UK ISP Spots a File-Sharing Loophole, Implements It 179
An anonymous reader writes "As well as taking an active part in OFCOM's code of obligations in regards to the ill-conceived Digital Economy Act (the UK three-strikes law for filesharers), niche ISP Andrews & Arnold have identified various loopholes in the law, the main one being that a customer can be classified as a communications provider. They have now implemented measures so in your control panel you may register your legal status and be classed as such." Another of the loopholes this inventive ISP sussed out: "Operating more than one retail arm selling to customers and allowing customers to migrate freely with no change to service between those retail arms, thus bypassing copyright notice counting and any blocking orders."
Lets get rid of it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Lets get rid of it (Score:5, Insightful)
ISPs siding with the public domain is a good step towards having governments listen to someone other than media corporations - hopefully plenty of people flock to this.
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How is this "siding with the public domain"? Does this, in any way, increase the number or quality of works in the public domain?
As far as I can see, all this ISP is doing is siding with pirates, their best customers.
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Could it be because this ISP charges for bandwidth (and quite heavily during the day) and are more expensive than other providers that supply truly unlimited tariffs?
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Pirates are any ISP's best customers. Once a pirate is hooked, then they're not likely to stop or downgrade their internet service. If anything, they'll upgrade their internet service.
If the ISP charges for the bandwidth they use, even better.
Re:Lets get rid of it (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, no. People who use bandwidth are an ISP's worst customers. They want to sell their basic high-speed plans to people who'll check email once a week and maybe surf the BBC or CNN for a few minutes daily, tops. They'll try to convince those who just use twitter and facebook all day that they need the next tier up. And oh, if you do any sort of gaming, well, you really want the super-high-speed $100+/month plan!
These people pay big bucks and the ISP can oversell very easily.
Pirates who use all their bandwidth mean they can't oversell as much. They'd much rather kick them off and replace them (even if they're paying $100+/month) with 5 light users who pay $40/month.
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Yeah, they're OK, but they're only really prevalent in the low cost plans. Pirates are addicted and enslaved to ISPs for life (barring an uncommonly massive force of will/conscience).
Re:Lets get rid of it (Score:5, Informative)
Yep, they're not cheap.
But they offer static IPs, in both IPv4 and IPv6. They do decent monitoring of your line, and have excellent tools for reporting your bandwidth usage, uptime and so forth. They can be your domain registrar and offer DNS servers.
With the exception of the bandwidth limits, they're pretty much a geek's dream ISP - pay for good service, get good service.
Heck, you can ask their support staff questions via IRC. You can get SMS alerts when your ADSL line is down.
I have two friends that use A&A. They're very happy with them. Most other people I know are on cheap ADSL providers, Virgin Cable or work for an ISP so have a connection through their employer anyway. I don't really hear complaints from the A&A users or those getting their connection from their employer. But everyone else, myself included, has had issues and not felt the support was good.
And no, I don't work for A&A. I get my internet connection through Virgin's cable service, because I had cable already. And I'm not being paid to say this - A&A don't know me from the proverbial Adam.
But A&A are the first company I'd look at if I had to switch to ADSL. I want their service, despite the costs.
It's not about piracy, this is about service. Many A&A customers host their own webservers at home, for example... Do you want to lose your internet connection just because of a bogus complaint about a webserver only you and a few friends use?
That's probably why they're putting these protections in, more than anything else. Arse covering for their customers. ;-)
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Second this! i do use them and love them.
Yes they charge for usage during the daytime, but only downloads, uploads are unmetered (so you can leave things seeding, kick off your offsite backup during the day etc). I don't see it as an issue. Besides metered access is fair if the greatest cost is the trunk bandwidth. (less fair if the greatest cost is the cost of the line, but that all depends on your business model).
As parent said even if there is a premium it is worth it (for me) because they give a better
Re:Lets get rid of it (Score:5, Insightful)
The key issue for me is not the copyright law. I don't care if Paramount and other companies want to protect their income stream on the new Star Trek movie.
The issue for me is that these 3-strike laws assign punishment without benefit of trial by jury. And once that precedent is set, then the government can further erode the rights of Englishmen. "You were caught stealing three times. 5 years jail for you." - "But I had no trial." - "Precedent shows we don't need to give you a trial. Take him away!"
