidth restrictions on connections like ADSL. This will become a thing of t
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You seem to think that P2P is only used for copyright infringement. What gives someone the right to clamp down on me using bittorent to spread a Linux ISO? What gives them the right to interfere with apt-p2p? And if they're gong to scan and only interfere with copyright infringing materials, they'd be infringing on my privacy.
Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Interesting)
we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid.
or even worse, introduces new problems without solving the intended ones.
Trouble is, some of the new problems it introduces (namely overbearing policing of actions online, bordering on a police state) are not usually seen as problems by the politicians (at least those in power or which hope to achieve it soon), but rather goals that they date not describe publicly...
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Hardly "unbiased" it's and ISP, how can they sell their high speed if you have the choice of
1) paying the same price as the store for you download
or
2)go to prison for "illegal" downloading?
for 1) you pay your ISP on top of the "content" and you will not get 10 movies or what ever a month, too expensive.
and 2) not many people want to go in prison
so without "illegal" downloading and cheaper price for download than physical goods you do not need high bandwidth. You go to a ISP that offer 256k "basic DSL" and p
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Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)
Nuts to this argument. The packaging, extras, quality, and convenience that are offered as part of non-pirated media will keep the honest artists and publishers going strong.
The music industry as it exists today is horrifically ineffecient and has had to settle price-fixing litigation as a result. Even after this wake-up call, they refuse to lower their prices signficantly. Do you honestly believe that it costs more to produce a 45 minute CD than it does to produce a 90 minute DVD?
Finding decent quality rips and downloading them takes time and effort. A lot of people would rather not go through the hassle and instead just buy the product from a legitimate retailer if the prices weren't artificially twice as high as they ought to be. This is not a case of people not wanting professionally produced works or of people not being willing to buy them for a fair price. It is a case of the media industry refusing to sell things for a fair price.
When CDs came out, they were fifty to a hundred percent more expensive than vinyl, but we were all told that the prices would come down because CDs are cheaper to make than vinyl or cassettes. Guess what - that didn't happen. Instead, the music industry just decided to charge as much as they wanted to charge and dare us to find a way around them. We found a way around them, and now they're trying to lobby and sue the entire world into submission. This guy is not the first one to tell them there's no way it works and that they'd better just start making the adjustment now to a less-lavish lifestyle now that large parts of the contribution they used to make to music production and distribution are no longer needed.
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The companies did get sued y the U.S. government for price-fixing and forming an illegal cartel. My family (and millions of others) got a ~$50 refund as a result of that court decision.
In other news:
Charles Dunstone has meant an untimely death in a car accident in a tunnel. Witnesses report seeing a van drive-away with the word "RIA" on the side.
Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason CD prices and DVD prices are what they has virtually nothing to do with the cost of production. It's because they lie on what the companies believe to be the optimum point on the price/demand curve - i.e. the maximum they can get away with. This is the result of monpoly distribution - if you want a legitimate copy of a particular artist on a major label, or a particular film, you go to their media representative and pay their price, or you don't buy it at all.
If you look at the price breakdown of either media, the largest slices of the pie go to the retailer, the label, and the taxman, generally in that order. The artists get a very small percentage. Where you see price drops, thats due to competition between the retailers (i.e. supermarkets) reducing their cut, rather than the label taking a hit. Of course, the record labels have used it as justification to reduce the artist's cut, even though their own profit margins have increased due to the substantial falling cost of production. Pressing plants are a lot cheaper, and while a good studio engineer and producer still costs money, the equipment is a lot cheaper and time needed to run it through autotune has fallen.
Just take radio; payola is still in business, so labels literally pay to get their music on the air, as a promotional tool to drive album sales.
With DVDs, most of the costs of production have already been paid anyway; most films at least break even in the cinema, so DVD sales are just gravy, and they'll take as much as they can get away with. It's also why prices are so wildly different between regions; they price to what local demand will allow (prices are generally 50% higher in Europe compared to the US), and use DRM and import restrictions to prevent customers price shopping around.
So, the internet. The long tail has turned out to be somewhat of a myth - online sales have emphasised the marketshare of the top marketed artists, not flattened it. Many of the more obscure back catalogues don't sell anything at all, as generally teenagers want the latest new hit, not some crusty 20 year old album from a band they've never heard of.
