UK File-Sharing Laws Unenforceable On Mobile Networks 130
superglaze writes "UK mobile broadband providers currently have no way of telling which subscribers are file-sharing which copyrighted content, ZDNet UK reports. This represents something of a problem for new laws that have been proposed to crack down on unlawful file-sharing. According to the article, databases (tracking IP address mappings) could be built to make it possible to identify what specific users are downloading, but the industry is loathe to fund this sort of project itself. Also, as an analyst points out in the piece, users of prepaid phone cards are mostly anonymous in the UK, which creates another challenge for the government's plans. And if that isn't enough, connection-sharing apps like JoikuBoost would make identification pretty much impossible anyway."
Wow (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'm sorry, I don't speak astromech.
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I guess I'm not sure what you want to talk to my printer about. Maybe you're alluding to some story I haven't haerd, but taking it at face value...
1) The network traffic associated with a printer doesn't look much like the network traffic associated with file-sharing clients.
2) I rarely print mp3's.
3) Which networks' admins is this going to confuse, anyway? The LAN admin can see the network address of the printer and sift that out as noise pretty easily. If the LAN is connected (say, via a NAT router) to
Re:Wow (Score:4, Informative)
I guess I'm not sure what you want to talk to my printer about. Maybe you're alluding to some story I haven't haerd
If I may, I believe this is about some of the DMCA takedown notices received by University of Washington from the MPAA in the summer of 2008. A few of them were directed at laser printers because researchers at the university pulled some tricks with IP addresses in an attempt to prove that, no, they really don't tell you about identity and, no, the MPAA doesn't care.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/05/the-inexact-science-behind-dmca-takedown-notices/ [nytimes.com]
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/05/entertainment-indust-1.html [boingboing.net]
I don't know if any changes have been made in response to the embarrassment, nor whether the embarrassment has even been acknowledged as such.
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Aha. Thanks for the clarification.
FWIW, I'm not sure that a historically-inept attempt to identify file-sharers on a network implies that such identification is never possible on any network, but it does make for a good sound bite :)
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Of Course... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Of Course... (Score:5, Funny)
end up paying rather more than retail for them...
You can't put a price on freedom!
Yes You Can (Score:1)
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You can't put a price on freedom!
Yes you can -- Three hundred dollars. [slashdot.org]
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Back in the 1980s people used to charge their long-distance calls for downloading pirated games to other people's calling cards. Perhaps something similar is being done with downloading over cellular dialup/phones?
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Now. What about in 5 years' time?
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Not really. For 35 pounds, which is the price of 5 albums on itunes, you can get a 7GB package, with which you can download significantly more than 5 albums worth of MP3s, or even FLAC. 35 pounds is the price of about 3 DVDs - again, 7GB lets you download a lot more more than three films in decent quality Xvid.
It's not cost effective to download complete blue-ray rips over mobile broadband right now; but downloading files over pay-as-you go broadband is not a particularly silly idea.
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For a few dollars a month you can get a proxy IP service in another country and download as much as you like.
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Not really. For 35 pounds, which is the price of 5 albums on itunes, you can get a 7GB package
For a few dollars a month you can get a proxy IP service in another country and download as much as you like.
...plus the cost of your domestic broadband connection (in the UK, typically £15-£30 depending on your preference for caps and customer service, so overall not too dissimilar).
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That's really expensive. Three will offer 15GB/pm for £15/pm. So in movie terms that is three (H264 compressed) blue ray rips at decent quality. I have no idea how expensive blue ray movies are in the UK, but I'm guessing that is a win purely on the monetary scale. Of course, it requires a 24-month contract and there is no guarantee they will still be unable to trace IPs in two years time.
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That's on contract, so they have your name and address courtesy of the credit check they did when you signed up.
Although I'm not sure on the progress on NuLabs proposal for everyone to have to hand over verified ID to get a pre-pay phone - this difference may not last for long (think of the terrorists!)
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True - but Three check identification when you sign up for pay as you go anyway. Or at least, they did when I bought my sim. So they still know who you are.
The claim in the article is that they can't associate IP addresses with customer details. But I wouldn't actually believe that for a second. Not least because all of these prepay mobile offers have hard usage caps, and they must have some way of tracking usage even if they complain publicly that they can't.
Not necessarily (Score:2)
It depends on where you live. Here in Denmark, pay-by-the-MB mobile broadband is virtually extinct. Between the various providers, there are 1GB, 2GB, 5GB, 10GB, and unlimited monthly plans, with speeds varying from 1 mbit to 16 mbit. If you go over your limit, most providers just stick you in a low priority queue, so you just get a slower connection.
