UK ISPs Asked To Block More File-sharing Websites 89
another random user writes with this news from the BBC:
"The UK's major internet service providers have been asked to block three more file-sharing websites. The BPI (British Phonographic Industry), which acts on behalf of rights holders, wants ISPs to prevent access to Fenopy, H33t and Kickass Torrents. The BPI alleges that the sites are illegally distributing music. The ISPs told the BBC they would comply with the new demand, but only if a court order is put in place. It follows a separate court order in April which saw popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay blocked in the UK. ... The letter, which was not intended to go public, was sent to six ISPs last week, namely BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk. It is understood that the BPI is hoping all three sites will be blocked before Christmas — far more quickly than the process has taken previously."
They have an industry association for... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, never mind; misread that.
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Yeah.. I had to read it three times, wondering why the British Pornographic Industry cares about music.
Re:They have an industry association for... (Score:4, Informative)
70's porn music? (Score:1)
Come on, really?
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So it begins (Score:1)
Better start setting up some fast VPNs, guys, because it won't be long before this gets out of hand.
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I object to these sorts of bans because they don't work. Everyone in the UK can easily access the pirate bay through a mirror hosted by the UK pirate party.
However, not agreeing with the content is very different from attempting to block websites that almost exclusively serve illegal content. It would be the same as saying that a country that has made murder illegal is just in the habbit of banning acts it doesn't approve of.
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You misunderstand the point being made. This is about enforcing an existing law, not about arbitrary censorship of whatever the hell the big media organisations want to get rid of.
If you want to argue that it's a stupid law and should be changed, then I'm fully in agreement with you. You can argue that this is a stupid method of enforcing it, and I'd agree with that too.
But it's still a law being enforced.
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Some of us don't even need to use a mirror - we use Fastnet for our ISP at work here in London and they haven't blocked it.
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The Pirate Bay blockade is pathetic - if the best they can do is a poor King Canute imitation, I'm really not worried.
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Tin foil hat slipped has it?
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Which part of the "Hopefully before Christmas....Quicker than before" makes you think we need to get VPNs up *quickly*?
Welcome to the UK, where your Police State moves that slowly it never catches up to you!
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LOL, I was being just a touch facetious. But to be fair to the ISPs, they have said they wont do anything without a court order, which does become a little closer to "police-state".
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LOL, I was being just a touch facetious. But to be fair to the ISPs, they have said they wont do anything without a court order, which does become a little closer to "police-state".
Although I agree that blocking TPB et al is pointless, I still don't think you can call obeying a court order being in a police state.
Is anyone really surprised by this? (Score:5, Informative)
And I absolutely love "The letter, which was not intended to go public" - so they want ISP's to filter traffic for them without all the hassle of legal process or negative public opinion.
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If it's the thin edge of the wedge, it must be a wedge of Swiss cheese.
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Well, no one should be surprised by this. No one will be surprised to learn that the banning of TPB has made no significant difference to the amount of traffic to it [bbc.co.uk]. The BPI like the RIAA sees every download as lost revenue, where the real link is that the most prolific downloaders tend to be the most frequent purchasers of media as well. The biggest impact on reduction of illegal downloading has been the introduction of legal services such as iTunes, Amazon MP3 store, etc..
Of course, posting this here is
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the most prolific downloaders tend to be the most frequent purchasers of media as well
Thanks to the solid scientific basis of your claim, I'm now convinced.
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Listen, I am also tired of all this. Anecdotal evidence bla, bla, bla....
OK, so I just read a political news where a survey was performed in a certain country and the results are making quite a noise in the media and political circles. What was the number of people surveyed? 570.
Now then, my "anecdotal evidence" about the statement of Waltrek that you object of is based on approx. 300-350 people I have personally investigated (colleges, friends, relatives and acquaintances). YES, the biggest pirates are the
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A quick google will show you that there's been quite a bit of research, all of which do in fact say that the most prolific downloaders tend to be the most frequent purchasers of media.
I can't find the link, but a couple of years ago a book publisher who, like most people, bought into the myth that pirates are all freeloaders commissioned a study to see how much money pirates were costing.
A book took a couple of weeks to hit the net, so the researchers looked at sales figures to see how much of a drop there
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http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharers-buy-more-movies-121018/ [torrentfreak.com]
http://torrentfreak.com/piracy-boosts-cd-sales-071103/ [torrentfreak.com]
http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharers-buy-30-more-music-than-non-p2p-peers-121015/ [torrentfreak.com]
http://torrentfreak.com/bittorrent-piracy-boosts-music-sales-study-finds-120517/ [torrentfreak.com]
Yeah, I'm lazy. And the site does have its own agenda. But the articles all link to the original sources, so should be verifiable if you're curious.
