UK ISPs To Send Non-Threatening Letters To Pirates 93
New submitter echo-e writes: "A deal has been made between groups representing content creators and ISPs in the UK concerning how the ISPs should respond to suspected illegal file sharers. In short, the ISPs will send letters or emails with an 'educational' rather than threatening tone, alerting users to legal alternatives. The rights holders will be notified of the number of such alerts that have been sent out, but only the ISPs will know the identity of the offenders. Only four of the UKs ISPs have agreed to the 'Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme' so far, but the remaining ISPs are expected to join the programme at a later stage. The debate between rights holders and ISPs has raged on for years. This agreement falls short of the of the proposals put forward by the rights holders groups, but the ISPs have argued that it is not their responsibility to police users and that a legal process already exists for going after individuals."
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Oh fuck off. Movie piracy is in no way comparable to physical rape. Cunt. You are one sick fucker to be able to conjure up such a story in such detail, anyway.
Re:Avast! (Score:5, Funny)
More like...
Dear Valued Customer,
Please try not to be noticed, but do continue to use a lot of bandwidth to protect our revenue stream.
There's a good chap.
Cheerio,
Your ISP
PS If you do get noticed we, most regrettably, shall be forced into the position of writing a stern letter to your mum.
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Nope. Your not cynical enough.
Did you not catch the part "alerting users to legal alternatives"
This will be a whole new stream of advertising revenue for the ISPs.
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Nope. Your not cynical enough.
Did you not catch the part "alerting users to legal alternatives"
This will be a whole new stream of advertising revenue for the ISPs.
I .. I suddenly have the urge to buy all the soundtrack music played over the tannoy at Tesco.
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Please try not to be noticed, but do continue to use a lot of bandwidth to protect our revenue stream.
ISPs don't generally want you to use bandwidth. Just pay for it.
Arrrrrrrr (Score:2)
And then I said, " ...
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It's driving me nuts!
Re:Arrrrrrrr (Score:4, Insightful)
And then I said, " ...
That's what most recipients will likely say - nothing.
So what happens after that?
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According to TorrentFreak.
...rightsholders say that if Vcap doesn’t achieve results, they will call for the “rapid implementation” of the harsh measures promised by the Digital Economy Act.
There's a 99.9% chance they're going to pull that shit on day one.
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I used to get emails and letters from Virgin begging me to download less. They advertise an "unlimited" service so they can't force me to, they just begged. I asked them to stop sending them and they did.
If that doesn't work you could ask for the letters to be printed on toilet paper so at least you could get some use out of them. Failing that just write "return to sender" on the envelope and shove it back in the box.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
I see it as basically advertising. ISPs agree to "alert[] users to legal alternatives", i.e. to send them junk mail promoting some streaming services.
Not really a huge win for the "groups representing content creators", but an agreement that ISPs will send free junk mail advertising your stuff is probably better than nothing. It's also at least targeted towards people who care about films/music/whatever, some subset of whom might actually be potential customers.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
The music industry is even paying for it £750,000 to set it up, and then £75,000 a year every year afterwards. I can't help but think the ISPs may even be profiting from this.
I don't know what happened, it's like the industry has realised it can't win, that even if it did push through what it wanted - the ability to extort money from people and block them from the age old right to trial and has basically just conceded on every point that matters.
There did seem to be a suggestion that if it didn't work then they could go back to the drawing board but that's a long way off, and if they couldn't win harsher penalties or the ability to bypass the right to a fair trial or the right to privacy this time then I'm not convinced they ever will. I suspect they've conceded that their business isn't in fact above fundamental human rights after all and that no court would let that stand in the long run.
This seems to be extraordinarily good news for once on this front, effectively one of the two most controversial measures in the Digital Economy Act has arrived 4 years late after numerous delays and now that it has has been well and truly gutted.
Maybe Google's closeness and lobbying of the current government and funding for their pet projects like Silicon Roundabout has finally paid off? Maybe the fact tech companies have far far more money than the music and movie industry is finally bearing fruit? Maybe the move of Ian Livingstone from BT to government trade minister has had an impact? Has tech finally learnt how to outplay the music industry at the great lobbying game in the UK?
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It might be that after a decade of trying hard-line tactics with them working little at best, changing to the "using honey instead of vinegar for attracting flies" method might be better.
