I wrote to my MP a few years ago regarding some copyright issue (I think it was the proposed extension to 70 years). The reply was pretty much,
"Our party believes this and that is what we are going with"
(their stance was pretty much the opposite of what I was writing about).
I wrote a second time explaining that I though representative democracy was supposed to be about the politicians representing the people, and their wishes.
The next reply seemed to acknowledge that, but I have my doubts that I was actually represented in any way.
Voters absolutely do have a say in this. Look at how disproportionate the influence of UKIP is. Only a small number of people vote for them but it's causing enormous panic in mainstream parties and (sadly) reflecting in policy.
The voting system is hardly perfect, but if, as the young and technically literate are wont, we don't vote much, then sensible policies don't happen.
Yea, but the ones "for" it have been trying to get this implemented for the last 10 years. They have payed off the correct people, and have gotten rid of the ones who where against them.
I'm terminating my Sky account over this today. At no point is this in my interest as a customer. They took £750000 to voluntarily violate my privacy.
They obviously will have to develop a heuristic for suspicion and store suspects somewhere. If that list becomes available by accident or court order then it puts people at litigation risk. Unfortunately despite guarantees supposedly mandated by law, if you're confronted with a case then you're screwed either with respect to costs or defense.
I would suggest people start moving to Andrews and Arnold or a similar smaller ISP immediately.
This must be the mildest agreement ever, and you're in outrage? Considering the alternatives, this is amazing. The only information that rights holders get is the number of letters sent out. How is this not a win for the consumer?
"Creeping normality" also known as "death by a thousand cuts" or in the context of the "boiling frog" story - the war of attrition, lobbyists generally excel at this.
Most of us are too busy to notice and/or are underestimating the negative impact of a large sum of little policies.
This amounts to less of a privacy invasion than performed by Facebook or Google, to my mind. In addition, anyone that is under the impression their activities online are currently anonymous is mistaken. It's straightforward for rights holders to track bittorrent users to an IP, which they can then use to identify the individual.
Most of my internet traffic doesn't flow through Google's or Facebook's infrastructure (at least not to my knowledge). All of it goes through my ISP's.
On the other hand, it's not so straightforward for MPAA to identify IPs of people downloading/streaming videos directly. ISPs can, of course. Also, without the cooperation of ISPs or a shady court system (which assumes that IP in a bittorrent swarm is enough of a proof that a crime happened), it's also not very simple to identify individuals from just an IP.
"They actively monitor your connection": This isn't the case is it (for this purpose at least)? It's the rights holders that contact the ISPs with a list of IPs that they claim are infringing. All the ISPs are doing is mapping IP addresses to real addresses and sending letters? The ISPs don't actively monitor for copyright infringement...
That's how I read it - all it made me do was make a mental note to remind my teenage son to use a VPN if he downloads stuff (NB which I do not approve of, but I'm not going to monitor his internet access to the point where I could block such activity).
No, that's definitely not the case. Read the section titled "How the system will work". It specifically says that the rights holders will be doing this.
By far the single most effective solution to dramatically slow down piracy is to make all content available globally for reasonable prices, for a digital "watch at home" copy", that has none of the costs of something like a cinema ticket, and benefits from large economies of scale (especially if the content is distributed P2P, and not many central servers are needed, other than keeping a seed on all content at all time).
This education thing won't do much to turn people away from piracy. If threat of prison or bankruptcy-inducing fines didn't, then neither will this, especially when there's little to educate them about when the content people want isn't actually available in their countries and soon after coming out.
You named the real problem allright: "for reasonable prices". They're going for maximum prices. I predict a great rise of VPN in Great Britain. And about VPN: Does anyone know why my iPhone can only have a manually 'on/off' VPN when company phones can have VPN-ON-all-the-time? VPN always-on would really improve my privacy.
I'm fairly certain the industry understands the relationship between pricing and revenue. It's hardly a fair market when they're forced to compete with free though.
> It's hardly a fair market when they're forced to compete with free though
Surely, as a member of an entrepreneurial-focussed community, you can trivially see why this argument isn't valid? The content holders are only competing with free if they're offering the same service as the free service.
The games industry has managed to cleverly counter 'competing with free' by making their paid services such as Steam value-added over simply providing the same content as the free content. The rights holders just have to find something that they can add that pirates cannot. As Steam gives community and ease of storage, and Spotify gives recommendations and playlists, so too must Hollywood find something that they can give.
Netflix already goes a long way to being the Spotify of the film and television industry, but it's hampered by only being allowed to show out of date content, and having its content culled fairly often. If the film and television industry were to introduce a Netflix+ with all the newest films and television shows, then I expect that they could attract a much larger number of people at a much larger price.
Of course, they could always just sit around whining that they "can't compete with free" and stick ever greater restrictions on the public until the public finally grow sick of them and force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry.
In the music industry, there are plenty of digital download services that offer convenient and reliable distribution of DRM free audio files. Yet it's commonly accepted that their business is still severely impacted by copyright infringement, ie. competing with free.
Services like Spotify make far smaller revenues than music sales, so can hardly be considered a success for anyone other than Spotify.
