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)
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Why are you upset? (Score:2)
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And if people are compelled to pay? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is a fantastic idea. They should be very careful to spell out the terms, but provided that it's not an exhorbitant amount per person (say, 5 cents per month), think about the flip side of that deal: for say 5 cents per person per month (or whatever nominal fee they work out), copyright holders are paid. That means that all people are free to copy as much music as they want. No more need for sites like pirate bay to operate in the shadows.
I mean, surely the copyright holders don't want to be paid and give nothing in return at all. Right? Guys? ...guys?
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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.
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Oh, hm. Well, whatever...long as I get to download all the free music I want. The rest of it sounds like SEP to me.
(Of course, in case you missed it, I was being sarcastic in my original post above. Just for the record, I think it's a terrible idea to mandate the state require people support any particular business model just because it happens to be otherwise unsupported. I have lots of terrible business ideas too, but I don't see anyone rushing to my aid with a bailout.)
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My sarcasm sensor is flickering at a sub-alarm level here.
I don't know about you, but I would really strongly object to payin
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making toll road owners responsible monitoring drivers carrying contraband.
LS
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Besides, do you mean to imply that on principle, people should be allowed to drive drunk even if it were technically possible to prevent it?
End copyright infringement ? (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean they can donate to organisations that want to end copyright altogether ?
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Uh oh... (Score:3, Interesting)
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I wouldn't say this is a good idea: when you read about what's going on between internet radio and Soundexchange, you see how this idea will work in practice. But it's an idea...
Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Informative)
I can't imagine that it would go better here, where the government and courts are even more beholden to the interests of the media conglomerates.
Re:Uh oh... (Score:5, Informative)
Sweden actually has the same kind of organization ( http://www.copyswede.se/default.asp?ML=10622 [copyswede.se] )... I think it even applies to hard drives!
That's also a pretty crappy idea, because what happens...? Well, since we became members of the EU, making online orders from outside the country became much cheaper, and I can just order 50 DVD-R's in bulk from Denmark for a cheaper price than in Sweden due to these fees, even including the shipping charges. All they're really achieving with these leives is risking making Swedish businesses lose profits due to these uncertain reports of how much the piracy even impact sales. I guess the fallacy being that Sweden is alone in the world, and they can do whatever they wish without impact to the economy.
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Canada for instance has a surcharge on blank CDs that goes to the media trade groups. From what I can tell very little of it goes to pay the artists, and pretty much none goes to the independent labels.
I think you're right on this one - the blank cassette/CD/media levy has been a schmozzle from an artist's perspective.
As I understand it, however, it has been the legal toe-hold that has made downloading of any material from a p2p network *not* illegal in Canada, so it has had an unintended side-effect that has helped avoid the RIAA lawsuit debacle up here. See the link below for background.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5121479.html [com.com]
Make telephone companies responsible then... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Actually they do. It's one of the jobs of Postal Inspectors. There's a whole body of law specifically dealing with crimes involving the postal system and their enforcement. In some counties, the communications infrastructure, as well as roads and railroads are owned and run by the government. In the US, the Post Office is mandated in the Constitution and was a cabinet level department of the US Government.
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Now wait...
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It's not really new nor absurd. Governments have been using business to enforce all sorts of laws. Tax laws, such as withholding, immigration laws, such as requiring businesses to verify the identity of job applicants and employees, all sorts of anti-terrorism regulations for transportation businesses. So big deal, what's one more kind of business getting forced into being a policer of government edicts, in this case, for enforcing special
Ludicrous? (Score:2)
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Or was that sarcasm? It's hard to tell.
That's making legitimate internet users pay (Score:3, Insightful)
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The law abiding always end up footing the bill for those who choose to ignore various laws. We pay higher prices for products and services whose manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers pass the costs of losses to crime and the security apparatus they use to reduce such losses onto us; we pay in th
Ludicrous? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's kind of sad to see people attach spit words to anything they disagree with, without telling us why...
