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Piracy Privacy The Media United Kingdom Your Rights Online

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)."
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UK's 'Three Strikes' Piracy Measures Published

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  • VPNs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @11:59AM (#40454155)

    VPNs will be the order of the day!

    In other news: First Post! :P

    • Re:VPNs (Score:5, Interesting)

      by cpu6502 ( 1960974 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:39PM (#40454751)

      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.

      • I do wonder whether the likes of Murdoch had a hand in that to try and generate new customers for his BSkyB network
        • Probably not ; it was more like the government saw little pound signs when they thought about all the money they could get from selling off the wide swathes of bandwidth that analogue transmissions currently occupy, and their corporate cronies saw little pound signs when they thought of all the lovely services they could charge you through the nose for that use the aforementioned bandwidth.

          Digital is much more efficient. Alas, it's also much more difficult to produce reception equipment for - there won't be

          • by ais523 ( 1172701 )
            Crystal radios can only decode AM, not FM. FM requires considerably more complex circuitry to decode; it's not out of reach for a hobbyist, but it's not the sort of thing you'd expect a kid to play around with.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        This 3-strike deal is just the latest in a series of dumb decisions by OfCom.

        Except it isn't a decision. From the very first line of TFA:

        Today, Ofcom has published an updated draft of the proposed measures to combat online piracy

      • Actually, from what I've read, this actually sounds like a fair plan. Getting caught 3 months in 12? Really, if you didn't learn after the first letter, or the second one, and yet you still continue, you deserve what you get.

        • Even though an IP address is not a person? You must be new to the internet.

          • And that has what exactly with anything at all? They are disconnecting the line and sending the information of the registered owner to whomever. It doesn't say squat about filing criminal charges against the registered owner. You must be new to the english language and reading.

            • And that has what exactly with anything at all? They are disconnecting the line and sending the information of the registered owner to whomever. It doesn't say squat about filing criminal charges against the registered owner. You must be new to the english language and reading.

              You must obviously be new to the basics of the judiciary system... It is pretty clear that if one person committed the offense, only one person can be prosecuted and possibly convicted. If you convict two, one is certain to be a victim of miscarriage of justice, which is a bad thing, both for the legal system (convicting someone innocent is the worst thing that can happen in the judiciary system) and for the innocent person obviously.

              Now, as it is pretty clear to most people, an IP does not in any way ident

              • You must be new to this world. Registered owners of cars get to pay parking fines and speeding tickets no matter who was driving at the time. Driving offenses aren't criminal usually, don't require the same burden of proof, and the owner is responsible for the actions of those they loan their car to. In SOME cases, you can get an exception. For example, your car was stolen, but the burden of proof is on YOU. Usually a police report stating your car was stolen is enough, but it is your burden to prove.

                Now se

    • by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

      Just bought a years worth, at only £3.63 per month even a UK unemployed person could afford that.

      Screw the governments monitoring, we didn't elect them to act like East Germany's Stasi.

      https://www.privatvpn.se/en/ [privatvpn.se]
      https://www.ipredator.se/ [ipredator.se]
      https://privacy.io/ [privacy.io]
      http://mullvad.net/en/ [mullvad.net]
      https://www.vpntunnel.se/ [vpntunnel.se]

      VPN reviews:
      http://www.bestvpnservice.com/vpn-providers.php [bestvpnservice.com]
      http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-seriously-111007/ [torrentfreak.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:00PM (#40454177)

    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.

    • by The_Wilschon ( 782534 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:14PM (#40454387) Homepage
      Best would be to spoof the ISP's identification mechanisms so that IP addresses belonging to MPs, ISP executives, music and film industry executives, etc appear in their logs.
      • by cpghost ( 719344 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:17PM (#40454427) Homepage
        These influential guys will be added to a whitelist of allowed copyright infringers. Do you really expect anything else?
        • These influential guys will be added to a whitelist of allowed copyright infringers. Do you really expect anything else?

          Doesn't matter if their IP's get whitelisted by ??AA-organization, because according to the article...

          The plans include requirements for ISPs to “notify their subscribers if the Internet protocol (“IP”) addresses associated with them are reported by copyright owners as being used to infringe copyright”

          You can report it yourself without any middlemen if you assert you hold copyright to something and its been infringed on from this IP, and if past is any indicator there are no penalties for false claims.

