High Court Orders UK ISPs To Block More Torrent Sites 133
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "The website blocking phenomenon has continued today in the UK, with the High Court adding three major torrent sites to the country's unofficial ban list. Following complaints from the music industry led by the BPI, the Court ordered the UK's leading Internet service providers to begin censoring subscriber access to Kickass Torrents, H33T and Fenopy."
Unlike when the Pirate Bay was blocked, none of the ISPs contested this. They did, however, refuse to block things without a court order. Looks like the flood gates have been opened. On the topic of filesharing, Japan arrested 27 file sharers, using the recent changes to their copyright law that allow criminal charges to be brought against file sharers.
Wow (Score:3, Insightful)
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What makes you think they will end with a 'slap on the wrist'? That process is simply a new one, in addition to the existing process of suing individuals. If anything, it makes the lawsuit that much better "But we gave him six chances to stop!" [it WILL be presented as a defacto admission of guilt unless you have challenged each step and been successful, which is, well, impossible] Nevermind that at best, they can only establish which internet connection was used for this possible infringement.
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The six strikes system hasn't been in effect long enough to see if the *AAs will still continue to sue the pants off of people and use any data obtained from the six strikes system against the accused.
Why wouldn't they? Given the fact that these companies have no compunctions about ruining people's lives because they violated someone's copyright, I find no reason to assume that they won't use the data against people. I mean, really, what have these companies done to deserve the benefit of the doubt?
VPN FTW! (Score:2)
Fun times (Score:5, Interesting)
When the law begins to not represent the morals and wishes of the people. The Australian tax payers are building a high speed fibre optic content distribution system that will allow content producers to sell us their copyrighted product and they have the gall to claim that we will be using it for piracy.
FUCK you content producers, I'm going to lobby the government that we should be taxing copyrighted content to subsidise the delivery system that the people have paid for,
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+1 interesting...
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And the entire music industry gathers together for a wonderful holiday charity chorale, featuring their stunning new number, "We Jump The Shark Together".
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FUCK you content producers, I'm going to lobby the government that we should be taxing copyrighted content to subsidise the delivery system that the people have paid for,
I'm a content producer and well... FUCK you, too! It's been shown via many studies that people that share music also buy much more than those that don't share it. Hollywood has made, hand-over-fist, more money each year, even when they have strings of crappy releases. This isn't a war of the content producers, insomuch, vs the public; it's the content copyright HOLDERS waging this war convincing ISPs to serve as the judge and jury to questionable connections between one computer and another. Really, I coul
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FUCK you content producers, I'm going to lobby the government that we should be taxing copyrighted content to subsidise the delivery system that the people have paid for,
I'm a content producer and well... FUCK you, too! It's been shown via many studies that people that share music also buy much more than those that don't share it. Hollywood has made, hand-over-fist, more money each year, even when they have strings of crappy releases. This isn't a war of the content producers, insomuch, vs the public; it's the content copyright HOLDERS waging this war convincing ISPs to serve as the judge and jury to questionable connections between one computer and another. Really, I could be sharing a legal torrent from archive.org with a person that's also torrenting a newly-released Hollywood movie. Both of us are encrypting all inbound and outbound traffic. Guilt by association? I don't know, but I have a feeling that if the EFF was arguing on my behalf, I'd win.
You right about your criticism of the RIAA and the like, but lets remember that these banned sites were just free loading shit bags making money from advertising or donations in return for giving access to content that they have no right to distribute.
It is one thing to think RIAA and MPAA are crap but that doesn't mean that sites like these are any better. They are just freeloading off the original artists that produced the works we all enjoy as well. At least the record companies share 0.001% (a pathetica
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I used to pirate a lot of music and also buy an awful lot of CDs. Same with movies and DVDs. Then they started suing consumers and adding those hateful anti-piracy ads to DVDs - did I pirate less? No. But I stopped buying discs. I'd like for
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Glad to see being dumb still has a penalty.
Re:VPN FTW! (Score:5, Interesting)
VPN is easy to use, we as information liberators need to educate the rest of the 85% on how to get around this.