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Lib Dems (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know if what I am saying is 100% correct. But people who might vote for Pirate, Green, ect ect. are mostly geeks or people directly involved in this.
True, and it is unfortunate that the "geek" vote is being split so badly. The LibDems are the only one of the three major parties that stood up to this law (voting against it and calling for its repeal). Whether someone's agreement with them on this issue outweighs any disagreements they may have with them on other issues is an open question.
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I don't know if what I am saying is 100% correct. But people who might vote for Pirate, Green, ect ect. are mostly geeks or people directly involved in this.
True, and it is unfortunate that the "geek" vote is being split so badly. The LibDems are the only one of the three major parties that stood up to this law (voting against it and calling for its repeal). Whether someone's agreement with them on this issue outweighs any disagreements they may have with them on other issues is an open question.
Us Pirates only have 9 out of a possible 650 candidates standing; I doubt we'll have an impact on the Lib-dem vote (hell, as there's no PPUK candidate in my area, I'll be voting Lib-dem).
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The LibDems are the only one of the three major parties that stood up to this law (voting against it and calling for its repeal).
They also seem the strongest generally when it comes to following common-sense approach to science; evidence-based policy is one phrase I've heard being banded around as well, which after the various allegations of ministers ignoring their own scientific advisors in the past few months is a welcome relief.
However, I'm more than just a geek. When it comes to my vote in a week's time, I also have to consider the pros and cons of each party to all the other aspects of my life: my wife, baby son, job, house,
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I think suggesting that the LibDems "stood up" to this is giving them a little more credit than they deserve. They ended up supporting it in the Lords and even adding the controversial web-censoring clause (I know they tried to get it removed, but it was too late then). As it was, only a handful (14?) of LibDem MPs turned up to vote, and even fewer made any sort of speech.
The LibDems seem to want to repeal this mainly due to the method by which it was passed, not for the content; they claim they would "take
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There were two Lords that pushed for web-blocking. I know it is now no longer party policy (and something I am glad the LibDems sorted out) but it is still important to remember that some of those MPs who spoke out against the Bill criticised the process but not necessarily the content.
Ideally when choosing who to vote for everything should be checked with the candidate rather than the Party, but the whip system means that we can't really vote for an individual.
Personally, I am trying to decide between the
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I, as a geek, would vote tory. However, as I've tried to explain to the old ladies trying to get me to vote - I can't as I'm not a citizen!
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One of the quirks of UK electoral law is that EU nationals may vote in local and European elections, but not Parliamentary elections. GP is correct as well, as a Commonwealth citizen resident in the UK I can vote in all 3 kinds of elections.
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Even better: the latest pools put the LibDems in a position of either winning or being the king-makers in a split parliement (in fact they might even win the popular vote but get less seats in parliement than other parties thanks to the not-really-democratic system in the UK). This is a huge change since they have consistently been the 3rd party in the UK for 50 years or something like that.
At this point I would change my vote to them if it wasn't for the simple detail that as a non-British EU citizen I don
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Your best bet is to vote Lib-Dem this election, and suck it up until the following election. Then vote Pirate. Assumes though that the Lib-Dems will actually implement a decent form of proportional representation.
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Clegg: Proportional representation please!
Cameron: DENIED!
Ad infinitum, and that will apply for every single decision for the next four years. It will suck.
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That wouldn't go on for four years. PR is a fundamental requirement for the Lib-Dems. A coalition only works whilst both parties have each other's support.
Canada is actually in an interesting position right now. They've had a minority Tory government (a.k.a. hung parliament) for some time, with no coalition. The opposition don't bring them down for two reasons: 1) voters don't want another election yet; 2) none of the opposition parties thinks their support has grown enough to make it worthwhile. Every
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Who say geeks don't make good lawyers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently those running the ISP - presumably geeks - know how to interpret the laws better than those who wrote the laws themselves.
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There is only one interpretation of the l;aw that counts, and that's the judge's one. This is espacially true in UK's(and US's) Common Law system.
So, they found loopholes, or so they think. They may be correct, but you will not know until thoose loopholes are tested in a courthouse.
Re:Who say geeks don't make good lawyers? (Score:5, Informative)
There is only one interpretation of the l;aw that counts, and that's the judge's one. This is espacially true in UK's(and US's) Common Law system.
