BPI Defends Anti-File-Sharing Partnership With Virgin Media 98
MrSteveSD writes "The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has responded to criticism by Bill Thomson over its collusion with Virgin Media in targeting UK file sharers. BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor personally wrote to the BBC to set things straight, and he asserts that 'it's Mr Thompson, rather than music companies, who is stuck in the past.' Of course, Virgin Media customers who download music and TV legally often find their connections being turned down to unusable speeds due to Virgin's aggressive throttling policy."
Mike also points out a blog entry that describes one of the letters received by a Virgin Media customer. In the letter were suggestions regarding the customer's router settings and anti-virus software.
The "letter" (Score:5, Insightful)
"But, when I do, it does mean that traffic from other machines could be dropping out through my pipe because my laptopâ(TM)s configured as a Tor exit."
Sorry guy, but you are responsible for any traffic that comes thru your connection. its part of the contract. You violate the contract you can be cut off. Take it like a man.
We can debate all day long if there is such a thing as IP rights, if throttling is ok or the letters are proper ( i happen to think they should go suck an egg personally and don't believe in IP rights ) but using the argument 'it wasn't my PC' is pretty flimsy when you are running a proxy drain point intentionally.
Yet another reason we should all be using freenet.. you cant pin the 'act' down on anyone in particular. All they can do is bitch that you are using too much bandwidth.
Re:Defence (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:thats what happens when (Score:5, Insightful)
you people are letting that happen in u.s.
lobbyists, corporate interests, 'donations' to senators, and they produce bills for their masters.
you need to take the reins back. and not listen to 'business should be free' bullshit from conservatives. for the freedom they speak of is only freedom for them to do whatever they want (to the extent of implanting workers with rfid chips for sake of 'security' - until california senate whacked them down) and get on top of the pile. theres no tolerance for competition in their view of life. so its pointless to lend an ear to them.
you need a new 'new deal' president like FDR. one seems to be coming up. grab him.
Faulty assumption (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I suppose deaf people spend even less in buying music. The error, as always, is assuming buying would be an option for people who download illegally.
I recently downloaded an old movie from a torrent. I would have paid, maybe $1, for that movie. It's on sale at Amazon for $14.95. If I didn't have the option of an illegal download, I simply wouldn't have watched it. There's no way I'll pay $15 for something that's worth at most $1 to me.
What truly undermines that market aren't illegal downloads. Until the industry learns how to calculate pricing according to market rules, they'll have to live with it.
Tor Node: Who is liable ? (Score:4, Insightful)
He's running a net anonymizer - and he was logged as having downloaded a Winehouse song. He says he ain't done it, but maybe someone on the net running Tor did - maybe he doesn't quite get it ?
If I lend my house to some idiot, and there is a report of someone having brought stolen property into my house, that doesn't make me a thief, but it doesn't mean the report is baseless either.
Edmund
It doesn't matter really .... (Score:5, Insightful)
They did not invest in infrastructure of the future at any point in the past. That is to say that they have never done what was needed to build a network that would support heavy usage.
An example of this is the cable company that I have to use (there are no options. Satellite is not a viable option for broadband IMO). I have three cable boxes on digital cable. If I rent a movie in the living room I can't move to the bedroom to watch it without having to pay twice. This means there is NO infrastructure built to know I have two boxes and which they are so that I can rent a movie once and watch anywhere in the house. This is not just ignorant of the capabilities of technology, it is blatantly ignoring them at the cost of value to the consumer.
There are a few people that would defend this situation with various excuses, but they won't work IMO because of the complaints that ISPs make regarding network usage, and the balance of guilt when you see what they were given as incentives to build a viable, usable network already.
Their business plan has been designed to steal as much money from the user's pockets and the government as possible. They have done nothing less.
This business of throttling traffic because of bandwidth usage is criminal in nature. If you rented a car to drive to your aunt's house but found that you weren't able to drive the expected speeds on all roads because of crippling by the rental company, would you sue? would you rent from them again? would you complain to the appropriate regulatory agency?
Go ahead, tell me about the fine print in the contract. meh. I pay for xyz MBits/second and I have more than reasonable expectation that this is what I'll be able to get regardless of protocol, end destination, or content.
The fact that I can't and that ISPs are throttling the service that I paid for is criminal. Their business model is broken. period. They have oversold their network to steal money from you and I, and now they got caught. It is convenient for them to blame the BPI and **AA, and there may indeed be collusion, but the fact remains that they did NOT use the money they were given to produce a usable network and are now trying, AGAIN, to get the users or government to pay them extra to build one.
Why, yes, I do have a solution. I'm glad you asked. The last mile should never belong to a private enterprise. It should belong to co-operatives or the local council or some group that is directly responsible to the local public. By responsible, I mean by order of a vote, they can be replaced and the performance of the cooperative is judged on whether they keep their jobs in a way similar to how AT&T boardmembers are responsible to the share holders.