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It's not quite analogous, but I don't think it'd be a terrible thing if the cost to maintain a driver's license floated to include all costs of enforcement of driving laws and damages from that (that arn't covered by tickets and lawsuits), so those of us who choose not to drive can opt out of tha
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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 p
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True enough, as long as I get to choose who I am dependent on and who on me. Dependence on the state is a forced, one way relationship. I can no longer choose.
(....it's politically difficult to convince people
The biggest fallacious assumption made by public transit advocates is that many, if not most people's time isn't worth much. We used to live in the SF Bay area, and even there, what was a 25 mi
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Your public transit argument is actual
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You pay for the greater share price of your Corporate Overlords, of course. The same as you always have.
language (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:language + ass-covering = zero (Score:1)
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.
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> Hey, why not? It's exactly the same. They mustn't look what's inside and are liable for it.
Because it is not the same.
"The proposal does NOT entail that ISPs will be called upon to hunt down file-sharers."
They are required to look. It only says they are, if the proof (which is hard) is shown to them and they refuse to take action. A better (but silly and impractical) example is asking the postal dept to block m
False perceptions (Score:2)
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Not only The Pirate Party is positive to our liberal file sharing laws, but also many youth organizations affiliated with our political parties. Heck, even some of our actual political parties have been cautiously positive (to not offende the IFPI etc too much, I suppose) to our existing laws.
So even if currently the Swedish gov
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Belgian isp lost similar lawsuit (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sorry for my poor knowledge of English and i am currently fortifying my house out of fear for the grammar nazi's.
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.
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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.
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Of course since the introduction of NAT everything has become more complicated, so now P2P applications have to punch through the NAT to connect to an other host, something which application didn't need to do before NAT arrived.
So if they follow the letter of the law/judge, then that ISP has to turn of their internet completely.
Can P2P be made to look like "something else"? (Score:2)
I'm betting it can - easily!
Is not e-mail basicly peer to peer? (Score:4, Insightful)
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So, it's more like P-2-S-2-S-2-P.
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Amazing how legislators are always the last people to understand a technology and its impact on society.
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Luckily, nobody can ever fail at that.
(FYI: there is no such language)
The perfect temporary solution: (Score:5, Insightful)
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They can't stop file sharing, but they can make it so expensive, students won't be able to afford it...
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Wrong. Encrypted P2P networks a-la freenet are private, i.e. they could be swapping porn, linux iso's or doing live teleconferencing, MMORPG games, etc. They'd need a warrant to ask the users what kind of encrypted info they're sharing.
In other words, ISPs only are held accountable for VERIFIED copyrighted file sharing. The lesser the detected copyrighted works traffic, the lesser the fine.
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Encryption, my friends. Govt can't censor what they can't read.
Why not? They can simply censor everything they can't read, i.e. block all encrypted traffic except SSL connections to known businesses like banks, etc.
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Which will make more than evident how far a police government can go. Maybe then people will begin to understand the need for a new government.
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Ultimately, the slippery slope was started when freedom of speech became second fiddle to copyright infringement.
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Once upon a time, you could. See American Revolution [wikipedia.org], as an example from a country of the distant past.
CC.
fee to be shared out among copyright holders (Score:2, Interesting)
might be the most sensible way to deal with this whole mess. And not just in sweden.
Why not put in systems that measure, based on statistical sampling at some representative
routers, a rough idea of the number of copies of content item x,y, or z that are making their
way across the net at any given moment, then average that out over a week, say, and use
that figure to determine the weekly share of the copyright tax.
This is
Also, it would be opt-in (Score:1)
say by providing a copy of it with a claim to copyright attached to a central web service for receiving
those claims. There would have to be a good way of verifying the copyright claims, and a dispute
resolution mechanism built in.
If you did not opt your content in, nothing would track its travels in some kind of disturbing orwellian fashion.
Users of such content would also be made aware of the general
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That would make spam really lucrative: Write copyrighted text, register it with the system, and then send it by mail to everyone. This guarantees that you'll get hits on every rout
Re:spammers would collect the fee (Score:1)
in order to get paid.