Push too hard, it doesn't take much for UK users to move to a VPN service, and after that, there would be no hope of copyright enforcement outside of blocking VPNs like Pakistan or passing a law require all endpoints have a program installed to scan for copyrighted material [1]. I wouldn't be surprised if these Draconian m
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Silicon Roundabout
Why is everything we do so shit... so British? Maybe I answered my own question there, but the Olympics were pretty un-British so I know it's possible.
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I have no idea. I still to this day do not understand why our attempt at a silicon valley was done in London when we had an astoundingly good research base in Cambridge and that is far more easily accessible to the rest of the country to boot because it's much closer to the centre of England than London is.
Hell, Cambridge even has more than it's fair share of hipsters so it even ticked the hipster box.
I can't for the life of me understand why they came up with silicon roundabout in a shitty part of London w
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The music industry is even paying for it ã750,000 to set it up, and then ã75,000 a year every year afterwards. I can't help but think the ISPs may even be profiting from this.
£750k and £75k/year _or_ 75% of actual costs, whichever is lower. So no, the ISPs are taking a loss of at least 25% of the cost of implementing this stupid scheme.
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I guess it depends how they invoice. It's quite easy for them to cost something up for more than it actually is - assign 100 days of project time to a member of staff on it but only have them working on it in a half-arsed manner so that they're 90% working on their normal actual job.
It's not unusual for someone being billed to an external client's work at 100% of their time only working on it 75% of the time or less in practice.
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That's my concern and what I wonder, but it's not like the ISPs are oblivious to what the entertainment industry wants, the entertainment industry isn't exactly smarter than they are, so the ISPs must have grounds to believe that can't and wont happen.
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I expect most ISPs will set up their own streaming services or at least do a referral deal with one so they can use the alert letters as high value targeted advertising.
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It establishes a history of notification that is usable as evidence in court and obviates attempts by copyright violators to claim ignorance while placating concerns about abuse by copyright owners by protecting identities and supposedly not terrorizing innocents. Should the violations continue the legal consequences escalate. Did you miss that last part? They don't just send love letters. They send letters first, then they get rough.
The same scheme is in the works for the US, if they're not already doi
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Like TV licensing vans (Score:3)
If piracy is actually a problem, this may be as effective as the TV detection vans they (used to?) have roaming around, supposedly able to detect if you're watching live TV without paying the TV licence (which makes you a criminal in the UK). Apparently the high tech of those vans is... a list of people who don't have a licence. Nobody knows if they have a remote listening device like in spy movies that they point at your window, and apparently they don't even bother sending the vans out these days - they just tell you they do, and it's just as effective.
Using that logic, just the appearance of threats can get most people to comply with the law, or demands from the law that you don't have to comply with (like in "can I search your car please?"). Since an IP address doesn't identify a person, that's pretty much all they can do: send educational material, which makes people think "we are watching you", which makes them subscribe to Netflix and give up on 0-day TV shows (freshly ripped off the air).
I'd like to see "piracy" and "loss" numbers a year after people start getting these letters. My belief is that the piracy numbers will go down, but the revenue of content creators will not follow suit.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.newscientist.com/bl... [newscientist.com]
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Yes, but if they were using these techniques they would have used them as evidence in court. When asked to provide evidence they have always failed to do so. It isn't clear how they would prove it was your TV they were detecting either, rather than someone else's.
If they had real detectors they would demonstrate them. They don't, they just rely on intimidation.
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They use a much simpler method these days: The agency just has a list of every home in the country without a license. While there are some people who actually have no TV, this is actually a very rare thing indeed, so they just pick addresses at random and send someone around to check from time to time. If you've got no TV license, you can expect an inspector to drop in every couple of years to make sure you have no TV either.
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how does that work, if you don't have a tv with TUNER but you have a computer monitor and you watch content that is not over cable or sat or over the air?
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The BBC would like to close that loophole, before more people start using it, but that can only be done at charter renewal.
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They are the 3rd party company only. No need to deal with them.
http://www.bbctvlicence.com/Wi... [bbctvlicence.com]
Old site - fun and informative for the era (Score:1)
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My belief is that this won't affect a damn thing. People get sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few copyright violations, and this hasn't stopped. It will never stop or even really be reduced all that much because of how easy it is.
The only thing that I could see putting a dent in some of these numbers is for the copyright holders to make it easy to buy and download DRM-free content online. It has to be as easy or easier than the 'illegitimate' route for it to work, and fairly cheap. That's jus
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They mainly use the strategy of sending many letters to address that they think are unlicenced.