What it has done though is freed the indies. OK, their share of the market might not be very big, but the market itself (if you include piracy) has grown quite a lot. indie music doesn't end up on piratebay much, and they can price themselves very low and still keep almost all the profit. Self-production is pretty cheap indeed now, and there's various indie distribution channels such as cdbaby that leave the artist with almost all the money. You might not make the megabucks of being a heavily marketed hit teen sensation, but it's still enough to make a decent living. Even major artists have twigged that once they're famous, if they can break free of the label they can really make a killing using the internet. Just look at radiohead.
So the record industry is being squeezed between two places. Internet distributed indies are showing how the internet can make you money not lose it; and piracy is utterly destroying their artificial distribution monopoly, and its monopoly prices. They had their chance to become the go-to online distributer buy buying napster and keeping it running, and blew it big time - now apple have that title. The film industry is not making the same mistake; with services like netflix, and video streaming via xbox live, or even just over cable they're trying to stay ahead of the curve by offering convenience for a price. If they can keep that price low enough, and get titles out fast enough not to drive the general public to piracy, they'll survive. Plus of course, they have the cinema chains to fall back on; anyone prepared to watch a cam rip wasn't likely a customer in the first place.
My maxim is always this - in a world where you can sell bottled water, you'll be able to sell packaged entertainment media. You might not make as money as you'd like, but give the customer a cheap, easy to use experience that 'just works', and you'll stay in business. Trea
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On what do you base this assertion?
More than what?
It looks like your sentence is crumbling upon itself.
It is about prices being unfair and it will continue to be about prices being unfair no matter how many times you or anyone says it isn't about prices being unfair. Millions of dollars of equipment and
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The only big artist I know offering a similar level of quality is Nine Inch Nails. Even the small labels have hardly realised that they can offer a better product than CD for cheaper and insist on using MP3/WMA etc.
The masses have never heard of FLAC files. Hence, any label that tries to sell them will run into issues like "why won't my iPod play this?" and "why won't WMP play this?" Noone's ever heard of VLC either, so don't get hopeful.
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That would be stealing, not copyright infringement, and it certainly causes more damages to more the store, manufacturer, and designer than downloading an mp3 causes to the artists.
Good for you! If you let me listen to 128k MP3s off the
Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:5, Insightful)
Things will even out, again thanks to technology...
A few years ago, high quality cameras and equipment for producing special effects cost huge sums of money, as did decent audio sequencing equipment... These days, a lot can be done very cheaply... Powerful computers with complex 3d modeling software are affordable and most special effects are computerized... Same for audio, a lot can and is done in software these days.
Big productions can be good, but they do come at a cost... Big name actors don't come cheap, and aren't necessarily any more talented... There are so many layers of management, corruption and greed that the production actually costs far more than it should.
Singers i think will do just fine, especially those who enjoy doing live shows... Technology is still no substitute for a live show. I guess other forms of live entertainment such as sports will also do very well. The effect it will have tho, is that being a singer will no longer be seen by people as an easy path to riches (as exemplified by all the talent shows on tv these days).. It will be seen as hard work, and only people who have a true passion for art will go for it.
There are also other avenues for actors, big name actors like patrick stewart do live plays, professional wrestling is also a form of acting, and the fame of being the star of popular (not necessarily profitable, most widely viewed is what matters) movies can propel people into other fields such as politics (see arnold schwarzenegger).
Incidentally, movies and music are already heavily used for advertising, not because they need the money to survive but because the producers are often greedy and only care about the money, not about the art.
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Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not the stars or the writers whose livelihoods are at risk. That's why it's the MPAA, the RIAA, and their ilk fighting piracy and not the screenwriters or actors or musicians (except for Lemmy, who noone ever thought was mentally stable). In fact, the actors and screenwriters have been in legal battles with the studios trying to get paid. Both the actual creators of the music and video and the actual consumers of it want to do the same thing, which is to cut the fat out of this market and thus reap the benefits of all the wonderful technology that made the major studios and labels unnecessary.
Your argument already applies to TV, radio, papers (Score:3, Interesting)
This is already the situation for TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers. In all of these media, the real customer is the advertiser who pays for access to the audience who watches/listens/reads for "free."