I've got an unlimited 7 mbit plan, and it is definitely fast enough to run BitTorrent on it. I get at least 4 mbit whenever I'm anywhere near a cell tower.
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</sarcasm>
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Or it would go the other way (Score:5, Insightful)
Sharing your connection using Joiku with a file-sharing felon might tar you with the same brush. 3 strikes and you're all out.
Due process? We flushed that crap down the toilet years ago.
Re:Or it would go the other way (Score:4, Insightful)
All bow to the outdated business model that is the music business of the 50-90s.
Profits from this *MUST* be protected at the cost of freedom, privacy and progress. /sarcasm (in case of "whoosh")
Amazing what bribes from robber barons can do to otherwise respectable politicians.
Re:Or it would go the other way (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wasn't the guy who pushed this shit through removed from two elected positions for corruption, and now only holds an appointed position?
"Removed for corruption" is perhaps overstating the matter. The first time he resigned because he'd failed to declare an interest that should have been on the public record (although he hadn't actually been personally involved in any decisions where there would be a conflict of interest, his department was handling such a decision). The second time he resigned again, but
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That's like saying "wouldn't be a robber if there were no banks around".
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In this case it was Mandy. "Otherwise respectable"?!
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Well you're the one deciding to share your connection. Shouldn't it then be your own responsibility to check just exactly -who- you're sharing the thing with?
If you decide to share your gun - which you only use for plinking - with some random stranger, they shoot somebody, and the ballistics end up matching a gun that's registered to you, you'd have some explaining to do, too.
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But in France, you are responsible for securing your own network, see: Here [arstechnica.com]. Wonder how long till that migrates across the pond? ACTA [wikipedia.org] anyone? Maybe, whats in that is secret because, you know, trade agreements are of national security...
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If you decide to share your gun - which you only use for plinking - with some random stranger, they shoot somebody, and the ballistics end up matching a gun that's registered to you, you'd have some explaining to do, too.
Yes, but you still wouldn't be guilty of murder. And this would still be a reasonable defence - whether or not the jury believe it is another matter.
"Your honor
Stop right there - the whole problem with this proposed law is that there is no "honor", and no defence. Whether people are disconn
A feature not a bug (Score:1)
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I believe it is the case in some European countries.
In the UAE, they wanted a copy of my passport to register a pre-paid phone/sim card.
In California, I believe I just had to give a valid ZIP code (and that may just be the network's choice rather than law... not sure).
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Unbelievable - it's actually close to anonymous?
No, it actually *is* anonymous. I have pay-as-you-go mobile broadband from 3. I bought the modem and SIM cash, and didn't provide any contact details when I did. I pay for the service using vouchers, bought with cash over the counter at supermarkets. They have no idea who I am, and probably only a vague idea where I am, and that only because I've made no effort to disguise it. If I had refrained from using the modem at home or in places I visit regularly
What about the isp? (Score:2)
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Here in the UK, you don't have a right to use the mp3, even if you do own the CD.
Unless you're Lily Allen, making a "mix tape" of copyrighted material - then it's okay. Even if you fileshare it to push your own career.
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Why would ripping your CDs to MP3s be illegal, as long as you don't distribute them? We made cassettes of our LPs for years, and it was specifically legalized in the 1970s before the record and movie companies started bribing Congress.
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Errr Radius Authentication (Score:1)
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£1 on any boot sale, pound shop, major booksellers, buys you a brand new, completely anonymous (i.e. not requiring activation or any personal details *AT ALL*, even to "top-up") pre-pay SIM card that will work with data products too.
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Re:Errr Radius Authentication (Score:4, Informative)
And lose a *huge* chunk of their revenue. According to Ofcom 55% of mobile phones in the UK are pre-paid or PAYG [ofcom.org.uk] (Look under the "Telecoms" section).
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And now record EVERY single connection. And I don't mean every time someone logs in with you, the ISP, but I mean EVERY connection, http, ftp, telnet and otherwise, ever done by every single customer, and record source IP, destination IP, time and a few other tidbits. You know how many entries a single webpage, given all the ads, google trackers and other crap littering them, creates? Now extrapolate by the number of your customers and let's be conservative and say they open one page every 5 minutes (creati
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Yes it is. I can go into my local Three shop, hand over £19.99 in cash for a pay as you go modem, and another £15 for a one month access voucher. They have no idea who I am.
Bill the record industry (Score:4, Interesting)
If the record industry wants this data, they can pay for its collection.
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So, you are willing to give them investigatory powers. Time to make encryption mandatory then.
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Which is not what he said.