          • You can report it yourself without any middlemen if you assert you hold copyright to something and its been infringed on from this IP, and if past is any indicator there are no penalties for false claims.

            Yeah, but I'm certain it will be a totally different matter for anyone making a false copyright infringement claim against a member of the government.

            You terrorist! You're likely also planning to bomb a tube station!

            (Not you personally, NettiWelho)

            Strat

          • You can report it yourself without any middlemen if you assert you hold copyright to something and its been infringed on from this IP, and if past is any indicator there are no penalties for false claims.

            I wonder what's stopping us from flooding the ISP's with bogus claims, then? Seems like an easy protest.

            • by Andy_R ( 114137 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:41PM (#40456771) Homepage Journal

              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.

          • It's not just that there are no penalties. The accused will only get to defend themselves if they fork over a 20 pound fee.

      • You don't have to spoof shit, they already pirate shit just the same as everyone else [slashdot.org].

        Of course, that doesn't matter, this is only going to apply to the hoi polloi anyway.

    • by slazzy ( 864185 )
      I'm sure this will happen for many reasons, but it will probably lead to more access points being secured properly rather than the law being changed. I think the internet is reaching importance that it should be considered a right that can't be taken away.
      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by cpu6502 ( 1960974 )

        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.

        • by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo ( 1000167 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:41PM (#40454789)
          The key difference is that driving recklessly is a physical danger to other motorists, downloading of copyright material has zero physical impact.
        • wrong. the right to information and to be represented on tinternet is more important that your ability to get from A-B without taking a bus. using the car analogy tho', you tend to lose your licence (for a finite amount of time) for endangering other people's lives whereas this shambles wants to take away the internet for something as unimportant as copyright infringement.
          • wrong. the right to information and to be represented on tinternet is more important that your ability to get from A-B without taking a bus.

            only if you live in an urban environment. where i live 20 miles from town there is no bus. (and it rains much of the years so bike is out) Car transport in much more important for people like me.

            • wrong. the right to information and to be represented on tinternet is more important that your ability to get from A-B without taking a bus.

              only if you live in an urban environment. where i live 20 miles from town there is no bus. (and it rains much of the years so bike is out) Car transport in much more important for people like me.

              The UN's "Agenda For The 21st Century" (Agenda 21) says you lot should all be herded into a more-easily controlled, regulated, and monitored metropolitan center anyways under their "Sustainable Development" plans.

              How else will the government be able to more easily & cheaply monitor absolutely everyone for potent

              • by amorsen ( 7485 )

                Do you seriously believe that the UN has a plan to make people "more-easily controlled, regulated, and monitored"?

                I suspect I may have missed a joke somewhere, but if you are serious, you really need to look into the way the UN works. If you want to take over the world, starting with the UN will guarantee that you get stuck in a quagmire.

                • Do you seriously believe that the UN has a plan to make people "more-easily controlled, regulated, and monitored"?

                  Well, Agenda 21 *does* call for Western governments to "encourage" their citizens, through laws & regulations, to move into metropolitan/urban centers. That's right in the UN policy documents for Agenda 21. The results would be, whether or not they come right out and declare it as a goal, that the population would be more-easily controlled, regulated, and monitored.

                  If you want to take over the world, starting with the UN will guarantee that you get stuck in a quagmire.

                  Well, Agenda 21 didn't seem to hit much of a "quagmire", since it's currently part of the UN policies and doctrines. Many US cities and coun

        • by Githaron ( 2462596 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:58PM (#40455169)
          You analogy does not work. If the internet was a road, there would be two types of roads. The first type would be like a normal road. If enough resources, you can monitor who is going where and whether what they are transporting is illegal. The second type of road cloaks all information about the cars except where they are going and how often they travel. With some clever tricks, a lot of this data can be obfuscated and to some completely hidden. If you scare all the illegal activity away from the normal roads, it will move to the cloaking roads that are just as good. In the end, you have done almost nothing beneficial and actually harmed some existing and possible technologies. It also harms those that are hit with false positives. Fighting online piracy is like Wack-A-Mole. Companies would be smarter to uses knowledge about piracy as market indicators and compete with it rather than litigate against it.
        • by Anonymous Coward

          You don't have a right to break the laws when you're driving down the road

          But you do have the right to due process before they take away your license. That means being convicted in a court of law, not simply receiving three letters accusing you of driving over the speed limit. It's strange to see you on this side of the debate, given how you've admitted that if you received one of these baseless letters, you'd simply throw it out. You're basically saying that you would have no problem losing access to the internet after throwing out the third baseless letter.

          in fact I'd say the net is LESS important than a car.