Airvpn is the best i think, easy to use and quite affordable, as a bonus they also accept BTC
https://airvpn.org/ [airvpn.org]
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Re:VPN FTW! (Score:4, Informative)
Its good for hiding your identity, it creates a encyrpted tunnel between you and the vpn, as you request data from the internet (say from bittorrent) that request is sent through the tunnel and through there server, effectively hiding your IP and your data from the ISP. You should use a public DNS, Google has a few and changing it can be a bit challenging for someone not understanding how it works, but once you understand it its easy. Lots of documentation on the web on how to change to a public DNS.
The downside is the data needs to travel farther and through extra hops, slowing everything down.
You want a VPN that claims to hold no logs, and some claim they dont but yet still do, airvpn has always impressed me and i have never had or heard of a problem with them, they also take BTC so your paper trail cannot be traced through say paypal. For pirating software, it will work fine and you would probably even be fine without changing your DNS, though id do it anyways.
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No! Fuckin' NO!
Remember the early days of "copyright infringement on the 'net"? And no, I'm not talking about Napster. That was BEFORE Napster. See? See how nobody gave a fuck? It wasn't worth half a second on TV, it wasn't worth half a line in your local newspaper, and it sure as hell wasn't worth spending a few hundred k bucks to buy a politician.
We made distribution of content so easy that even the last dimwit could do it. And that became a problem. Because they dimwits weren't stealthy about it. And it
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We just see things on two different planes of existence, while you seem to want to protect the content industry, i want to open the flood gates.
Fact is, the numbers are far and against the industry, the more people that know the more people that will do and the less control they have and maybe, just maybe, things can change. I am for civil disobedience on a massive scale, you want to hide in the shadows and be one of the few that can get around things, i want a change, you want the way it is to continue
Big
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You can argue that content is overpriced (compared to what?), but it still costs money to produce. All the hacktivism in the world won't change that.
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Movies cost so much money because of a broken system, music cost so much money because of a broken system, information itself cost so much money because of a broken system, the system has got to break completely before it can be rebuilt
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All the hacktivism in the world won't change that.
And all the whining from the industry in the world won't make copyright enforceable. It's almost as if... they need to find a different business model, and as if... they're the ones responsible for doing so, just like any other business would be.
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All the hacktivism in the world won't change that.
And all the whining from the industry in the world won't make copyright enforceable. It's almost as if... they need to find a different business model, and as if... they're the ones responsible for doing so, just like any other business would be.
The problem is that our society is not ready to abandon the concept of copyright. If you asked a selection of people in the street I do not think the majority of the population support abolishing all copyright law.
This leaves us with the dilemma of trying to educate young people as to why to follow a law that to them, makes no sense what so ever without fucking their lives over too badly if they get caught braking it.
Copyright law though does make sense to some people who stand to gain from it and as young
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It doesn't surprise me at all that people support laws I believe are unjust because those laws benefit them. If we had a certain group of people in society who, by law, could walk in anyone's house and steal a certain percentage of his/her belongings, a number of people in that group might support such a thing simply because it benefits them.
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Yes, but by no means anything close to what their asking price is. I actually know a few producers, good producers (well, if you share my taste in music), and they manage to get by without the industry. The cynic in me would say, they get by not despite but because they also got by the music industry...
They're not raking in millions. Granted. We're not talking 40 millions a year. More like 40k a year. Which is still pretty decent money where I'm from. It's also not just sitting around and waiting for the mo
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This isn't civil disobedience, though. I highly doubt that these people are downloading because they want to "fight the system" or whatnot, and at the same time I'm convinced they would cry bloody murder if they made any content and someone asked them to hand it over for free. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a "free content movement", and I'd be the first one to chip in and publish my code. Well, ain't much to promise, most of it is already somewhere on a publicly available repository, but that's not the po
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Bringing them down would be nice, but it just ain't worth the risk and price.
I'm sure it'll happen eventually, anyway. Copyright is almost impossible to enforce at this point, and if they try to create draconian laws, all they'll do is anger innocent people and turn them against them (though, since the average person usually only cares about him/herself, that would be when something directly affects them).
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I'm done with "educating the masses". The masses don't want education. They are not hungry for wisdom, they're just greedy. They want everything and for free. Nothing else. And this isn't worth risking even more limitation to my freedoms, sorry.