Yes, all that AT&T, Virgin, Verizon, Comcast et all can do is provide network services. They can only hook up their big pipes to the local WAN and provide backbone network services. You can subscribe to their email etc. or you can subscribe to someone else's email and home page portal. You would be able to access Google via any of them network service packages. Like emergency services, email services would be possible without having long distance.
Once network services are separated from last mile and provisioning services, their worth will be seen in the correct light, and all this throttling will become a thing of the past, a memory of bad times when criminals ran the board meetings and made marketing decisions for cable companies.
When consumers have the right to choose and can do so with a phone call, then the market place will work as it should.
In short, Fuck Virgin! and all their warlord comrades around the world.
Re:thats what happens when (Score:5, Insightful)
One great example is Boeing. They were allowed to buy up all the other airframe manufacturers in the US because they claimed they couldn't compete with Airbus otherwise. Boeing got fat and happy, getting all the big contracts, until Airbus ate their lunch by building better planes. Boeing stopped trying so hard because they had no domestic competition, and now they can't compete with Airbus.
The government of the United States has been completely co-opted by big business. We now have a person running for president (the old white guy) whose staff is entirely made up of paid representatives of big business, who have been paying his way for his entire 30-year political career. Some of them are also paid representatives of other countries, including Iran.
BPI has no customers. We are just consumers. (Score:4, Insightful)
In TFA, the BPI is talking about "consumers" when talking about people that are enjoying music and other recordings, but "customers" when they are talking about the ISP. BPI doesn't have customers, obviously. So no wonder they don't care about what the people want. And the people don't care about the record companies either: they are just consumers, supposed to just consume whatever is recorded.
Not that I fully agree with the original column, the reply by PBI is particularly sickening. The attitude they present is so high-hearted, as if they are God and the consumers exist only to serve them. I do understand the record companies have a big problem on their hand, but the last thing any reasonable business should do is sue their own customers. Oh well, they don't have customers, there are just consumers. And who cares about consumers, because they will consume anyway.
I've said it before... (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, by the way, there's also Azureus Vuze, among others, who rely on filesharing to work, even as they allow for-pay downloads.
And two, if it can't be addressed through new models alone, it can't be addressed -- again, without significant collateral damage.
Re:Let the industry die (Score:2, Insightful)
Those two things are not unconnected. A lot of Indie films get made (financed) because of the profits of block busters. Hollywood is very good at farming new talent through Indie films. This isn't to say that no Indie films would get made, but I bet that several of your favorite films would not have.
Be thankful for the sheep-masses, they help fund the good stuff you and I like.
Re:difference ? (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:It doesn't matter really .... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Blog stupidity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Faulty assumption (Score:3, Insightful)
The implicit agreement of the market is something to the effect of "if you don't like the price, don't buy it". But an assumption built into "don't buy it" is that you're not going to have the same benefits as having bought it, either. The high ground here is to just not watch the movie.
But you did, because you were willing to spend the time to get it illegally. Let's say it was $1. Does that mean that the movie should be sold for $1? Only if that would cause about 14X more people to buy it, and that is also a faulty assumption. Here's a fairly sound assumption: if it was trivially easy for everyone to get a free version that was just as good as the pay version, there would be no pay version. Luckily for us, it takes some extra effort to get a free version and it's usually not quite as good, thus enough people keep paying into the system.
Incidentally, in some ways the free version is superior to the pay versions as they stand now: instant gratification (as compared to amazon), easier storage (as compared to a DVD), more flexible playback (as compared to iTunes), etc. And I think these things are as much to blame for piracy as the near-zero-cost.
In the end, I don't believe it is right to download stuff you haven't paid for, though I don't think it cuts into sales nearly as much as businesses claim. It's still fairly amoral, by which I mean it eventually has some negative indirect effects.
I do think that if some company got the instant gratification, storage, quality, flexibility, and pricing right, they'd be able to re-capture a lot of the pirate market and make at least a bit more money than they do now by whining. So I don't have a lot of sympathy either.
Cheers
Re:Faulty assumption (Score:3, Insightful)
How much is a judge going to award against you when you show that for those 10's of movies on your hard drives you have DVDs telling you your licensed to view the contents?
YMMV, the law isn't this logical, IA-most-definitely-NAL
The real meat of this is here: (Score:3, Insightful)
they chose not to and still refuse to do so.
Lies by omission are still lies. Keep lying to everyone, but nobody outside your payrolls is buying it.
Re:difference ? (Score:2, Insightful)
In light of that, I would expect the connection to be just as deep as is surmised be previous posters.
Re:It doesn't matter really .... (Score:1, Insightful)