          I don't need a car

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

          Driving isn't a right, it's a privelege. Of course, I'm of the opinion that internet access shouldn't be a right, either. Food and health care? Of course. But internet? One can survive quite easily without the internet, but not without food or health care.

          • by Anonymous Coward
            I order the majority of my food over the internet. Online pornography is my healthcare.
        • and with a ticket you have the right to court and there needs to be a standard of evidence.

        • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

          'You', the individual, not your number plate. They are not identifying you, your car or even a physical number plate, just the arrangements of shared numbers. Basically they are not really requiring proof of anything, guilty until you can prove your innocence against a lowest possible system that is only used monitor use with regards to billings in the dollars per week range which can deny access that can represent losses in the thousands of dollars per week range.

          When 'you' are driving 'your' car and 'y

      • I'm sure this will happen for many reasons, but it will probably lead to more access points being secured properly rather than the law being changed.

        Actually... Here in Denmark we've had two verdicts confirming that you cannot be liable if you run an unsecured access point, and you cannot be forced to secure any access points. This has led to more unsecured access points as a measure of plausible deniability.

        I think the internet is reaching importance that it should be considered a right that can't be taken away.

        Yes, very much so. That's why the EU court has struck down any attempts at creating a pan-European three-strikes law.

        It should be obvious that rampant copyright infringement should be stopped at the source, not at the destination through abuse of th

    • End-to-end encryption. Your ISP should should only know what services you are connecting to, not what you are transferring.

    • That would only be good if everybody did it. Otherwise, it would just be an asshat thing to do.

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Troll around the neighborhood looking for open WiFi access and torrenting a bunch of random crap.
    • That's not the worry. Drive around putting files on people computer that you wouldn't want on your own machine.
      I need TIN FOIL!!
  • by Githaron ( 2462596 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:01PM (#40454203)
    Wouldn't this make onion routing potentially illegal?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Anonymous Coward

      No, this is about monitoring your ISP, not the TOR proxy network.

      • Re:Onion Routing (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Githaron ( 2462596 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:13PM (#40454371)
        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..
  • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:08PM (#40454301)
    We have the darknets ready to run.
    • Darknets huh? Is that like Kazaa or Bearshare? I kid, I kid...
    • by AngryDeuce ( 2205124 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:44PM (#40454857)

      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.

      • The Nigel. Every school, university and most workplaces have one.
      • explicitly for the purposes of sharing media with each other.

        So when you're done "sharing" the media in question, you meet again to return the media, right? You're not keeping it because that's not how sharing works.

        it's the best option for us to minimize risk.

        Risk of what? If all you're doing is "sharing", not keeping the media, there is no risk. I've done that. Gave someone a tape to listen to, when they were done they gave it back to me.

        That's what you guys are doing, right?
        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          So when you're done "sharing" the media in question, you meet again to return the media, right? You're not keeping it because that's not how sharing works.

          Anyone ever share a story or a joke with you?

          Did you give it back afterwards?

  • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:08PM (#40454307)

    Should not it be called "The Taken Wicket Policy"? What is this "Three Strikes" non-sense you speak of?

    Off for a spot of tea...

  • What about all the false positives from people who have no clue how to work wifi? Throw away the key! They teased us in school. I'm sorry but it really is a temptation to enjoy this.

    If you want free copyright material, there is usually a way to get it with a magic marker, some duck tape and a deep voice. No jail time!

  • Shouldn't that be "alleged persistent copyright infringers"?

  • Seems fair (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Hentes ( 2461350 )

    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.