I think you hit on it, rather indirectly, but nonetheless, you did. The public doesn't seek wisdom, but they seek knowledge (information). The same signs that signal to a bird that a tree's fruit is ripe are the same signals that tell a horny fella that women drink for free. Knowledge + experience = wisdom. The more one removes themselves from the ordinary, the more novelty and similarity they'll find. Hence, the wisdom is attained with age (assuming one engaged enough in life, aka, tried and got rejecte
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They don't even seek information and knowledge. They just want "free stuff". I wouldn't mind if they wanted knowledge, if they wanted to know how it works, how to make something like this, if they wanted to learn and build on what they learned. But that's not the goal. The goal is not betterment, the goal is not improvement, the goal is simply consumption.
And I'm done with trying to pander to that crowd. You want to learn, come to me. You want my aid to build something, come to me. You want something for fr
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I'm done with "educating the masses". The masses don't want education. They are not hungry for wisdom, they're just greedy. They want everything and for free. Nothing else. And this isn't worth risking even more limitation to my freedoms, sorry.
Sure, everybody loves getting something (of value) for free!
But that NOT what's driving piracy and downloading. The leeches only account for less than 10% of those downloading stuff illegally. The huge majority is what the media companies only can describe as "good customers", i.e. people buying media significantly above average. They download to get access to stuff, not to get it for free. Many even buy the stuff if and when it finally becomes available for purchase despite that they already have it from i
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VPN is easy to use, we as information liberators need to educate the rest of the 85% on how to get around this.
The way /. has degenerated throughout the years, I'd say 85% is generous.
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How is this done? (Score:1)
Are these sites pulled from those ISPs' DNS servers? Do they block the IP address (which could easily be changed)? Non-Brits want to know.
Re:How is this done? (Score:5, Informative)
Are these sites pulled from those ISPs' DNS servers? Do they block the IP address (which could easily be changed)? Non-Brits want to know.
Well when TPB was blocked a few months ago it definitely wasn't DNS(I use open DNS and couldn't access it normally). I think they must be blocking the IP address, easily negated by the various proxy sites that popped up straight away, and which still give easy access to TPB without the next need for TOR or a VPN or any such obsfucation techniques. The same thing will happen with this next round of blocks. The ISPs that grumbled the last time probably aren't bothering this time around, because they are aware of the fact that it won't really affect anyone other than having to alter a couple of bookmarks before carrying on as usual. I'd be willing to bet that there has been no decrease in torrent traffic since the Pirate Bay block, and there will be none this time either.
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if its a dns level thing then its an easy bypass for *nix people just install their own dns server and redirect dns requests to 127.0.0.1
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changing the DNS doesn't help, the IP address is blocked at ISP level. The usual workaround is to google alternative web addresses that point to the same final IP. for instance :- if "www.thepiratebay.org" is blocked by your UK ISP, you'll probably find that "http://thepiratebay.ee/" will get you to the same place and not be blocked. I hope that helps.
If an IP address or range is blocked at the router, it won't matter what you name it, it will be blocked. If www.tpb.org and tpb.ee go to the same place, then a block on that IP address will take both of them out.
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"Cleanfeed". Built for blocking child porn, of course. Traffic to specific IP addresses is redirected to a deep inspection system.
Re:How is this done? (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not actually a DPI system, though your close: It's a transparent HTTP proxy. The packet filter just directs traffic to port 80 on blacklisted hosts to the transparent proxy box, and the transparent proxy then filters on specific URLs. If it were a true DPI system, requests would still appear to originate from the correct IP address and we wouldn't have seen the wikipedia incident happen. Transparent proxying changes the source IP, which can be very disruptive to anti-vandal/troll systems and really mess with log analysis.
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Back when I worked with transparent proxies in the 90's, keeping the source address intact was a fairly standard feature...
Anyway, their setup depends on the source address changing. Otherwise return routing would miss the inspection-box. So even if their transparent proxy/DPI box has the "keep source address intact" option, they cannot enable it.
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The solution to that is obvious. If you can route traffic *to* the suspect IP into the inspection box, you can route traffic *from* it there too! If it's heading for the customer, it's still got to traverse the ISPs network.
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You can, but it gets extremely tricky.