My flat has two different numbers (One based on floors, the other based on the order reached when climbing the stairs) and I received a licence sent to one address on the same day as a warning sent to the other.
For many years (until I finally told them) I received warnings to the unlicensed version of my address every few months.
Media companies are clueless (Score:5, Insightful)
Legal alternatives usually don't even exist, or are completely overpriced, or months late in other countries.
Stop trying to educate, threaten or sue people. Clean up your copyright deals so that you do synchronous worldwide launches of your content. We're in the age of the Internet downloads and streaming. Try to keep up.
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Try to keep up.
Exactly. To beat TBP, the service has to be better, or at least as good. This means:
* Timely
* Easily searched
* Good range of different qualities
* Good download speed.
* Even vaguely decent software for actually downloading the stuff.
* No mandatory streaming and/or bullshit DRM.
* A la carte purchase of individual shows and episodes.
* Sane codecs, i.e. a nice MP4 which plays anywhere.
The thing is, not a single one of the above is about price. Those are all the features that TPB offers which cu
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Indeed. Pirates have noticed this too. Once legal services become cheap, reliable and convenient in any region the number of pirates in the community drops sharply. It's a serious problem - piracy is a community, and it falls apart when half the members lose interest because they can get what they want quicker on Netflix.
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And yet, that is eventually what it comes down to, is it not? Everybody is apparently willing to pay if only A, B, C ... X, Y, Z. But rarely is there an amount attached.
Netflix launched in The Netherlands to much furore. We're a bit on now, and guess what? Most of the subscribers are still downloading, some even started downloading more; they found a series they liked, then realized that Netflix only has seasons 1 through 3, even though season 4
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And yet, that is eventually what it comes down to, is it not?
No.
Everybody is apparently willing to pay if only A, B, C ... X, Y, Z.
Yeah but A-Z very rarely exist.
But rarely is there an amount attached.
Sure there is. People still buy DVDs. To series I've come to late (i.e. where timeliness isn't an issue), I've bought the DVDs instead. The DRM is so light as to be non existent.
Netflix launched in The Netherlands to much furore. We're a bit on now, and guess what? Most of the subscribers are still downloading
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Here's the thing. As others have pointed out, IP owners don't have to share their property with anyone. They can lock music, videos, art, books, whatever in a vault and deny you access. Don't like it? Tough, that's what private property is all about.
On the other hand, at least in the USA, the copyright clause begins with the preamble "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." So, if you want to keep it to yourself, or your circle of good freinds, fine. You just shouldn't rely on copyright law to
Best Part (Score:2)
the ISPs have argued that it is not their responsibility to police users
Hey, would y'all mind exporting that attitude to us here in the US?
What happens when there is no legal source? (Score:3, Informative)
What happens if, say, the user is downloading shows for which there is no legal source? Let me give you an example:
There's a Japanese TV show, highly popular on various anime trackers, called Game Center CX. It's a live-action show that's been running for something like 18 seasons now where a comedian named Shinya Arino plays through hard and/or bad NES/SNES era games.. and it's also had a bit of an odd cycle of rights in the United States.
Initially, Kotaku (horrible as it is) licensed some 13 or so episodes from the show's rightsholder, Fuji TV. They overdubbed them.. poorly.. and released them online. Kotaku only had the rights to those specific episodes, and only for I believe two years. The show proved unpopular on Kotaku, because at that point Something Awful already had a fansub group together who were doing a much better job translating and didn't have an annoying English-language overdub. SA-GCCX released their work on Youtube, where it stayed for years without a problem. I should also mention that they only translated the episodes Kotaku did not have the rights to - episodes that could not be legally seen outside of Japan because they were only broadcast on Fuji TV and no one bought the rights to them here.
About a year ago, Fuji TV sent a mass of DMCA notices on every episode of Game Center CX that had been uploaded to Youtube, even though the show was not licensed (and still is not, with one exception that I'll mention) in the United States. Every single episode got taken down, and there was a massive scramble to get them all back.
There is ONE exception to the licensing - SA-GCCX actually got a commercial DVD released just before Fuji TV started sending out takedown notices, of their own subtitled versions of the episodes Kotaku had butchered. However, they only had the rights to the episodes Kotaku had previously licensed, and they were not the ones who sent out takedown notices on the Youtube videos. Fuji TV also sells DVD box sets of the show, but those are not subtitled, almost impossible to import, and cost a metric fuck-ton of money (I tried to buy one once, it would've cost me something like $300 for a set of DVDs I can't understand).
