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)."
Please, Please, Please start a trend. (Score:5, Interesting)
I really, really want it to become a trend to deliberately download red-flagged content from IP addresses other than your own. Do it over poorly-secured Wi-Fi, or public access or whatever, but do it to prove a point.
That seems like the natural activist thing to do.
Seems fair (Score:2, Interesting)
There might be some traps I didn't notice but this seems fair to me. It notifies the accused, forbids the ISPs from sharing the data they collected of them and has due process. Altough if they really want people to respect copyright laws they should concentrate on fixing them first.
Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend. (Score:2, Interesting)
You don't have a right to break the laws when you're driving down the road, and if you do it too often, you lose the right to drive. I fail to see how the internet is any different..... in fact I'd say the net is LESS important than a car.
It's a trap alright (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:VPNs (Score:5, Interesting)
This 3-strike deal is just the latest in a series of dumb decisions by OfCom. They are also planning to turn-off the FM radio band.
No firm date has been set, but they proposed 2018 in their meeting minutes, after which listeners will be dependent upon the barely-functional MP2 DAB (digital audio broadcast). The switchoff of analog television was also handled poorly by these bureaucrats with many citizens unable to receive the new digital channels.
Back door revenue stream? (Score:3, Interesting)
The sliding window approach allows ISPs to harvest just enough infringers to keep big content supplied with a steady stream of lawsuits with ready-made payouts. Not that big content is suffering in any measurable way from copyright infringement to begin with. The problem with these approaches is that they falsely assume that every download is another lost sales opportunity. The flaw in their reasoning here is that people's pockets don't suddenly get deeper as soon as they have no choice but to pay for content...they just view less content.
Re:The pirates are not concerned. (Score:4, Interesting)
Even outside of that, we have old trusty, sneakernet [wikipedia.org].
I'm a part of an unofficial club that meets every couple weeks explicitly for the purposes of sharing media with each other. A handful of laptops and external hard drives and we're sharing hundreds of gigabytes of shit in a fraction of the time it would take for us all to torrent it ourselves. We've even somewhat specialized our focus to make it more efficient; I'm the music guy, we've got our movie and TV show guy, our game guy, our PC software guy, our Apple software guy (who's also getting tons of eBooks/eMagazines and shit for us now as well).
Until we get a fully P2P internet, it's the best option for us to minimize risk.
Very telling (Score:5, Interesting)
It's interesting when you think about it. The media producers are pushing for the so-called pirates to be punished by removing their ability to pirate or assist others in doing so by uploading.
If they were truly motivated purely by profit, wouldn't they be pushing instead for massive civil penalties, or perhaps some sort of tax?
Banning pirates from the internet does little to increase profits even IF you follow MAFIAA logic that every single pirated file equates to one "stolen" sale, because where are people most likely to buy music? Online.
This leads to several possible conclusions (ranked in order of probability (by my analysis), descending):
1) The entire music/film industry is basically panicking and is unable to think straight due to the massive upheavals caused by the Internet, and they're lashing out like a scared animal.
2) They actually do not care about pure profits, but are instead concerned primarily with maintaining control of distribution, making this as much an attack on iTunes as The Pirate Bay.
3) They are fully aware of how ineffective this will be at curbing piracy, and plan to use this as a stepping-stone to something bigger and worse ("Look, even with the Three Strikes law, we're still making only billions of dollars per minute, we need a law that taxes people by the megabyte to use the Internet because they might use it for PIRACY!").
4) They're just a pawn in someone else's Evil Master Plan.
Re:£20 to appeal (Score:1, Interesting)
If your appeal is successful, that fund is refunded to you.
Re:Please, Please, Please start a trend. (Score:4, Interesting)