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Precedent (Score:2)
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And they just cannot understand how anyone would not want to watch/listen to the movies/music produced by their members. The same as the UK TV Licensing cannot understand how any household could live without a TV set, so assume that anyone who does not have a TV licence is watching TV illegally.
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And they just cannot understand how anyone would not want to watch/listen to the movies/music produced by their members. The same as the UK TV Licensing cannot understand how any household could live without a TV set, so assume that anyone who does not have a TV licence is watching TV illegally.
If you don't have a TV you don't have to pay for a TV licence. Similarly, if you don't want to pay to watch a movie or listen to a piece of music, don't.
The movie/music industries exist because people want to consume their products. You always have the option not to consume them.
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Yes, that's true, I think. Just today I saw a funny article here [wordpress.com], which begins by claiming that piracy is the reason that the newspaper industry is on the decline. (The site is focused on the music industry, but the author seems to blame piracy for every bad thing that happens in the world.)
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Here is a precedent for censorship...boycott the fuckers, no more DVDs, CDs and cinema for me.
How is stopping someone from reading/viewing/listening to your own stuff censorship?
If I write a poem and lock it away in a drawer, how am I censoring you by not letting you read it unless you pay me?
Yes, I know you said "a precedent for censorship" but they are just weasel words.
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The Imperial Wack-a-Mole Games are officially open (Score:1)
I wonder big the list is of industries/products that throughout human history have disappeared because of changes in technology.
I wonder if the phonographic industry realises that they are on that list and marked in red "pending".
I wonder if they realise that once an industry/product is on that list you can never come off.
BTW this list is called human progress.
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I know people on slashdot think that everything can be made for free, but especially in the case of films, that simply isn't true. The industries are there because one man and his laptop can't make a big glossy Hollywood film.
As to whether big glossy Hollywood films need to be made, that is a different question. But as an awful lot of people se
Torrent sites are distributing (Score:2)
For various definitions of "distribute"
Your mileage may vary
Dear BPI, (Score:5, Insightful)
Fuck off, you do not hold any copyrights yourselves, therefore you are NOT LEGALLY QUALIFIED TO COMPLAIN.
Yours Sincerely,
Everybody.
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NO STOP ABORT!
Don't listen to them BPI. Please continue your research in the name of your artists. Please continue you send these letters to ISPs. Thanks to your efforts I just discovered a new torrent site.
God bless the BPI and all you do for your artists by publishing a list of places we can pirate their material.
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True story:
At one ISP I worked at, the abuse@ DMCA notices were filtered into a separate mailbox, and was only read / searched to find links to download. This was, of course, not in USA :)
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That isn't a very meaningful limitation. All posters here are copyright holders, as you hold the copyright of your own post. Anyone who has ever drawn a picture or written a paragraph is a copyright owner. With the exception of infants, I don't think you would be able to find anyone who is *not* a copyright holder.
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Close. It's theoretically true. In practice much of what is said on Slashdot is a carbon copy of something somebody else said. So point 1. You can't copyright something that isn't actually yours. Point 2. Copyright law states that one must actively announce that the content is copyrighted, that it is not to be replicated without consent, and any breaches must be actively fought.
Summary: 'All posters here are copyright holders' - Not true in practical terms, just because we all /can/ be, doesn't mean we all
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Your points are all missing the point: you can't copyright an idea, only its presentation. If I say the same thing you said in exactly the same words, I violate copyright. If I reword it, I'm not in violation.
You hold copyright to the comment you just wrote, unless you cut and pasted it from someone else's comment. Likewise, this comment is automatically granted copyright to me.
Your using patent to explain your incorrect view of copyright is likewise 100% ignorant. It doesn't matter how obvious my nobot sto
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And, as usual, slashdotters flip flop between a legalistic approach and "I don't care what the law says, I care what's RIGHT" depending on their personal stances on any particular issue.
Yours sincerely,
Somebody
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Fuck off, you do not hold any copyrights yourselves, therefore you are NOT LEGALLY QUALIFIED TO COMPLAIN.
Yours Sincerely,
Everybody.
As the discoverer of this amazing legal loophole, I trust you have informed the ISPs concerned so that they can rebuff teh evil BPI with a few well chosen words?
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Actually I didn't. Recent precedent proves it.
I quote from a comment I made on the Authors Guild -v- Hathitrust (11 CV 5361 (HB)) decision a couple weeks ago:
ABKO Music Inc. v. Harrisongs Music, Ltd., 944 F.2d 971, 980 (2d Cir. 1991) (“[T]he Copyright Act does not permit copyright holders to choose third parties to bring suits on their behalf.”