He said he'd BILL the record companies for the cost, but of course it would still be administered by the ISPs
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But then, who will be next in line with a big pocket to pay for data and ask the gov for policing some communication. Remember Phorm? Do we /want/ a society where your communication is eavesdropped? That is a trademark of oppressive regimes. It really does not matter whether the ISP is the middleman. No data should be intercepted unless a court-order is provided.
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No. I'm at the point where I'd like to see the 50 States call a Constitutional Convention, and abolish the United States completely, replacing it with the Articles of Confederation (where the central government was weak).
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So you are proposing a return to primarily local, "tribal" government, run by unrestrained petty tyrants waving the banner of "states' rights"? Visit Somalia or a country that ends with *stan and see how well that works in the 21st century. BTW, I wouldn't recommend the trip if you are female, gay, or non-muslim.
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No but at least the capital in my *democratic* Republic State is only a few miles away, rather than on the other side of the continent (DC) and out-of-reach. It makes logical sense to move the power closer to the people at the State level.
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Why? They can just buy the laws to criminalize it, then use your tax dollars to enforce it.
Retarded (Score:4, Informative)
Outright retarded article... Mobile data fees are so expensive that this whole story it makes no sense whatsoever
I've seen plenty of slow news days here where kdawson decided to publish non-sense, but this is a new low.
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By the time it becomes affordable to run torrents on mobile broadband, there will be NO issue with law enforcement of file sharing restrictions. So I really don't see the point.
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Well there's mobile (netbook/notebook USB things) plans...
http://mobile.broadbandgenie.co.uk/3g-broadband [broadbandgenie.co.uk]
Neither of which seem to be 'so expensive' or have ridiculous limits. Granted, I haven't read the fineprint.
It might not be -cellphone- mobile, but it's certainly using the cellular networks.
I'd dig up a cellphone plan, but as in the U.S. and NL, finding details on plans on operators' sites is next-to-impossible. I'd imagine T-Mobile offers their web-and-walk plan in the UK as well, though.
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And what do you think it will be like in 5 or 10 years' time?
The bottom line is that, aside from the legislation being bad for many reasons, it will be outpaced by technology in a matter of years. The flip side is that the Government uses this as as argument for mandatory monitoring and registration of mobile networks - we need to be watchful of this, before it's too late.
Unfortunately there is already a catch - thanks to "OMG Think Of The Children" paranoia, all mobile broadband in the UK (AFAIK) has censo
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Unlimited EDGE is certainly faster than 56k and slower DSL
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It depends where you are. Here in Sweden, I can get a mobile broadband stick for free from a provider and get 20GB of bandwidth a month for 199sek.
In fact this is what I use for my home internet, as there is no landline connection to my house. Telia wants 10000sek to install one, so I told them where to stick it :)
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Outright retarded article... Mobile data fees are so expensive that this whole story it makes no sense whatsoever
15GB for £20 still costs somewhat less than buying original copies of most of what you'd be downloading. Sure, it's more expensive than a fixed line phone deal, but if you need it anyway (e.g. for accessing email while on the road) then it's probably actually more cost effective than having two subscriptions.
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I might actually go ahead and fire up a torrent next time I'm bored on a train. Just out of sheer perversity.
Telling users how to get away with piracy? (Score:3, Funny)
Who hijacked slashdot for this "story"? Is the slashdot torrent tracker next? I guess it's not too far a stretch. Instead of 100 inane "frist post" comments they're all be converted to "Please seed" instead. Instead of flamewars about Apple, Microsoft, or Google, we can all start flames about the torrents containing viruses or whose torrent of the latest 0 dayz warez is better than whose. Welcome to the new slashdot. Not so different to the old!
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We the People have granted a *temporary* monopoly to authors so they earn some money off their product. This monopoly is intended to benefit the People by enriching our lives, and the lives of the authors, not to go-around ruining various citizens lives with million-dollar court punishments and/or threatening persons with $5000 extortionate letters ("pay up or else"). We the People gave these authors a generous monopoly over their works, and they have abused it. Like a kid who takes crayons and s
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Citation where GPL authors have behaved in a manner like the OP talked about, please?
And even if we did return to 14 years for copyright, including for GPL, I don't see why that's a problem. Yeah, it means that someone will be able to use and modify a 1995 Linux without distributing the source - OMG!
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Or else take Windows95, or Windows NT 4, and modify these programs for use on their ancient machines.
Or download the songs they listened to when they were teenagers (pre-95) and enjoy the nostalgia of hearing old music without fear of RIAA suing them, or the ISP turning-off their internet
A lesser form of the FSOSA meme... (Score:1)
I don't think FSOSA (free speech or stone age) had this (somewhat middle ground) scenario in mind, but it rhymes quite a bit.