So now, outside of spending a ridiculous amount of money to buy a satellite package that contains Fuji TV (which I'm not sure even exists) and learning to understand spoken Japanese (tried it, lapsed when I got a job) or moving to the Tokyo metropolitan area and paying for a cable subscription, there is no legal way for me to watch Game Center CX should Fuji TV decide to go after torrents of the show. They haven't, so far, and I don't live in the UK, but I can just imagine AT&T sending me a "non-threatening" letter:
"Dear Customer,
You have been caught downloading Game Center CX, a television show owned by Fuji TV, Inc. This is wrong and you should consider a legal purchase instead at the following locations:
(NULL)"
Technically exists, the best kind of "exists" (Score:3, Insightful)
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Indeed !
Still waiting to find season 1 of "Absolute Boy" (Zettai Shonen) with English subtitles without paying a small fortune.
Amazon has one copy of Season 1 @ $65 (with Subtitles in French and Dutch, gee NO thanks -- want ENGLISH), but for how long?
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Unfortunately no matter how much you enjoy watching it you don't have the *right* to watch it outside of how Fuji TV provides it.
No one said they do have such a right. What that person is saying is that there is no reasonable legal source from which to buy the content from that the ISPs can inform them about, so this move won't help in those situations.
Can't you read?
Well I'm sorry none of those reasons give you the right to pirate.
Once again, no one is asserting any such "right." Everyone here well knows that copyright infringement is illegal, so imbeciles like you needn't state the obvious.
Now, I would argue that free speech should take precedence over government-enforced monopolies over ideas, b
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I'll be modded into oblivion, but...
Why are you entitled to watch this, and have you considered the alternative of NOT watching it?
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You could as easily ask why anybody is entitled to prevent him watching it.
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You could, if you wanted to present a strawman rather than answer the question.
Like it or not, challenging or not in a digital age, but (largely speaking) content producers (and the people for whom they produce that content) own their content, and get to decide who gets to sees it.
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Sorry but you ask why someone feels entitled, as though there's any reason at all why they shouldn't.
Content producers do not 'own' that content. They have an artificially created legal claim to it, but that doesn't mean they own it, or that they have any entitlement to prevent anybody else from accessing it.
So don't give someone shit for wanting to experience elements of human culture. It belongs to everybody.
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Simply put, if anyone with the content decides to share it with the public, then that's it; you can't exactly stop it. I wouldn't say it belongs to everyone (whatever that means), but I would say that it's not wrong for people to download the data that others are voluntarily sharing.
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So don't give someone shit for wanting to experience elements of human culture. It belongs to everybody.
Except that it doesn't.
You're not entitled to use any of the software I wrote. It does not belong to everyone.
You're not entitled to see any drawing I've sketched. It does not belong to everyone.
You're not entitled to hear any of the music I've played. It does not belong to everyone.
As it applied to Net Neutrality (Score:2)
>> the ISPs have argued that it is not their responsibility to police users
And this is one of the reasons established user policers, particularly cable and dish companies, continue to push out traditional ISPs (and are being encouraged by content providers to continue to do so). Similarly, it's no coincidence that the same parties line up where they do on net neutrality: once you're OK with metering certain types of provider content, all you need to do is meter the hell out of any non-whitelisted pr
Re: Insurance (Score:2)
... they can drop you?
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(X) Encrypt peer connections.
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My ISP has pointed out to the media companies and to the government that an IP address is not an individual and that (for example) neighbours may use a wifi access point.
Given I have an intentionally open wifi access point I'm glad that my ISP understand this, and appreciate that they wont assume that I am the cause of any illicit use of their service.
My cats can't be named as contract holders because they don't have names. They can and do however use the internet. Legally the actions of a cat in the UK are
I wonder... (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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It seems to me like downloading movies would be easier than stealing copies of them. I would think engineers would be smart enough to realize that, and act accordingly.
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legal alternatives (Score:2)
Like the $2.99 per episode a la carte offering for Game of Thrones HBO has on their website? Sweet! Thanks for letting me know, I didn't know such a legal alternative existed! ...oh, wait...
Threats and the law go hand in hand (Score:1)
Let's play a game: You show me a law without a threat, and I'll show you anarchy... and you can name your subject.
Legal Alternative #1 (Score:2)
Only 4 ISPs signed up? Bit misleading.. (Score:1)