    • It's a trap alright (Score:4, Interesting)

      by HalAtWork ( 926717 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:37PM (#40454721)
      Well, the trap is that they could be mislabeling infringing content, there could be content you own that you're uploading/downloading to a cloud service they're unaware of that they could flag, they don't know who's using the computer at the time, nor the IP address really. Could be automated by a trojan for all they know.
      • The guy named Alex Jones has been targeted a lot recently with "false positives". Several of his older shows have been yanked because a record company (Warner Bros?) is claiming ownership of all interviews by a man they just signed to a contract. Apparently they believe they have ownership not just to present products, but also previous products 4-5 years old. So the interviews get labeled "copyright infringement". Under this 3-strike law Mr. Jones would now be up for legal troubles.

      • by Hentes ( 2461350 )

        Which why there is a court that has the last word.

  • £20 to appeal (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:16PM (#40454405)

    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]

    • The accuser should have to eat the £20 no the accused.
    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      If your appeal is successful, that fund is refunded to you.

      • by Andy_R ( 114137 )

        One question that Ofcom haven't answered... why would anyone appeal to win back £20 of their own money, when they could sue for libel and receive unlimited damages?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You could always use Small Claims Court to recover the ï20, plus ï30 court costs and any other costs (time off work to attend the hearing, transport, photocopying etc).

      Of course the moment you are banned from having an internet connection you could just sue to get it back. It will also be interesting to see how the ban is administered. For example if someone moves house will the next person find the address blacklisted? What if two people share a flat, one is banned but the other wants an internet

  • by ravenscar ( 1662985 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:20PM (#40454479)

    For every three strikes policy there should be a home run policy. A home run would be a crime of such complexity and grand proportion that its perpetrators would get off free and clear. The US seems to have an unspoken home run policy that is frequently applied to those who work on Wall Street. The UK has a similar policy in their own investment banking sector.

    So, what would be a home run in this instance? Uploading the top 10 movies and songs of 2012 onto every web-connected machine?

    Of course I jest.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      So, what would be a home run in this instance?

      Replacing the CBS web page with a forward to another web page that actually has the entire current season of each show freely available for anyone who wants to catch up. Include links to the Amazon page to buy DVDs of prior seasons, and have non-invasive, passive banner ads above and below the video stream.

      CBS would get some letters thanking them for the new, user-friendly web site. When they eventually fix the hack, they'll get flooded by demands to change it back.

      (I want to see this year's back-episodes o

  • by Mr_Silver ( 213637 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:35PM (#40454697)

    I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!

    From the BBC News [bbc.co.uk]:

    Suspected internet pirates will have 20 working days to appeal against allegations of copyright infringement and must pay £20 to do so, according to revised plans to enforce the UK's Digital Economy Act.

    So now you're automatically assumed guilty .. and can only prove you're innocent after you've paid for the "privilege" to do so!

    • But the BBC did note how sluggishly the bureacracy was dealing with this aspect of the DEA. Anyone would think the civil service could see a disaster in the morning (contrary to the popular image, some of the guys at the top are really quite clever). It's taken them two years to do this first consultation and the BBC suggested it won't come in until 2015 (curiously just around the time of the next general election). I am tempted to suggest that the £20 fee has been inserted to ensure public outrage i
    • by bazorg ( 911295 )

      The original webpage of the Ofcom website has no indication of that cost to make an appeal. They do however welcome feedback on this consultation: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/infringement-implementation/howtorespond/ [ofcom.org.uk]

    • by digitig ( 1056110 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:42PM (#40456791)

      I can't believe the submitter missed out the worse bit!

      From the BBC News [bbc.co.uk]:

      Suspected internet pirates will have 20 working days to appeal against allegations of copyright infringement and must pay £20 to do so, according to revised plans to enforce the UK's Digital Economy Act.

      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.

  • Soon we will see just how many David Camerons, Tony Blairs and Gordon Browns there are in Britain...

  • by andy16666 ( 1592393 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:43PM (#40454825)
    "...to those who infringe above a certain threshold."

    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.
  • Very telling (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @12:54PM (#40455067)

    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.

    • Erm, Occams Razor says there is a 5th possibility you seem keen to overlook - people who routinely pirate material even after multiple warnings aren't buying music from iTunes nor are they going to, so banning them doesn't cause any lost sales. But people who get caught a couple of times might well go legit.