Basically, you can't quash speech unless people can't access laptops and wireless cards. Period. You either go back to the stone age or accept arbitrary, free speech.
But in this case you don't even need to resort to some grassroots, duct-taped together community mesh network - you just need to get one or two abstractions away from the proper "Internet" and you're already there. Whi
The wonders of NAT (Score:1)
For those who haven't RTFA, they're pretty much just saying that mobile networks in the UK use NAT for their data connections so there's no way to narrow connections to one user.
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Simple Solution (Score:2)
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Sounds very nazi like.. the people watching the people. uggg...
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> The solution to the problem of file sharing is very simple.
It is indeed: just stop downloading and acquiring, legally or illegally, the ``content'' that these companies produce.
Do something else instead of being spoon-fed entertainment. Go for a swim, meet up with friends for a chat or wonder at the stars.
Everyone has always known... (Score:2)
Filesharing is "the perfect crime" in any situation which doesn't involve horrible crippling of networks. There has NEVER been a solid mapping between "person" and "network route", and there never will be on any sane network architecture.
Root Conflict (Score:3, Interesting)
Ban anonymous prepaid (Score:3, Insightful)
And require all devices to be registered, with clients shimmed into your ip stack being required to access anything online. This is where it will end up. Everyone will be running something like the old netzero client .. ack.
Remember only terrorists and pirates want to be anonymous... You have nothing to hide.. do you ?
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As I posted above, over 50% of the UK mobile phone market is made up of pre-paid phones; it would be utterly devastating to the industry to do away with PAYG phones.
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I didn't say ban prepaid. I said ban *anonymous* prepaid. I can see them requiring ID to buy a device, and then track additional minutes you buy back to a particular device.
ID cards good for buying phones! (Score:1)
Indeed - the Government's current strategy for touting the "benefits" of the new national ID card and database scheme are:
1. Put up the price of the passport (used to be £30-40 a few years ago, it's £77 now, and when it merges with the ID card in a couple of years, it'll be £93 plus £30 processing fees).
2. Start insisting that more and more places require ID (one example of this is that the police are now increasingly requiring that pubs and clubs introduce a ID scanning policy - of
"Specific Users"?? (Score:2)
>According to the article, databases (tracking IP address mappings) could be built to make it possible to identify what specific users are downloading
Exactly how is knowing an IP address mapping going to tell anyone which SPECIFIC USER is doing anything? It might tell you which account is doing something. But last I checked, that doesn't tie to a person. Any number of people might use a single IP address. At work, we have 150+ users behind a single IP address.
So, an account holder will be guilty, reg
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Unfortunately, it's a long-standing tradition that IP addresses should be used as a unique identifier; we've got 1.3 million people [www.nhs.uk] behind a handful of IP addresses at work and it causes no end of fun when people like Microsoft decide to blacklist them within Live Mail for sending too high a volume of email and therefore being a spam bot, which they've done twice this year so far..
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It Gets Tricky... (Score:2)
Making laws is easy when it is a vetted and money'd interest on one side and some upstart disruptive ne'er do well on the other. Things get a bit more complicated when there is influence on both sides of the issue. How can lawmakers possibly know what is right when there are bribes available on both sides of an issue? It is an unreasonable thing we ask of them -- ultimately they have to try to predict which side will be able to give them more money in the future.
Seriously... (Score:2)
... all this really does is give them more dead horse to beat on.
All the while not considering that piracy is so widespread it is best described as 'natural' and is found ubiquitous among the poor, rich, educated, ignorant, moral, and immoral. Piracy is almost as common as laughing, and probably more popular than religion.
No.... lets pretend this is a curable disease; an infestation of the people's perception that can be righted..... lets beat this frikking horse to pieces and when the path gets awkward, b
File-sharing via a mobile only for music really (Score:2)
I have a Vodafone mobile dongle and it costs me £15 per 1GB for pre-pay and they are hardly the cheapest ones out there.
They don't have my name or any other contact information on me (I went to the store in person, bought the dongle and paid in cash) so anything I do through it cannot be associated with my name (as long as I never "load more money" into that account with a credit/debit card).
That said, at £15 a GB, file-sharing is only really worth it if what you're downloading is music (in the
Lord Mandelson's response (Score:3, Funny)
Head explodes.
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oh, wait, that can't be right...
Sentiment (Score:2)
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I THINK ITS QUITE OVIOUS (Score:1)
Is that you, Lily Allen? Come on now, you know you shouldn't be "stealing" other people's work, even if you do distribute it in the form of a "mix tape". As you said yourself, music's not free to make, so it can't be free, can it? Who could argue with solid and well thought out logic like that?
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