They receive enough money (Score:2)
Yes, it is a good idea and it does work. The thing is that in Sweden, we already have these fees in place. We have Svenska Filminstitutet [www.sfi.se], Film i Väst [filmivast.se], subsidies from the EU, Kulturrådet [kulturradet.se] and dozens of other regional and national institutions in place to support movie makers, music artists and writers. We pay lots of money in
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.
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Ah, yeah? Friends sharing a song they enjoy is cause for police involvement now?
The problem with the Copyright Cartel's rhetoric is that there is so much of it. Even if most of it is rejected as obvious bullshit, some of it apparently sticks.
Copyright infringement is not theft. It's breaking the law, but it's really quite innocuous. In fact, it is not even completely clear that anyone is harmed by it at all. We cert
isp's pay... (Score:1)
I would imagine consumer internet connections costs in Sweden go pretty similarly as they do here in Finland (apart from the huge government su
Very odd... (Score:2)
^- I'm just happy I'm a customer on this ISP.
The purposed "law" sounds completely arbitrary, and out of touch with the modern society... People are doing lots of other things than sharing P2P, and t
With out an OS (Score:1)
Maybe BestBuy should require people to take polygraph testes to see if they intend to download files from the internet when they go there to purchase a computer/cd writer or a bigger hard drive. Then refuse to sell them the equipment if they fail.
If all music/movies were free then th
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Do they attach the wires to your balls.
LOL
Swedish ! take up action !!! (Score:2)
Enough of copyright (Score:2)
Am I the only one who's getting a little sick of copyright holders constantly trying to enforce their will on manufacturers, legislators, service providers, and the general public ?
In fact I'm starting to get sick of the whole concept of copyright itself, and so I ask: do we really need it ? If the "artists" can't make millions from a single recording, and if no one can build a multibillion dollar company around a singing and dancing cartoon mouse, do we really lose anything important ? And more important
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The way to deal with copyright is to watermark everything. That way, if it gets loose onto the Internet, the copyright owner knows who to contact. Let P2P thrive, let me view my content on any player I wish to use, and sue the bigges
Sweden (Score:1)
2. Post on Slashdot
3. ???
4. Profit!
Seriously - there seem to be a lot of stories from Sweden at the moment? I'm beginning to think that Lichtenstein and Andorra are not pulling their weight.
Bjork Bjork Bjork? (Score:1)
Why is it ludicrous? (Score:2)
Now it's an unfortunate fact about human nature that if you don't punish people for crime they tend to do it.
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You could even change it a bit. Only charge the tax on Internet access exceeding a certain speed. Moms and pops don't need 9Mbps down--let's face it, 99% of reasons for a home user to get that speed is to pirate.
I'll take my cut thanks (Score:2)
What is more important.. (Score:2)
nothing ludicrous about a broadband royalty fee (Score:3, Interesting)
How exactly is that ludicrous? If you paid a 15-20% surcharge on your ISP fee to download anything and everything anytime and the money went to artists on a straight popularity basis (easily monitored at the network level), all kinds of good things would happen.
The devil is in the details. A good system would render record labels and TV networks obsolete so they would fight it. But it's a great solution.
The EFF has suggested something similar, a $5/month Voluntary Collective Licensing Fee [eff.org]. Making it voluntary is fantasy (and I say that as one of a handful of people who actually gave money to FairTunes each time I made an MP3 for friends). Making it a percentage of broadband cost (so someone on DSL pays less than broadband, and dial-up less still) is fairer than the subscription model Rick Rubin proposes in the NYTimes article, and making it compulsory makes DRM irrelevant.
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The "but I only use teh Intartubes for e-mail/blogging/exchanging scientific data sets" is a tiny minority, and well, tough! I guarantee in a democracy "Your ISP bill just went up 15% but you can download anything and everything anytime (and artists get paid)" would be an overwhelmingly popular solution for consumers, voters, artists, and a few enlightened media
Fishy (Score:1)
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.
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No difference.
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So y