Now I won't say that's a good thing. I think it's terrible. In my opinion, quality is clearly higher when it is made directly for t
Myth of market forces and network TV (Score:3, Interesting)
First, if you prefer what the commercial networks produce that's fine by me. They have made lots of good TV shows. It's probably largely a matter of what you grew up with. I grew up with BBC shows rebroadcast in Canada, so prefer Doctor Who to Star Trek.
This is not actually what the main
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I submit that the best movies and TV series these days comes from BBC in the UK. That's a publicly funded organization, whose mandate is more-or-less to make quality entertainment, documentaries, and news coverage. Finland has a similar organization called YLE, I'm sure other contries ditto.
Ergo, I think you are absolutely correct: commercial movies and entertainment materials will be ads - they almost are, already. The non-commercial quality stuff will be publicly funded.
The only change will be that commer
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Or they will have to do more live performances.
I spend about £250 per year on concert tickets. I wouldn't consider spending anything like that amount on CDs.
Re:They hit the nail on the head (Score:4, Insightful)
This reproduction opens your exposure to a MUCH MUCH wider audience. You may lose some paying consumers as they never really wanted to pay the price, but buying your CD was just the easiest way to get your art. Now it isn't. However, people may be willing to 'donate' the $9.99 they would have paid in a store to those who produced such art.
This new distribution network for information is probably one of the biggest technological jumps in producing as it gives everyone who has an IP address the ability to distribute w/e it is they create. From tweeting to personal scientific research, everyone has the capacity to be a producer. This leads to tons of new competition against big-media, and as has been shown people will produce for nothing more than a few hits on their web site.
In summary, if you do art for a living, good luck. Everyone is creative, and now you have a bunch of competition lowering the value of what you produce.
Of course... (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as there is internet, there will be piracy. Plain n' simple.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm inclined to correct that, because long before the internet there was piracy too. I remember copying the new Guns n' Roses album (Use your Illusion I) and lots of other stuff to tape. Yeah, that was 1991 - internet did technically exist, but let's be realistic, it wasn't a common thing to see in a house hold.
So how about we say, "as long as art exists, there will be piracy"?
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
back then piracy was what people did when they made hundreds of dupes and sold them on a market stall. taping an album off your friend was just taping an album off your friend.
half of my dad's music collection was lp's and recorded tapes, half were dupes an blank tapes. the same went for everyone i knew. there was never even the inkling that there was something wrong with this.
now all of a sudden anyone who obtains dupes for free is a vicious evil greedy selfish thieving pirate and deserves to be financially ruined and/or imprisoned.
fucking absurd.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
So how about we say, "as long as art exists, there will be piracy"?
No. Not at all.
You can't pirate something which is freely given.
As long as copyright exists, there will be piracy.
If and when society discards the crutch of copyright in favor of modern means of funding creative endeavours, piracy will end.
Getting rid of copyright is the only way to end piracy.
Re:Of course... (Score:5, Insightful)
And making killing people legal is the only way to end murder....
Current copyright law is FUBAR, which doesn't mean we should get rid of copyright completely. Even a sane version of copyright will still be infrinded just as any other law out there, which doesn't mean that one shouldn't exist. Sane copyright laws should exist, however they should be beneficial to art and culture, not to the RIAA's pockets, and shouldn't thread down on almost everybody's and their wishes.
Currently many people want and have the opportunity to remix and share art, so they will do it. On the other hand, current copyright laws make almost everything you can do with a work illegal. It's simply inconsistent with reality.
P.S. What's this piracy are you all talking about? Why would you bring sea-robbers in a discussion about copyright?
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More sane copyright laws would massively reduce the level of infringement that occurs... If you make media easier and cheaper to obtain, while removing nasties such as DRM then people will have far less reason to infringe.
People do it because it's easier, substantially cheaper and often yields a superior and more usable product.
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Exactly how is morality implicated here? Even if one accepts the argument that it is immoral to use software without payment (which many do not), it seems from your post that your mother-in-law did pay for it and was simply inconvenienced by a "feature" of it (being required to find a license).
How exactly is it immoral to use a workaround to use software you paid for the privilege of using?
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I think the world is fucked up today not because of the law but because of the people's attitude towards the law. When there's something wrong, people demand a new law to fix it, and expect that the existence of the new rule will magically make the problem disappear.