To get the traffic to the box each ISP just listens to a BGP announcement from the Cleanfeed "ISP". Then all of the ISP routers automatically do the right (wrong) thing, no further configuration needed. To get the return traffic from the content provider, the ISP needs to do source-based routing (policy routing). This means adding configuration to at least each edge router which might receive traffic from one of those banned content providers, and in many cases the core
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It's not DNS, as others have said it's done by IP. However, on our backup ADSL connection which is provided by Xilo (on a exchange with no LLU) we don't have a problem, so it appears to be only for the big ISPs, and not for smaller ones that use their infrastructure.
AAISP don't do any filtering either. I was sorely tempted to move from AAISP back to BT as their FTTC package was cheaper, but this is making me rethink that idea. Not that I pirate anything, but it fucks me off when my ISP tells me what I can a
Dear Judge (Score:2, Funny)
I have good reason to believe that criminals use the telephone system to distribute plans to commit crime. It is time to shut down these criminal aiding telephone systems.
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And So It Goes. (Score:2)
And the roots of the next step in the evolution of non-corporate-sanctioned file-sharing began.
Im done pirating (Score:5, Funny)
This is a blessing in disguise - Its a chance to stop stealing content (lets be honest here) and buy stuff through legit channels. The reason I started pirating in the first place is that a 700 mb xvid was vastly more convenient than going to the store, bringing home a dvd wrapped in annoying plastic with easytear perforations that never work and sitting through an FBI warning with nonsensical forced previews. This is all resolved, Hollywood has listened and there are tons of ways to stream movies (only the movies and non of the crap). Piracy is gone in my world, I thank Hollywood for listening to us.
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I fail to see how copying something makes you steal it, and I would certainly not have paid for most of those things I downloaded. Therefore I don't see how those companies can even claim a loss in that case, and I doubt I'm an isolated case.
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I think the only reason hollywood listened was because the piracy forced their hand. Without piracy, there would be no netflix or hulu.
Re:Im done pirating (Score:4, Informative)
They'll come around eventually, Spotify and other streaming services are now over half the music market in Scandinavia and HBO seems to have finally taken a whacking with the cluebat and introduced HBO Nordic, a streaming-only service that'll have new episodes within 24h of airing. Sure they could use a few more whacks with the cluebat, but it's a start. Give it another 5 years and I think it will have spread just like Spotify has. Movies will be last because they still manage to get people out of their chair and into cinemas for unskippable commercials and to buy overpriced soda and popcorn on top of expensive tickets, but if TV go streaming they will too. In any case, there's no reason to stop pirating. It's no surprise these services have launched where piracy is strongest and where the Pirate Party has made most progress, they're damage control. You just have to keep at it and drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
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We need to make more of this Cluebat you speak of and gangrape a few companies...
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ISP blocking...??? (Score:1)
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Reluctantly, in this case. It took a court order.
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21627614/ [bbc.co.uk]
Futile (Score:1)
On the internet all it takes is one hole. One weak link in the chain.
This will achieve nothing. It will solve nothing.
Determined users will find ways around it if they have not yet. This will not generate revenue and just feed the hate for the MAFIAA [mafiaa.org]
It's not even about legality. Look at any banned substance, if there is a demand for it, there will be a supply. This ruling follows a token law that has no bite, has no teeth and is actually counterproductive. I did not even know about those other two sites
Well... (Score:1)
.. I do not know about you, but I am done pirating.
On a more serious note, do the people making those decisions recognize the amount of ill will created by their actions? If I was not so old and did not care the new shiny everyone and their mother needs to have, I would probably start pirating out of spite...I am certain teenagers don't do things they are expressly forbidden from doing..
But maybe I am ageist; I do teach the old folk basic computer skills for my volunteer work. Last we
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I would probably start pirating out of spite...
I did.
I wasn't that bothered about it, had a few albums. Everything else was happily bought CDs and Blurays etc.
Then Labour started lauding about the digital economy act, smug Andy Burnham going on about the poor music and movie companies, like a red rag to a bull and bought pretty much nothing since except hdds and a few 2nd hand PS3 games.
So I downloaded the lot :-
Music - Every flac discography I could possibly think, want, maybe slightly consider - got them all.