I don't disagree that rights holders should make their services as user friendly as possible, but it's disingenuous to infer that will fix the underlying problem.
I'm not sure what you mean by your final paragraph. Why would the public 'force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry'? The film and television industry are the ones producing the content that the public want.
Ease of use and convenience outbids free 90% of the time.
The other 10% can barely afford food every day so there's no point in getting upset over it.
If you're wondering why they have internet then the answer is simple information is power and there's no other place on the planet where you can find so much free information.
With Cloak (getcloak.com), they now have a "on-demand" feature that will switch on your VPN as soon as you connect to any wifi network.
(TBH it's slightly annoying: some public networks have portals that will block VPN connections, so in those cases the phone gets stuck trying and failing to turn on the VPN)
They're simply too pig-headed. If you're not in the US, you'll try and watch a snippet of a late night show and routinely get a lame message about the video not being available in your region. It hardly engenders a feeling of loyalty or interest in supporting the creator/marketer.
In the past, people could at least buy Game of Thrones through iTunes per-episode or on some sort of season pass. As of this season, they've changed so the only option is a $50/mo pay-TV subscription. The one person I knew who was paying for GoT in Australia, now doesn't.
From the final paragraphs of the article this seems like a compromise agreement for both sides. The ISPs have pushed against becoming the rights holders' enforcers, much like ISPs in Australia and other jurisdictions that have been through this. While the rights holders obviously see this as a stepping stone to lobbying for greater powers - 'In the agreement, it states that an ineffective system would lead rights holders to call for "rapid implementation" of stronger measures as outlined in the Digital Economy Act.'
I don't think any of these ISPs are working in the interest of their customers though. There is nothing here that discusses the rights of the account holders to dispute these warnings or any talk of consulting with customers before implementation. And while it says that rights holders cannot use the system to prosecute individuals, surely if the ISPs are maintaining this information to send warnings a rights holder will use the courts to try to access the actual IPs eventually?
Why would you dispute someone sending you an educational letter? To tell you about struggling artists and starving music A&R men? What are you, some kind of communist? /s
Besides, you can always just ring up or email your ISP with "I dispute your assertion/implication I was illegally downloading or uploading copyrighted content."
I'm not sure if the courts would force an ISP to release the information if going after the account holder would be in breach of a prior arrangement. Besides, pretty sure it has been shown that an IP doesn't identify an individual.
The other thing is that the information isn't centralised, which means someone could just hop from ISP to ISP, never hitting the 4 letter a year limit. If you port using a MAC code, there's very minimal downtime when you switch.
It would seem to me like the ISPs have acted in their interests and the interests of their customers by heading off legislation but still not evening showing teeth, let alone using them.
The same thing was implemented in France several years ago with the HADOPI (another government body created for the occasion, probably to put relatives and friends of politicians - easy money), and the alert system had no tangible results... except that there was a massive move to VPN subscriptions after its implementation.
Looks like the UK did not learn anything from its neighbor.
Well it did put the legislators under a little ridicule when warning letters were sent to the French prime minister's home after his kids had been pirating movies (can't remember all the details).
I can't wait to read the news articles that follow when these letters get sent to 10 Downing Street.
I do want the ISP's to give away data to those organisations and I do want those organisations to go legally against all of us that are downloading pirated stuff. Its only like what 10-15m people in the UK? Go on sue us.
"... and by the way, your name is now in a database that might be made available to rights-holders who want to sue you."
That's the real sting: building infrastructure to keep tabs on who is accessing what. Once that infrastructure is in place, you only need to flip a switch in Westminster in a few months (because "the system isn't working", of course -- ever seen any rights-holder data saying piracy has decreased?) and the mass-punishment will begin.
Which is idiotic, really: the French HADOPI law was built on the same principles, and it only made VPNs more popular.
Don't celebrate just yet it may be lacking teeth at the moment but it gets their foot in the door so they can "adjust" it later.
Just look at the NSA as a good example of an organization that steadily amassed power over time.
I expect this to happen in about 3 years when the copyright holders decide it's not working (doubt anybody would actually double check) and they start making noise to give it more teeth.
England already has blocking for sites that distribute images of child sexual abuse and for sites that distribute pirate content (or that distribute torrents for that content).
These systems are separate and distinct.
Images of child sexual abuse are handled by the Internet Watch Foundation.
Pirate sites are handled by a court process.
I don't know if there is any scrutiny of the IWF, or if anyone has ever published a list of things they have blocked. And researching that list is legally problematic in the UK - if you're given a list of sites blocked by IWF how can you confirm that they were righfully blocked apart from by visiting those sites?
This is not to say that I agree with the way the UK does things. I especially do not like the amount of power that rights holders appear to have under UK law.
£3 million plus to send out a bunch of letters to, assuming 20 million UK households, what could end up being more than one in 10 of us?
Imagine they'd collaboratively invested that cash into British startups tasked with finding new revenue streams for the entertainment industry, and then worked with them to provide legal access to films / music / whatever.
They could be in a completely different place in three years. This feels like spitting into the wind.
Or imagine if they didn't waste your money at all with threats or a pointless exercise trying to supplant an antiquated business model for an industry who refuses to adapt themselves.