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Advertising... It's already happening, how many movies have sponsors or product placements these days? Tho most of these movies have their traditional revenue streams as well, adding the advertising is pure greed to get a bit of extra cash. That's one method right there, as requested.
Modern technology makes production costs much cheaper than they used to be.
Live shows.
And many others..
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Works of art were copied long before your tape recorder existed. Hell, they were copied long before the printing press. I would guess that monks were copying lots of literary works by hand without any permission.
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Anywhere that mass duplicated media is sold for far less than it costs people to duplicate their own, there will be "copyright infringement"...
CDs were not commonly copied when computers didn't have enough disk space to store them, processing power to compress (mp3) them, and writable CDs cost as much as pre pressed ones containing music. Instead, people made lower quality copies onto audio cassette.
If you want to stop copyright infringement, make the originals better value for money such that it isn't viab
Re:Of course... (Score:4, Interesting)
but you were copying to crap cassette tapes. You didn't have digital audio tape. Why not? Cuz the RIAA won that one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Tape [wikipedia.org]
As long as the technology was localized, where they could attack a single format, target manufacturers, etc, they could keep it under their thumb. Things are, I think, fundamentally different now that digital copying and digital redistribution is ubiquitous.
You weren't making anything like the quality of copy that is possible now, and you had no way to anonymously dump a million crappy cassettes for other people to pick up, either.
Although technically you might have called what you were doing piracy, I think the Internet has fundamentally changed the game. He might have needed to say "piracy at this scale" vs. just piracy, but functionally it's just a minor quibble.
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Well of course it has fundamentally changed the game. Let's not forget that recording a radio/tv show onto tape (casette/video) -is- still perfectly legal. You -can- still borrow your neighbor's DVD, play it back, and record it to tape legally.
However, I have a sneaking suspicion (or call it insight from history) that if that were the -only- available method (lossy transfer, can only transfer slightly above real-time or else the recording gets too distorted for the tape technology, etc.), casual piracy wo
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Or, as long as copyright exists, there will be piracy.
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The record industry needs to get a better business model. They could have been making lots of money from Internet distribution if they hadn't adopted the 'kill the Internet' strategy. By coming u
Re: There will always be piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not so certain...
At some point, as with Prohibition in the States, the law may cave to reality at some point and we'll give up on the concept of owning strings of 1s and 0s.
Some other mechanism for paying creators will have to emerge - I think it'll end up being patrons for most things and live performances for others (like band tours and book readings), with a smattering of physical merchandise related to the original content.
Some things may end up being free, done as labours of love. It's not like th
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I don't think that's actually the industry's goal. (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe the industry knows that you cannot stop 100% of software piracy. I don't think that's their goal.
I remember back in 2000 when I went to my dentist. He sat me down and started making the usual small-talk, asked me where I worked, what I was majoring in in college, etc. When I told him I was a comp sci major, he brought up Napster. My dentist was using Napster. He went on and on about how computer illiterate he was, but he had no problems using Napster, and how he was finding songs on there from back when he was a kid, how he could find anything he wanted, and how simple it was to get whatever song he wanted...
I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.
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Lemming, Lemming, Lemming of the BDA!
Lemming, Lemming, Lemming of the BD- Lemming of the BD- Lemming of the BDA~!
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It was clear from the start of the Internet that free sharing can't be stopped. They need to accept it and move forward.
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Spotify is free.. in a way, better than napster was, except you don't keep the music. In an age of ubuquitous internet access keeping and storing music doesn't make a whole lot of sense anyway.
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I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.
That's what they like to think. But knowledge of how to use the latest piracy tools is just as unstoppable as the piracy itself. It is a variation on the same phenomenon that results in virus-construction-kits and script-kiddies.
They can only go so far to make piracy harder. What they can do without practical limit is to make alternatives to piracy easier. If typing a song name into google gets you 10 different places you can legitimately download it in various ways for various payments (outright purcha
Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go (Score:4, Insightful)
he had no problems using Napster, and how he was finding songs on there from back when he was a kid, how he could find anything he wanted, and how simple it was to get whatever song he wanted...
I believe the industry is just trying to make sure my dentist doesn't start downloading songs again.