Emulation - Spectrum, Atari ST, Amiga, SNES
Not the direction I hoped for (Score:1)
We seem to be heading towards the direction of streaming content, both audio and video, where the consumer pays $X per month for a selection of content. That's fine if you prefer that model (and it's a decent model - there's plenty of content that's probably only worth a single view/listen anyway), but unfortunately this seems to be the only legal outlet that's available for legit, digitally-distributed movies and videos from the big guys.
In other words, I still can't legally download TV shows or movies in
Correction (Score:1)
"On the topic of filesharing, Japan arrested 27 file sharers, using the recent changes to their copyright law that allow criminal charges to be brought against file sharers."
According to TFA
"Existing legislation against uploaders of copyright content already provided for penalties of up to 10 years in prison and a 10 million yen ($108,202) fine."
Given that all the arrests were for uploading or otherwise making available pirated goods, I would say this comes under the pre-existing law, and not the October 1s
Damned be! (Score:2)
Re:the future... (Score:5, Interesting)
Or possibly sneakernet. You can get 1TB external USB drives cheap now, and can fit a lot of piracy on one of those. Every school, college and workplace will have a Knock-Off Nigel ready to swap drives.
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They now have external USB drive enclosures with built-in wifi now. Check out the Startech S2510U2WF. You don't even have to find Nigel, just look for the WIDROP SSID.
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Well, I know what's going to be duct-taped to a bunch of li-ions and sitting in my bag at a future furmeet.
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We used to do this with Commodore 64 floppies in high school back in the day...
Might sound funny, but we'd do this with vic20's on cassette tapes. Then again, BASIC being what it is, you can also just write things out on a sheet of paper or several dozen of them and hand them off to someone.
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hehe, back in the day my locker partner and I both joined one of those music clubs and made sure we didn't duplicate any choices both for the intial stuff and the required 3 purchases. They aren't such a bad deal under the right conditions :)
PS, most of those cassettes lasted longer than much of our digital stuff will ... still have some over 30 years later. I think the extra few cents i spent on good tape was worth it.
At the rate we are going the pirates will have become shoplifters to minimize risk ;O
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...so i tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time.
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720K disks. Not that they were up to date even then, but I had a cubic meter of them. Quite literally. An old Atati ST collector gave them to me: A box one meter on each side, filled to the brim with 720k floppies. So many I could just give them away. So I did. Loaded with (via spanned ZIPs) mostly pokemon stuff. Website rips, roms, emulator, whole episodes in realvideo format. It was the in thing back then.
That was at school. Now I'm in employment, and it still goes on. The technicians exchange 1TB drives.
Re:the future... (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't buy music CDs or movies until I have downloaded and sampled them first. The harder they make it for me to download the less I will buy, or at least the less of their wares I will buy. Those other guys who give away their stuff freely get my attention and money instead.
Yeah, I'm the immoral bastard who gets up and makes coffee during advert breaks instead of being glued to the screen paying for my free entertainment. What a dick.
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Movies I can understand, but music samples are everywhere on iTunes, Amazon, Spotify, etc.
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I don't buy music CDs or movies as doing so would support fundamentally evil organizations which seek to strangle the progress of humankind under the influence of their own greed. I feel guilty even listening to that stuff even if I didn't pay for it, as I feel a better approach would be to support independent artists in the unlikely effort of breaking the cartel. But I do support independent artists, given the opportunity. Magnatune, Jamendo, and Band Camp are great ways to accomplish this.
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Actually, it just means less piracy, which in turn will mean more money for the entertainment industry to use to bring us great movies and music.
Even if I buy the second part of your argument, I'm not sure it's worth it. Torrrents are used for tonnes of legal things. Creative commons movies and linux distros for example. Torrents are a great alternative to ad-filled slow upload sites. If you have a multi-megabyte file that will be interesting to ten or more people, they're just the best option.
Granted, this story isn't about blocking the bittorrent protocol. The problem is, however, that many of the "pirate" sites run really nice public trackers th
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Hey, I'm pretty sure if we GOT great movies and music for our hard earned money, few would complain. Right now, looking around, the price the copiers pay match pretty much the value of the product.
Personally, I'd say they should get some change back for their time.
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It's a little more complicated than that in practice, but the general idea is sound.
If you a) don't download infringing content in the first place; and b) do not ever share your internet connectivity with anybody else who might, I might suggest that you'd be pretty safe from harassment.