Well, I guess... (Score:3)
BT, Sky, Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk have just driven the final nail in Trust's casket. I've just called O2 and told them where to put their SIM contract.
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Switch to Andrews and Arnold (HTTP://www.aaisp.com) they have an anti censorship policy.
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It's not reasonable for an entire country to suffer because of a handful of people.
If the ISPs are blocking child pornography, who exactly is suffering apart from the consumers of (illegal) child pornography, about whose "right" to view child pornography I personally don't give a flying fuck?
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It is a fundamental breach of contract not to deliver.
Unfortunately, court orders can overrule contracts, sidestepping breach-of-contract in the process.
Besides, which is worse: obeying a court order, or being shut down completely?
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I would call it a PFCP: Partial Filtered Content Provider.
Any service provider who sells you a package which includes INTERNET and filters it without your knowledge or consent is committing FRAUD, since you don't know what filters are in place or what they're filtering, you are not getting what you paid for by any stretch of the most deranged imagination.
Market forces (Score:1)
Just take your business to plusnet
It's cheaper and they don't block any sites.
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Plusnet are owned by BT - which is why I left them.
Rise of encrypted net (Score:1)
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That's an idea - Firefox with HTTPS everywhere, and an automatic failover to Tor for everything else using FoxyProxy. Time to upgrade my net connection and start an exit node...
Can't read that with a straight face (Score:2)
"It follows a separate court order in April which saw popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay blocked in the UK."
PMSL! The block is about as effective as putting a cat in a wet paper bag. Why are they wasting the time of the ISPs and legal system persuing this pointless venture? Who at the BPI is actually stupid enough to think this is effective?
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It doesn't need to be effective against everyone. It just needs to be enough of an inconvenience that those who can't figure their way around it will instead sign up for something like Netflix or Spotify.
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All of them were smart enough to be able to use a bittorrent client and browse bittorrent sites.
They will be smart enough to use whatever plug-and-play method the internet will invent to circumvent these bans.
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All of them were smart enough to be able to use a bittorrent client and browse bittorrent sites. They will be smart enough to use whatever plug-and-play method the internet will invent to circumvent these bans.
"whatever plug-and-play method the internet has already invented to circumvent these bans".
FIFY
Remember that time... (Score:4, Informative)
Remember that time where the internet was freedom? Where one could create a website, it was subject to law, like any other act. Remember when the providers of the internet buckled under the pressure from "the powers that be". Sites could be blocked, freedom quashed, because somebody didn't like the content of a site, because somebody thought it aided in crime and law breaking, despite not breaking any laws itself.
When we start forcing ISPs to block sites, based on anything other than law, we open gates that will never be closed. One leads to more, more to many and eventually freedom on the internet will be dead.
This is the key issue we are dealing with. It is getting overlooked because "piracy is bad". We have many other questions to ask: does blocking these sites even /help/ the problem of piracy? this [bbc.co.uk] suggests not!
Is piracy really the problem, perhaps the intermediate companies between consumer and author's of content are to blame somewhat?
Why do we have to constantly start making much larger problems while trying to fix smaller ones. Fix the music industry, the film industry, the E-book-monolopy that Amazon is building, fix the problem at the root. Provide consumers with a modern, suitable market in which they pay the author's of content for their products, for a price that represents the true worth of that product. Allow the consumer to have freedom with that product to use it in any device, in any form. Provide a good service, that is value-for-money, and people /will/ use it. We've seen it work before [torrentfreak.com]
Leave the internet alone, once the gates are open the wars begin....
(This is one army, preparing arms... [internetde...league.org]
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Of course I remember that time. We're still in it. They have the freedom to be asshats and the power to change the law. We have the freedom, and indeed a duty, to disagree with and resist their conceited laws. Nothing's changed on that front, it's all business as abnormal.
"When there is peace, the warlike man attacks himself" - that's Nietzsche, and his point is that there really is no peace. There's always some war, somewhere, with someone. And there are no winners or losers either... just those who are st
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EFF like org in UK? (Score:1)
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Not quite sure, perhaps http://openrightsgroup.org/ [openrightsgroup.org]
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Finally, lets see whether CD and DVD sales soar (Score:1)
how'd we get to this point? (Score:1)
I moved out of the UK 13 yrs ago, and im no longer part of the daily culture, but I get surprised at how far my homeland has gone in terms of nanny state/police state/big brother.
How did we get to this stage? Is it Camerons gov. that has done the damge, or did blair set the groundwork? I used to take great pride in my nationality, but this is one conversational topic where you hesitate in admitting your British.