Then the solution is not to sue the dentist, but to give him options to get the music he wants cheaply and easily. By cheaply, I don't mean the current prices that they are ripping me off with. 12p a track sounds reasonable. 10p to the artist, 1p to the publisher, and 1p to the distributer.
When they try and sell me a digital album for £8 - £10, I just give up. Do they think I am made of money? Why should I pay a large amount of money for something that costs them nothing to reproduce?
One big issue the industry will hit is that when people my age (late teens) get to the point when we are the dentist, we won't have any problem pirating things. We won't have any problems with computer illiteracy. We will know where to find the programs that encrypt the traffic. If we don't, we just ask a friend who does.
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Meh, its more like 1p to the artist 10p to the label and 1p to the distributor (to the latter if often rolled into the label).
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Napster was awesome, and I regret its passing. There is nothing like it today.
The great thing about Napster was that it let me find new music that I liked. I'd see a reference to a song in, say, a book; I'd search for it on Napster, download the track, and play it; and then, if I liked it, I could go back to the same place and see what else the guy had. I discovered They Might Be Giants that way; I downloaded Rock To Wind A String Around from a recommendation, then went back and dug out more of their trac
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I was going to offer a rebuttal with examples of how you're wrong, but actually you're right, back then you'd just easily search for a song, download it, it would instantly start (can't say the same for BitTorrent or eMule), using a mere 33.6 K modem with a 20 hours/month connection you still could get quite a lot, and you could go to chatrooms, actually make new friends and even see what they had. And if you downloaded porn, you'd even get the person you were downloading from telling you to get your hands
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I wouldn't be so sure :) In fact, I think that's exactly their goal and the only thing stopping them from going for it is that it would likely result in copyright law being abolished or at the very least thoroughly re-examined. They'll push it as far as they can, and they'll only stop pushing when it starts to hurt their bottom line.
Re:I don't think that's actually the industry's go (Score:2)
I believe the industry knows that you cannot stop 100% of software piracy. I don't think that's their goal.
Its also not the governments goal. Their goal is to use this as an excuse to get citizen support of reduction of our rights.
The ways in which TalkTalk gets it (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's a few snippets from the article, selected to show how TalkTalk gets it:
TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry. Dunstone said any technical measures to try and clamp down on sharers of copyrighted material would soon be bypassed by pirates.
"If people want to share content they will find another way to do it," [...] This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive."
TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.
Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...
Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.
(I'm not paid to say that)
Geographic Limitations (Score:2, Insightful)
Can anyone convince these TalkTalk guys to start a branch of their business in Austin, Texas? I know a number of current Time Warner Cable subscribers who would be eager to switch.
-- 77IM
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They may be the 2nd largest ISP in the country, mainly by buying up everyone else - OneTel, AOL, Tiscali etc, but I don't think they are particularly good as an ISP.
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TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.
Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...
Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.
(I'm not paid to say that)
You wouldn't be all that enthusiastic if you actually had ISP service from TalkTalk... (Like I have.)
They are 40x oversubscribed and proud of it - so my 8Mbit line only gets more than 500kbit between 2am and 4am.
Their support is notoriously bad - I had to talk to them about 12 times for half an hour each to get 110 quid back that they overbilled when I moved house.
They use the Internet Watch Foundation secret censorship list (Slashdot reported).
They suck as bad as any ISP, their only redeeming feature is
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FTTC is being tested by BT Wholesale, and later in the year there will be lots of ISPs providing it - many of them *much* better than TalkTalk.
What they forget to mention is that 40mb download (definately achievable if you're near enough your cabinet, as it's VDSL), but only a 2mb upload. With that level of disparity I wonder if the ACK packets will saturate the upstream before you hit 40mb anyway.
Also, they won't be increasing the monthly caps, so if you do stream that fast you're going to get burned anyw
Amazon! (Score:4, Interesting)
Amazon has 89 cent downloads. And .99 to 3.99 albums (one per day). Pirates should check out Amazon!!!
