UK's 'Three Strikes' Piracy Measures Published 150
judgecorp writes "UK regulator Ofcom has published details of plans to disconnect illegal file-sharers. It is the 'three strikes' policy which ISPs unsuccessfully appealed against, and it requires ISPs to keep a list of persistent copyright infringers (identified, as usual, by their IP address). ISPs will have to send monthly warning letters to those who infringe above a certain threshold. If a user gets three letters within a single year, the ISP must hand anonymised details to the copyright owner, who can apply for a court order to obtain the infringer's identity (or at least, an identity associated with that IP address)."
£20 to appeal (Score:5, Informative)
Yes thats right, even though it is only an accusation, it will cost the innocent £20 to deny the accusation! telegraph article [telegraph.co.uk]
Guilty until you pay up (Score:5, Informative)
I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!
From the BBC News [bbc.co.uk]:
So now you're automatically assumed guilty .. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!
Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Onion Routing (Score:4, Informative)
If your computer is setup to act as a node on Tor or another onion routing technology and a pirate uses your computer as a exit node, the pirate's traffic would look like your traffic to your ISP..
Indeed it would, but when your traffic terminates in China, or some other place, who gives a fuck?
Note: I don't condone using bittorrent thru Tor either. there are similarly designed protocols for that, like I2P.
Someone using BitTorrent over Tor network wouldn't show traffic going through you to China (or wherever the Tor user resides). An ISP monitoring your traffic would see BitTorrent requests originate at your IP address, and BitTorrent responses terminate at your IP address, simple as that.
When you are a Tor exit node and someone makes a BitTorrent request through you, the actual request to the BitTorrent cloud is made by you (i.e., originates at your IP address) and the response is delivered to you (i.e., terminates at your IP address). At this point, your Tor software running on your system would encapsulate the response that you received and forward it through the Tor network back towards the actual requester.
Now, depending on whether or not your ISP is monitoring Tor traffic (or all traffic) as opposed to specifically BitTorrent traffic, they may very well be able to see a correlation between your receiving some packet (remember, Tor can be obfuscated) and making a BitTorrent request, and, likewise, you receiving a BitTorrent response and sending some packet. If they're smart and if they care to, they may even put two and two together and realize that you're just acting as a proxy for someone else. However, that's on them.
Makes running a Tor exit node as a method of plausible deniability seem pretty appealing though :)
Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend. (Score:5, Informative)
The thing that stops this is the proposed claim process, which is insanely complex. It requires copyright holders to accurately predict in advance how many claims they will make, take part in a blind dutch auction over how much they are willing to pay per claim, and the cost of claiming more than doubles if you are claiming against someone connected to the 4th or 5th biggest ISP.
The does not to allow small copyright holders such as independent musicians, journalists or photographers to pursue actions. Ofcom's consultation shows that the only people pointing this out and insisting that this would be wrong were the Pirate Party UK â" we don't like the DEAct, but if we are going to have it, we want it to be fair.
Re:Guilty until you pay up (Score:4, Informative)
I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!
From the BBC News [bbc.co.uk]:
So now you're automatically assumed guilty .. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!
No. After the three warnings, if you don't appeal to any of the warnings, your details are passed to the copyright owners who may choose to take legal action through the courts. The £20 (refundable if you win) is for if you want to avoid having to bother with due process; it isn't part of the due process which is still there. This looks to me to be a big improvement over the existing system where the first you might hear of copyright infringement accusations is a court summons.
Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend. (Score:4, Informative)
The kind of argument made by someone who understands the difference between criminal [wikipedia.org] , reckless [wikipedia.org] act likely to lead a nasty manslaughter [wikipedia.org], and an act that is simply a civil [wikipedia.org] tort [wikipedia.org], likely to only incur statutory damages [wikipedia.org]?
Of course, this "civil-vs-criminal law" being one of the most common distinctions made in all jurisprudence, I'm sure you already knew this... but i never like to accuse random people of willfully lying to blur a political issue, in the hopes of serving some hypothetical self-interest. So I'll assume this is a freak case of ignorance instead. Links to easily cure yourself of this unfortunate condition have been provided.