Verizon To Throttle Pirates' Bandwidth

another random user sends this excerpt from the BBC: "U.S. net firm Verizon has declared war on illegal downloaders, or pirates, who use technologies such as BitTorrent to steal copyrighted material. Verizon has said it will first warn repeat offenders by email and voicemail. Then it will restrict or 'throttle' their internet connection speeds. Time Warner Cable, another U.S. internet service provider pledging to tackle piracy, says it will use pop-up warnings to deter repeat offenders. After that it will restrict subscribers' web browsing activities by redirecting them to a landing page. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which campaigns for digital freedom, is highly critical of the imminent campaign, saying: 'Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers.' ISPs will be acting as 'Hollywood's private enforcement arm,' it added."

Re:Makes sense for them.

[Anonymous Coward]

3. Reduces their profit margin as people move away from these services to ones that don't give a fuck whats on the wire.
4. Makes them liable for all the other 'bad' things their customers do. They have displayed they DO have the level of control needed to stop spam or other crap comming from their customers machines.

what are the chances...

[Steven_M_Campbell]

What are the chances that this will simply be used to target anyone who uses the bandwidth they paid for?

Re:I've got a way around this

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not, but it would be obvious from usage pattern exactly what is going on. It would quickly be shut down.

Re:I've got a way around this

[Anonymous Coward]

Or starts with NET and ends with a FLIX? Seriously, its 7 bucks. At some point its going to be easier and cheaper to pay the content creators than to avoid being caught by the ip police.

Re:I've got a way around this

[fredprado]

Not when the IP vendors do not sell what you want to buy...

How do they differentiate non-infringing files?

[kawabago]

We have seen all kinds of examples of some entity claiming ownership of a work they don't in fact own. What protects consumers from spurious claims? Good will of the entertainment industry? They don't have any. This kind of practice will make consumers turn against the entertainment industry and demand it be muzzled.

Re:It's an elegant solution

[miltonw]

No, it damn well isn't elegant. The fact that you think so simply means that you haven't a bloody clue what you're talking about.

Those URLs of "known piracy sites" are the same URLs of sites that host significant amounts of perfectly legal content.

There are two scenarios that Verizon can follow:
- Invade everyone's privacy and inspect everything being downloaded, or
- Assume everyone who downloads more than a "certain amount" is "a pirate -- even when they aren't.

Whichever scenario Verizon chooses, it will be very wrong.

No, not "elegant" at all. Really, really bad. You really haven't a clue what you are talking about.

Re:I've got a way around this

[datapharmer]

as someone who runs deep packet inspection on a few networks I can tell you a) it is pretty easy to tell what shouldn't be passed through and b) a little sand in the underwear bites - Throwing in some junk data in the right ratio can wreak havoc on an ssl encapsulated torrent connection. Send all you want over ssl but it will be throttled and so much garbage by the end you won't want to waste your time after a few days. I can also tell you it is pretty easy to block this even without deep packet inspection. Hint: dns tends to be required to get your torrent information in the first place, and it is pretty easy to send you a response from my dns server that looks like a response from your manually configured dns server. You won't know the difference and will just assume thepiratebay is down.

Re:Makes sense for them.

[Attila Dimedici]

What regulation that allowed viable competition was removed? As far as I am aware, both cable providers and telephone providers have been regulated as local monopolies for almost as long as the former has existed and since before I was born for the latter. Unless someone else is allowed to run the cabling/fiber there can be no real competition. The fact that there are no more than two options just about everywhere is a product of regulation, not a product of the removal of regulation.

Re:Why I stick with my local telco VDSL

[Mitreya]

End result, data caps and packet snooping so it's a pain in the ass to download ANY large amount of data because we're automatically assumed to be dirty pirates.

I feel your pain, but don't be deluded into thinking that pirates cause data caps

Verizon doesn't want to upgrade their network and supply the bandwidth they actually sold. Overselling is lucrative -- hence the data caps

Also, many providers are paving the way for selling their own streaming services (or partnering with one). Hence, it is nice to have strict caps and then say "oh, and OUR service does not count towards your cap".

People should buy digital content now that it is sometimes available in a convenient form. But don't think for a second that doing so will stop all this bandwidth cap bullshit. We need competition -- having multiple alternative ISP services available would be a good start. Over last decade, I usually had 1 choice available to me, sometimes 2 (cable and DSL).