Here is what I've gotten (albums for less than $3.99) in 6 months:
$ ls -d */* |cat
Aerosmith/Big Ones
Alanis Morissette/Flavors Of Entanglement
Amy Grant/Heart In Motion
Bob Marley/Live At The Lyceum
Bon Jovi/Cross Road
Boston/Boston
Butch Walker/Sycamore Meadows
Cary Brothers/Who You Are
Creedence Clearwater Revival/Chronicle_ 20 Greatest Hits
Creed/Greatest Hits
David Bowie/Heroes
Eagles/One Of These Nights
Elvis Costello/My Aim Is True
Forgive Durden/Forgive Durden Presents Razia's Shadow_ A Musical
Heart/Make Me
Inxs/Kick
Jack's Mannequin/The Glass Passenger (Amazon Exclusive)
Jackson Browne/The Pretender
James Morrison/Songs For You, Truths For Me
Jimi Hendrix/Electric Ladyland
Joan Jett & The Blackhearts/I Love Rock N' Roll
Joe Bonamassa/The Ballad Of John Henry
Joshua Radin/Simple Times
Kate Voegele/A Fine Mess
Katy Perry/One Of The Boys
Led Zeppelin/Led Zeppelin
Madonna/Like A Virgin
MC5/Kick Out The Jams
Metric/Fantasies
Mieka Pauley/Elijah Drop Your Gun
Neil Diamond/Sweet Caroline
No Doubt/The Singles Collection
Pink Floyd/Animals
Prince/Purple Rain [Explicit]
Queen/News Of The World
Robin Trower/Bridge Of Sighs
Rod Stewart/The Definitive Rod Stewart
Seether/Finding Beauty In Negative Spaces Spaces (Bonus Track Version) - [Explicit]
Seth Walker/Leap Of Faith
Shiny Toy Guns/Major Tom
Soundgarden/Superunknown
The Apples In Stereo/New Magnetic Wonder
The Band/Greatest Hits
The Benjy Davis Project/Dust
The Go-Go's/Beauty And The Beat
The Pussycat Dolls/Doll Domination
The Weepies/Hideaway
The White Tie Affair/Walk This Way
The Who/Who Are You
U2/No Line On The Horizon
Van Halen/Van Halen
Van Halen/Van Halen II
Various Artists/Motown Number 1's Vol. 2
Whitesnake/Whitesnake
Yes/The Yes Album
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Here is what I've gotten (albums for less than $3.99) in 6 months:
Is this lossless encoding of 16-bit stereo 44.1KHz?
If not, then I still prefer a FLAC torrent.
For old time classics like these, a price of 0.49/track 1.99/album for lossless compression is about where the price needs to be to compete.
Re:Amazon! (Score:4, Interesting)
What's the incentive for pirates to look at amazon?
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If I got that right, that's 54 albums, so in cost that's $215 you've spent right there. I bet I could have the majority of that on a torrent in a day or two, for nothing.
What's the incentive for pirates to look at amazon?
Of course you could find all those via torrents -- with no guarantees that an album in a discography won't be incomplete, there won't be any pops, skips or warps in the song files and that your download won't stop at 98% for eternity. Part of the reason I quit pirating is because, just like getting anything else on the black market, the quality often left a lot to be desired.
Furthermore, Amazon has a massive catalog of great albums that aren't freely available as torrents. Some of them you'd be lucky even
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Re:Amazon! (Score:5, Insightful)
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So bloody seconded. Wanted to start clean with buying newest Keane "Perfect Symmetry" which I love so much and after that wanted to get "Ode to Mr Smith". They don't even care to inform you before registering your credit card data that it is for US ONLY.
Amazon, it is really Stupid, stupid, STUPID.
Re:Amazon! (Score:5, Funny)
He's right but... (Score:2)
In the end I guess it doesn't matter as long as he's on the sensible side but it would be nice to know he'll stay on the sensible side.
Part of me thinks (Score:2)
part of me thinks he's only saying that because Talk Talk is a cheap service and he'd easily change his mind if the government offered them a cheap or free solution to police their service.
And part of me thinks he's confident that if the government makes such an offer, he can show how it is an ineffective solution.
more subtle (Score:2)
It's not true, the news media isn't vulnerable to piracy. Well, obviously their product is ad supported, but only some small minority of "pirates" blocks the ads. An easy solution is : (1) change internet radio consist of separate mixing instructions and content, so the original song is immediately available to users, but (2) include banner as in the ogg/mp3 comments and get player to attempt to induce purchases. But there are numerous other frameworks where users "usually pay".