      Also, they have tried massive civil penalties, but a lot of pirates are poor so that they can't pay. And the legal system is so expensive and slow that it's a poor solution which doesn't scale to the num

  • Assuming they want to retain their customers, this should spark a competition between ISPs to demonstrate , ironically, their incompetence at implementing relevant monitoring processes.

    The next time a lawyer asks them for a user's data transaction list, they should be saying "Oh sure, here is a list of PING request sent from this users connection since January...."

  • by CanEHdian ( 1098955 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @01:11PM (#40455409)

    Don't forget that this is all done to "protect the Artists" (we all know the truth, but most don't).

    It is therefore reasonable to attack the artists that come out in favour.

    The Telegraph article has a photo of Adele. Don't know her opinion, but either they come out against soon or they are presumed in favour (though for 20 quid I will review their case) Boo outside their concerts. Use "xxx Kills The Internet!" Or, organize a public "CD burning" (have some real ones, have a bunch that you printed covers with a quality colour printer). The point is: make it personal. It's no longer the Grey Anonymous Regulatory Organization that is the bad guy. Give them a face.

    But: make sure to not bother those artists that come out against, to the contrary, support them.

    • by green1 ( 322787 )

      And this is exactly why the RIAA/MPAA and all the similar organizations around the world exist. Their sole purpose is to introduce a separation in people's minds between the companies that make them up, and the lobbying and enforcement done on their behalves.
      The media industry isn't stupid. they know how unpopular this all is, they also know that people are too stupid to link the hated organization to the entertainment people like.

      The only solution is to, at every possible opportunity, point out that this i

    • Why is it "reasonable" to attack artists that are in favor of systems to protect their livelyhood? Shouldn't you be attacking the pirates that motivate the creation of such systems in the first place? If piracy was not endemic there'd be no motivation to create such complicated things as a 3-strike system.
  • This is sort of like people getting parking tickets when they are not responsible for the infraction. If my 18+ grandchild parks my car illegally, I get the ticket even though there is no proof that I parked it. Things like this happen all the time, but I wonder how. Maybe a parking ticket is not considered a criminal offense like a moving violation??
    • by green1 ( 322787 )

      Depends how the law is written. When the police around here wanted to introduce photo-radar speed traps and red light cameras it actually required the government to re-write the law. The offence you are charged with if you are pulled over for speeding is "operating a motor vehicle above the posted speed limit on a roadway", however if you are caught by photo radar it's actually a different offence called "being the owner of a motor vehicle being operated above the posted speed limit on a roadway" (the latte

  • Download all the crap you want within a single calendar month, then get one letter. Wait 6 months till you need more stuff and repeat, getting 2 letters in a year and not enough to trigger the restrictions.

  • by Gordonjcp ( 186804 ) on Tuesday June 26, 2012 @02:31PM (#40456635) Homepage

    "Oh you've got evidence that this person was infringing? Well, it's a dynamic IP, so we can't guarantee that's the same person..."
    (a week goes by)
    "Oh right, so you've somehow worked out that it is? Yeah, I guess it does look like it fits a pattern of a single user. Is that definitely copyright-infringing material?"
    (a week goes by)
    "Yeah fair enough, you can apply for the anonymised details. Just sign here... and here... and here... and have your solicitor sign here... here... and, uh, here... Good. And how do you want to pay for that admin fee? Ah, we don't take Amex."
    (a week goes by)
    "Right here's your anonymised data"
    (a month goes by, while the court paperwork gets filed, lost, refiled, buried in a peat bog, posted to Azerbaijan and eventually found in the ruins of a disused hospital somewhere near Glasgow)
    "Oh, the contact details? Sure, just need you to sign here, here, and here... cool, and your solicitor needs to sign here, here, here, here and here... Lovely. Now, how would you like to pay the admin fee?"
    (a week goes by)
    "Oh, the contact details? Sorry, it's run over its time limit and we've wiped them. Would you like me to send out new forms?"

  • It's only a matter of time before everyone gets banned from the interwebs for 'piracy' and ISPs go out of business. Another brilliant idea. It makes me almost angry enough to move to Papau New Guinea and forget I ever knew about teh interwebs.
  • How do I get the first of my three strikes? Please provide links ;-)

    (Absolutely seriously, how does the ISP know what to log, and what to is infringing, and what thresholds, etc?)

You know you've landed gear-up when it takes full power to taxi.

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