Either you or I have misunderstood this particular section of the Digital Economy Act, and the balance of probabilities suggests that it's you. At issue is not the legality of sharing the files - the DEA doesn't deal with that, that's part of pre-existing Copyright acts - but the short-cut that now exists that enables rightsholders to harrass suspected filesharers through their ISP without the need for a court order.
Before the DEA, firms were required to issue a court order to the ISP - a timeconsuming and potentially expensive process if done in bulk - in order to collect enough information to contact the individuals themselves. With the DEA in place, they can simply require the ISP to do their donkey work.
So, they found loopholes, or so they think. They may be correct, but you will not know until thoose loopholes are tested in a courthouse.
The loopholes definitely exist, I've seen the various discussions that led to A&A making the implementations discussed and it is quite clear from the wording of the DEA itself (which, combined with the Telecommunitions Act IIRC, is very specific in its definitions of the parties concerned). The legal route, where the case can be presented in front of a judge, does still exist: it just requires more effort on the part of the rightsholders, and specifically the amount of effort that they should have had to take in the first place before the DEA came into effect.
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Before the DEA, firms were required to issue a court order to the ISP - a timeconsuming and potentially expensive process if done in bulk - in order to collect enough information to contact the individuals themselves. With the DEA in place, they can simply require the ISP to do their donkey work.
Require how? There must be some recourse that the copyright holder can take against an ISP that is failing to respond to complaints. Eventually such a recourse could end up in front of a judge, and that's when AAISP might find themselves in hot water.
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With the DEA in place, they can simply require the ISP to do their donkey work.
Require how? There must be some recourse that the copyright holder can take against an ISP that is failing to respond to complaints.
By 'require', I was referring to the fact that the DEA allows rightsholders to send their complaints to an ISP, and the ISP is required by law to pass those complaints on and (I think - I've not read it in a while) take further action where they relate to a subscriber of that ISP. AAISP's view is apparently that they can alter the status of their customers away from 'subscriber' to circumvent this requirement.
Eventually such a recourse could end up in front of a judge, and that's when AAISP might find themselves in hot water.
They seem to believe otherwise. It is quite possible (I'm not going to say 'likely', these thin
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For many of AAISP's customers, there is a much simpler way that the rights holders could contact the potential infringer directly. AAISP only supply fixed static IP (both IPv4 & IPv6) addresses to customers and a whois on these addresses identify the customer. Of course, if the customer is a private individual, the privacy laws allow him to suppress much of the personal details from the whois record. So rather than needing a court order, all the rights holder has to do is issue a whois query on the alle
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The effect seems to be positive nonetheless. According to their page, communications providers don't really need to bother looking at infringement reports. Classify yourself as one and AAISP won't care about your infringement reports directed to them. You, equally, don't have to care about your infringement reports directed to yourself; after all you're a communications provider, not a subscriber.
If whomever is sending out the reports is serious, they can still go the legal route. They could do that before
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I think the idea here is "no one, get a warrant/subpoena". Since that information is, you know, private.
Good on this ISP. Refreshing to see a company actually care about its customers.
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Cannot agree more, many judges even break laws as far as I can tell with some of their rulings.
If the judge hates file sharing enough, or their is enough force lobbied against this ISP it will not matter if they have the law on their side.
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Well I'd say that the biggest flaw is not the loopholes, it's the fact that in the end the copyright holder still has to sue the individual they suspect of copyright infringement. As yet the idea that a screenshot and IP address are enough evidence is an entirely untested one.
There are also the human rights issues. If someone in a household does download something and gets the internet connection cut off, what about the other people who live there? Imaging being a student and not having the internet at home
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Presumably you can't just switch ISP to get the connection back, unless they less that massive hole open too.
Indeed, this is one of the holes they are exploiting: "Operating more than one retail arm selling to customers and allowing customers to migrate freely with no change to service between those retail arms, thus bypassing copyright notice counting and any blocking orders."
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That's because the people who wrote them were much too full of roast beef, spotted dick and brandy when they wrote them.
Re:Who say geeks don't make good lawyers? (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer, I may not be an apple or linux fanboy, but i might just be an AAISP fanboy: I use AAISP as my service provider at home and they are awesome!