The Pirates Will Always Win... (Score:3, Funny)
Wow, progress being made, but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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If I had to look to the content creator in the eye every time I "pirated" something, I'd download the entire Metallica discography on a weekly basis and I don't even *like* Metallica.
Let's face it, pretty much everybody who downloads and quite a few of us who don't despise the RIAA and their so-called "artists", so appealing to people's consciences ain't gonna do much.
I didn't know TalkTalk were like this. (Score:2)
TRUE for almost all crime (Score:2)
The best the police can do is try and stay only a few steps away from the criminals, instead of miles. With computer crime FUGET ABOUT TIT!
Copy protection doesn't work. Never has, never will.
It used to take someone with GURU computer skills to be a pirate, now all it takes is a kid with access to the Internet.
The problem is not piracy, it is the distribution and cost of media (content not storage).
I would feel confident in saying that the majority of American homes have one, likely more, instances of pira
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Me. However, I would not be waiting on a download. It's called planning ahead. I dislike DVD's and CD's for other reasons:
1) I find them to be archaic. Music CD's hold 75 minutes of music. They get repetitive quickly and I'd have to bring a bunch of them with me everywhere I go. The whole "Album" thing is so outdated and more of a "tradition" than a necessity these days. Instead I prefer to just put
It's a sudden break of common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been screaming this line for years and years.
It would appear, I'm a fucking visionary.
Why do they put up so many barriers to buying their content?
Make it cheaper, make it easier to find and access. If I could buy your content online in HD format for what I think it's worth, then I would buy it instead of download it. You think it's worth more than it is. You strictly control access to it. You claim that your business is suffering. Adapt to the damn market.
And finally, make up your damn mind. Is it a product or a license? You can't have it both ways. If it's a product, I can understand that. Since downloads are not stealing and aren't a diminishment of your product, we can download anything we want.
If it's a license, then I have a right to download the mp3s for all the vinyl and CDs that I own. I also have a right to download any movies I own on vhs (which is a lot.)
If it's both, we can still download anything we want.
Copyright law was intended to prevent counterfeiting. Piracy isn't counterfeiting. Downloading isn't piracy. Downloading isn't counterfeiting.
The statutory damages were intended to prevent corporate counterfeiting. They were never intended to be applied to music fans.
the issue is control (Score:2)
Piracy is not what is stopping the music industry embracing online distribution. How could it possibly be worse than the existing position? What they are frightened of is their lack of control and competition. Piracy is making their existing business untenable, but competing with it will cause them all kinds of problems that they are used to having control over. What's Wall Mart going to do when the label is actively competing with it? What are their mega stars going to do when the labels no longer control
FINALLY someone seeing clearly! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly what he said:
TalkTalk has always maintained the defence that it is merely a broadband pipe and not an online policeman for the content industry.
Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please (Score:5, Insightful)
Making ISPs police the users and the content is as if they wanted to make BMW and others responsible for all the illegal activities people commit in their cars.
How come it's so hard to differentiate between offering access and being responsible for what people do with it?
Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please (Score:5, Funny)
I wish my ISP would filter out all the car analogies for me.
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In light of the waterpipe analogy I wanted to say something along those lines, I just didn't know the English word for the ones delivering the water to the people.
Re:Yep, now explain that to the politicians please (Score:5, Insightful)
The truth of the matter is that ISPs secretly love pirates- they pay the broadband bills. Modern piracy has been a big loss for the content industries and a big win for telecoms companies. Please don't pretend that Dunstone is resisting this because he is a huge fan of civil liberties, he is resisting this because it is good for his business.
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How can we take anything this man has to say seriously when he is balls deep in that dung heap?
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Re:Same goes for child porn (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post is clearly flamebait, but...
What the hell makes you think that a child's right to not be abused by a pervert is of equal or lesser importance than a corporation's desire to have a profit margin higher than any traditional industry?
These companies are greedy and want to produce infinite copies of something for virtually no money so that they can sell them at 99% profit, and gouge consumers for multiple copies of the same thing. Do these companies have more "right" to this level of profit than a kid does to not be abused?
Why should companies in markets like this make such massive profit margins when anyone else selling food, physical goods or services etc must make do with a few percent?
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Didn't iTunes go DRM free for all their music?
Or is there still music on iTunes thats DRM protected?