Re:Easily Avoided (Score:5, Insightful)
Not downloading is no protection or excuse. There are countless examples of people wrongly targeted. BBC Watchdog covered it a few years ago and had an expert example the computer and router of an elderly couple who were accused to make sure a) they didn't do it and b) they were not hacked. The detection system is broken and targets people at random.
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But hey.... if it makes you feel better, you are feel perfectly free to shout at me that I was wrong if that turns out to be the case. Until then, however... wait and see.
I expect the number of genuinely false allegations (that is, innocent people whose networks go completely unused by people whose actions they are not prepared to be held acc
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Okay, their detection method is fatally flawed for reasons I will present in a moment, but first I'll make the more general point that they have never sued anyone who bothered to turn up and content it in court. They know their evidence is weak and would be shot down, so they rely on people just paying up and drop it the moment you challenge them.
Their system works by gathering IP addresses from a tracker. Many trackers now seed themselves with some random IP addresses to break this. TPB has had doing it fo
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You seem to have completely overlooked that I was only talking about false allegations being low with regards to people's networks who go completely unused by people whose actions they are not prepared to be held responsible for.
If they were hacked, or more than one person uses that router and they aren't prepared to take responsibility for that person's actions, then of course all bets are off.
But in typical slashdot pedantry, people here are far more worried about exceptions than they are in noticing
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It's a little more complicated than that in practice, but the general idea is sound.
If you a) don't download infringing content in the first place; and b) do not ever share your internet connectivity with anybody else who might, I might suggest that you'd be pretty safe from harassment.
Try not to feed anoymous trolls. This moron is posting about people being arrested for file sharing but this thread is about sites being blocked which has nothing to do with prosecution or being arrested.
Given the choice between:
1) A campaign of over the top prosecutions on parents just because their kids downloaded something illegally because the kids don't agree with the concept of copyright.
2) Trying to play whack-a-mole to block access to sites that specialise in distributing content they have no legal
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There is a very easy way to avoid being arrested for file-sharing ... don't do it.
Currently this is modded Score:0, offtopic. How on earth is it offtopic?
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Because GP's voice is counter to the belief some Slashdotters hold which conflates piracy of games/movie/software and other consumer media with sharing of knowledge and information. There's a vocal (and popular) contingent among us who would elevate the act of downloading and consuming the latest movie without compensation to the level of scientists freely sharing data or dissidents networking with each other without encumbrance.
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Personal attack aside (nice how our enlightened /. community allows personal attacks on some ideas?), you've not made a counter-argument or explained how media consumption (1 way exchange of information) should be elevated to the same level as idea sharing (2 way exchange of information). In simpler terms, explain how a guy getting the latest Batman movie and watching it in his bedroom is morally and ethically defensible to the same degree as a scientist sharing data with another scientist, or a political d
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To distill it even further, explain why you believe information for consumption is morally equivalent to information for collaboration. Slashdotters tend to conflate the two just because they are all "information", but I beg to differ.
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I agree that all source code should be always disclosed. The user has the right to know what a program is doing in his system, but using copyright is th
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How on earth is it offtopic?
file-sharing != copyright infringement
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Considering how those file sharing accusations reek more and more like carpet bombing, I wouldn't count on it.
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I'd rather risk jail time than pay the absurd prices they levy on media. Have you seen the price of a Blu-Ray in Japan?
IF you are actually in Japan... can you explain to us how their election system votes and how any person under 30 in Japan can vote for a party that supports these draconic measures? I really can't get my head around it and the only explanation I can find is a rigged system where the bigger established parties always win, with the help of the Usual Suspects (old people that vote for a party because they always voted for that party).
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An easy solution (for now at least) is to change ISP.
Unfortunately Virgin has a monopoly where I live. I am 2.2km from the BT exchange and ADSL/ADSL2 don't work. The most I can get is about 5mb but it is unstable and cuts out every few minutes.
I regard a VPN as part of the cost of internet access because Virgin has been broken for a long time now.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm in a similar situation, max 8mb estimated with BT line, get a pretty consistent 100mb with Virgin.
I'm considering a VPN - AirVPN and VPNUK are a couple I've been recommended - AirVPN looks to have a control panel to setup port forwarding, which is nice for torrents. How do you find yours in terms of speed and ease of use?
Cheers