Want static IP addresses? Sure, how many? As long as they see access on roughly half of the addresses you ask for, no more questions. Very very useful for IP phones.
Want detailed traffic graphing? No problem.
Want direct access to all the log files right down to the ATM session layer, no problem, there's a webpage for that.
Want to restart the line from the BT side, another button to click.
Want a redundant connection for home use? Erm, only available in certain places but i have a friend in Manchester who is using them to do this.
If all this fails and you phone them up they treat you like the geek you are, the person you speak to knows what they're talking about and can fix it themselves. (yes I'm looking at you Virgin Media)
My best experience with them was I wanted to use a Cisco 877 router (completely none standard) for my router rather than the one they supplied. Any other company would have told me to sod off, but these guys helped me debug the setup.
Nope definitely a company run by geeks for geeks, you get the impression these people enjoy their job and revel in the technology.
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Just make sure you know not to vote for the other pirate party that's standing (ok, in Westminster, not Gorton) with the aptly named Mad Cap'n Tom [madcapntom.co.uk]
Just be glad there's no Ninja or Monkey parties standing in the same constituency! (and yes, you may be surprised to hear there's a facebook page [facebook.com] you can join)
I can't believe..... (Score:5, Funny)
....that such a well planned and comprehensive peice of legislation would have loopholes. It's almost as if they rushed it through the legislative process, but I'm sure our politicians would never be so careless....
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I'm sure our politicians would never be so careless....
Then you must grow 'em smarter over there than we do over here.
Could we borrow some of your breeding stock?
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Then you must grow 'em smarter over there than we do over here. Could we borrow some of your breeding stock?
Be careful of what you wish for [photochopz.com].
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I'm sure our politicians would never be so careless....
Then you must grow 'em smarter over there than we do over here.
Could we borrow some of your breeding stock?
You're assuming that smarter means less greedy. I'd rather have a greedy incompetent politician who screws us over a little than a greedy intelligent politician who screws us over a lot. Of course, what I'd really like is an intelligent politician who wasn't out to line his own pockets, but that's definitely straying into the realms of fantasy.
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Before this copyright infringement was not a indictable offence i.e only a Civil Offence in which the police have no power and had to be made by the Copyright holder directly on the alleged offender, this is still true but now they can on suspicion only get the ISP to punish the alleged offender without a court order and without a hearing ....
The ISP will have to pay for (at least part) of this process, and will lose a customer .... No wonder why they are trying to find loopholes
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Yes, but the point is that this was rushed through as part of the "washup" at the end of parliament, so did not have the same level of scrutiny as it would normally do. It's a crass way to handle complex legislation and I'm glad that this ISP has taken the time to go through the details. Well done.
Re:I can't believe..... (Score:5, Interesting)
It was voted in by about 200 pissed up MPs who had been dragged out of the pub to make sure it passed. Only about 40 actually attended the debate.
Watching it happen was an eye opener to say the least. Any illusions that we have actual representation died that day.
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I'm fucking disgusted.
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If you didn't have representation, you wouldn't have had all those loopholes...
Well done (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope that the ISP will earn enough money from this, so that they will be able to defend this when faced legal action.
Re:Well done (Score:4, Interesting)
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There must be some redress that the labels can take against an ISP that is ignoring the rules. Now you can say "they aren't ignoring the rules", but the only person that can decide whether they are flouting the law or not is a judge.
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The MafiAA can (1) buy more legislation, (2) pay the police to harass them, (3) sue for contributory infringement, etc. UK is a very shitty place for modern human rights, they'll get stopped eventually.
That said, if they're clean enough, they'll gain many many customers while the labels react, they might not pay any damages, and they'll surely raise awareness for copyright reform.
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That's sort of what I was thinking. Giant corporations can take advantage of loopholes to rip off their customers. Individuals and small businesses can't do that.
Don't see this working (Score:3, Interesting)
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Well, if that's the case then all those peering network providers are also attempting to skirt the law.
I could set myself up as a communicatins provider - I've thought of it actually - put a colo server in a datacentre, then offer bandwidth (and web space) to paying customers. But then, why not simply offer payign customers to use my existing bandwidth that I have at home. Its not much, so I can't see many taking my up on my offer, but as I'm offering a niche product that shouldn't be an issue.
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Well, if that's the case then all those peering network providers are also attempting to skirt the law.
The difference lies in intention, and that was the point of my original post.
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They can say that you are deliberately breaking the rule that says anyone providing communications services must monitor and log the usage of that service.
Re:Don't see this working (Score:5, Insightful)
They are only circumventing the intended aims of the people who lobbied the law into being.
Regarding the written law itself, they are legitimately following and making use of the provisioned measures. It doesn't sound like they are relying on particularly liberal interpretations of the text, but rather are going off of what it plainly states.
Granted, I don't know a great deal about UK law, but it sounds to me like it's rather more on the legislature want to remove these elements than for judges to sit down and play psychoanalyst of the "offender" and for the legislature simultaneously.
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Granted, I don't know a great deal about UK law, but it sounds to me like it's rather more on the legislature want to remove these elements than for judges to sit down and play psychoanalyst of the "offender" and for the legislature simultaneously.
A case usually has to reach an appeals court before a Judge start delving into legislative/parlimentary intent.
If a law is vaguely worded, legislative/parlimentary intent allows a Judge to essentially remove the vagaries through judicial fiat.
If the law is clearly worded, a Judge has no choice but to dismiss and suggest that the politicians fix their mistakes.
Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
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The passage of text relating to that was being discussed a few months back made it look like using WEP and posting the password on the wall would be enough to get around the restrictions, at least as far as cafes with internet access and so on are concerned.
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I'm *trying* to get elected!
--Tim Dobson, Pirate Party Candidate, Manchester Gorton
http://votepirate.org/gorton [votepirate.org]
http://amiapirate.org/ [amiapirate.org]
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Cosigned. I'd like to see a Pirate Party US movement.
There is one: http://www.pirate-party.us/ [pirate-party.us] I believe the problem over there is that, (unlike here in the UK) you need to register your party state by state & they all seem to have different byzantine regulations. Here you only need to register once to cover all of the UK except Northern Ireland where not even the major parties put up candidates because it has a whole politics of it's own due to historical reasons.
From what I've heard it's also harder to get on the ballot over there (here any old perso
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't even have to be that. The contract for the line coming into my house is with me. My wife and kids use that line, without a contract with the ISP. How could they do that if I - the contracted individual - wasn't providing them with the service?
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's very interesting indeed; I live alone, but my daughter and her mother live literally across the street, and they share my (secured) wifi connection. I most certainly am providing a service to them, and they don't even live under my roof.
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You guys really vote some Pirate party to your parliament to properly put an end to this crap properly tho.
If by some fluke we [pirateparty.org.uk] do manage to get one of our 9 candidates [pirateparty.org.uk] elected we'd actually have a real voice this time around as the polls show [ukpollingreport.co.uk] we're heading for a hung Parliament [wikipedia.org]
The good thing about a hung parliament... (Score:2)
... is that if we do it properly, we won't even need the whole 6460m of rope. We can probably reuse a few nooses.
But these laws are carefully considered (Score:2, Funny)
Impractical and/or illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just looking through the list, I'm not particularly excited by their loop-holes.
So, while I am impressed that at least one ISP has thoroughly read through the Act and is trying to work against it, I think their loop-holes aren't going to be that good in practice (with the one exception). Still, their draft Code seems to have highlighted many of the key points, and I hope that they will get heavily involved with the Code-drafting process.
The best way to get around this sort of thing is to either fight for repealing the Act (so vote Pirate or Green - while the Lib Dems have said they want to repeal it, that's due to the process by which it was passed, they still seem mostly in favour of the content) or making sure that the Code approved
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Did not the European court rule the three-strikes thing was a violation of fundamental human rights? The UK might get away with it only because you can change ISP.
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Did not the European court rule the three-strikes thing was a violation of fundamental human rights?
My understanding is that the European Parliament passed a directive that means three-strikes style laws can't operate without judicial process. When Spain started working on this sort of thing, I think one of the Commissioners warned them that it would likely lead to conflict with the Commission.
At the moment, there is nothing in the Act that, from what I see, conflicts with this - but once the code comes out, this might change. I would not be surprised if, when the powers in the DEA are used for the first
At least they are trying... (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer: I am a happy A&A customer.
At least AAISP are attempting to bring to light the shortcomings of the law, as well as taking part in the OFCOM part of the regulatory process. Believe me that AAISP were also attempting early on to bring attention to this law and lobbying as much as they could themselves.
I've spoken to the owner. He does not believe in supporting pirates, but he does believe in due process and fairness. Things that the DEA is not.(to customers or the ISP's) If a court order is provided AAISP will happily process it, however someone randomly pointing at an IP and saying "they've downloaded something of mine, cut them off unless they can unequivocally prove otherwise" unfairly reverses the burden of proof.
AAISP just wants to be a neutral carrier, operating within the (sane) law and rightly so.
They particularly deserve mention on Slashdot as a geeks ISP. There aren't many ISP's that provide the following...
They aren't as cheap as the bucket providers, but then you get what you pay for....
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one more thing for A&A is that they offer IPv6 across the board, included in your service for free.
They've always been a more "advanced" ISP in the UK.
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What I really appreciate is their "no-bull$hit" service. As with any network, occasionally things will go wrong - not very often - but when they do, they're always very upfront with frequent status update. You always know where you s
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The second one increases the number of offenses that go without consequence from 2 to 2*[branches of the ISP]
It's the ISP that has to cut off, and they count offenses per branch. So if they transfer you to another branch upon receiving a second notice, you have clean account with the new branch. (and you could have signed away the right to transfer your account like that in the contract)
Of course this won't work with very massive offenders, but suddenly a 3-strikes law becomes a 37-strikes law or something.
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2*[branches of the ISP]*[Family members/friends/dog]
Also the act says nothing about keeping a count for *ex* subscribers.. so pingponging between two may be enough.
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Not voting at all, OTOH, is equivalent to saying "You know what? I really don't care who gets in - Labour, Tory, LibDem, Monster Raving Loony, whatever"
The Conservatives have a strong set of policies but they also have a history of foaming at the mouth just as badly as Labour. If they take office it's more or less guaranteed they'll come down on the side of whichever claims to have the biggest business interests.
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes and even more bureaucracy... and frank
Re:Come May, I'm quite stuck. (Score:4, Insightful)
LibDems, OTOH, seem to like the idea of even more taxes and even more bureaucracy... and frankly we're taxed heavily enough as it is, TYVM. Damned either way, IMV.
Whatever you think of their other policies, the Lib-dems are the only ones proposing PR, vote for them at this election, so that another party that you*do* support can get MPs next time. If we do get PR, watch the Tory party split over Europe, Old Labour split from New Labour and the Lib-dems old Liberal (recently relaunched as the "orange bookers") split from the newer SDP more left wing part. We'd actually get a proper choice!
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Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
There is another view which says that you inevitably wind up with watered down legislation which in trying to pander to every party doesn't really solve anything. In essence, a true example of "a compromise is what happens when you come up with an idea that doesn't really suit anyone".
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Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
IMO it's also the fairest, most democratic system; I really hope we introduce STV for by the time of the next general election.
There is another view which says that you inevitably wind up with watered down legislation which in trying to pander to every party doesn't really solve anything. In essence, a true example of "a compromise is what happens when you come up with an idea that doesn't really suit anyone".
The examples of many European countries from Germany and Holland to Sweden and Finland and even the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish regional assemblies show this argument to be false. As long as politicians can be grown up about it PR works just fine.
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As long as politicians can be grown up about it PR works just fine.
Oh dear. We're screwed then.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course they're proposing proportional representation, they've got the most to gain from it.
Even if they really only had a self-interest, what has that got to the question of voting for them? You're telling me that if a party was supporting something, that you wanted, you wouldn't vote for them because they gained from it? That makes no sense.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How would PR allow me to vote for an Individual to represent me and my constituency in parliment?
The Single Transferable vote system has larger, multi-member constituencies; the geographical link is not broken, and you can still vote for individuals, not party lists. It's already used in the UK and around the world: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:2)
STV is not PR. Would you like to try again?
Yes it is; from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
The single transferable vote (STV) is a preferential voting system designed to minimize "wasted" votes, provide proportional representation, and ensure that votes are explicitly cast for individual candidates rather than party lists.
emphasis mine. What makes you think that it's not PR?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes it is. Would you like to try again?
Re: (Score:2)
Their tax policies for businesses are rather less friendly, however. Which is fine if you're an individual but if you run a small business (which lots of people do) is rather less attractive.