They are entitled to public assistance as much as the phone book publishing industry.
If the media companies wanted a creative new approach to delivering their content they would fund it themselves. They would rather use your government and your money to maintain the stats quo. If they want to stop piracy they should do it by providing a legal alternative which matches piracy's convenience.
The phone book industry does not generate headlines and gossip material for the entire nation. Like it or not, Brangelina, Bieber and their likes are the cultural backbone of our modern consumerist society, and politicians know it very well. Hence, they'll bend over backwards to accomodate their wishes.
Cultural backbone according to who? Tabloids and E news? Modern societies are composed of many sub cultures. A better anatomical analogy for awful pop culture would be a repulsive and visible contagious rash on the face.
The closest thing I can relate this to in the UK is the way they handle TV licensing. That's another government sponsored organization seemingly designed to find and harass false-positives with threatening letters. Yes, I own a screen. Yes, there theoretically exists a mechanism to hook it up so that it would receive broadcast television were you to broadcast any television in my area. But no, I'm not going to pay you for a TV License regardless of how many times you threaten to send somebody over to my house.
Similarly, I pay Lovefilm, Orange.fr and the NFL directly for access to paid content. I streamed a Game of Thrones episode to my TV here in France last night, possibly making me the first person in history to watch the show legally.
But when I head back to our house in England in a few months, I might want to watch the next episode so I'll download it. I have paid for access to it, but BT has no way of knowing this so they'll add me to their list of "Bad People".
There's simply no way they can correctly track who paid for what, so it leaves us in a situation where, regardless of whether you have a right to the content you watch, you're still labeled a criminal.
Kinda makes you wonder why bother paying at all if the end result is the same.
We did. That just made them even madder because they knew we had a TV in there and now we were lying to them about it. They're definitely sending a guy out now, you'll see.
We'd answer them and ask, yes, please do send somebody out. We'll show you around. That really pissed them off, since now we're not only lying but calling their bluff.
Eventually after several months of this, a very angry looking man came to the door, stormed upstairs, looked around a bit, searched a few cupboards, and apologized.
I often think that if they took the time and effort they spend harassing people who don't watch television and instead directed it towards making television programs that people might want to watch, they would actually get more people to pay them for a license to watch television.
Format shifting does make you, in their eyes, a bad person.
The fact that you paid for it in one format doesn't mean you're legally allowed to format shift it, especially if by doing so you have to download a torrent which involves some amount of uploading.
Old media will never win this battle. Perhaps they should focus on making their content available reasonably - having to pay a yearly TV tax plus a subscription to Sky or Virgin just to watch what might well be a single programme is ridiculous. Netflix is far better, and I use it, but its catalogue is still tiny and often released an extremely long time after a programme was aired on TV.
53 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 62.0 ms ] threadThe best thing we can do is vote, as often and loudly as possible.
I wrote to my MP a few years ago regarding some copyright issue (I think it was the proposed extension to 70 years). The reply was pretty much, "Our party believes this and that is what we are going with" (their stance was pretty much the opposite of what I was writing about).
I wrote a second time explaining that I though representative democracy was supposed to be about the politicians representing the people, and their wishes.
The next reply seemed to acknowledge that, but I have my doubts that I was actually represented in any way.
The voting system is hardly perfect, but if, as the young and technically literate are wont, we don't vote much, then sensible policies don't happen.
They obviously will have to develop a heuristic for suspicion and store suspects somewhere. If that list becomes available by accident or court order then it puts people at litigation risk. Unfortunately despite guarantees supposedly mandated by law, if you're confronted with a case then you're screwed either with respect to costs or defense.
I would suggest people start moving to Andrews and Arnold or a similar smaller ISP immediately.
1. They actively monitor your connection to be able to determine whether or not you have "infringed". This has non legitimate utility.
2. They are building a mailing database which whilst is under a mild agreement may in the future be made available under different terms.
So this is not a win, it's a tragic first step towards what we don't want.
Most of us are too busy to notice and/or are underestimating the negative impact of a large sum of little policies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog
I think!
Which is something they are already doing anyway.
This education thing won't do much to turn people away from piracy. If threat of prison or bankruptcy-inducing fines didn't, then neither will this, especially when there's little to educate them about when the content people want isn't actually available in their countries and soon after coming out.
Hollywood is its own biggest problem.
Surely, as a member of an entrepreneurial-focussed community, you can trivially see why this argument isn't valid? The content holders are only competing with free if they're offering the same service as the free service.
The games industry has managed to cleverly counter 'competing with free' by making their paid services such as Steam value-added over simply providing the same content as the free content. The rights holders just have to find something that they can add that pirates cannot. As Steam gives community and ease of storage, and Spotify gives recommendations and playlists, so too must Hollywood find something that they can give.
Netflix already goes a long way to being the Spotify of the film and television industry, but it's hampered by only being allowed to show out of date content, and having its content culled fairly often. If the film and television industry were to introduce a Netflix+ with all the newest films and television shows, then I expect that they could attract a much larger number of people at a much larger price.
Of course, they could always just sit around whining that they "can't compete with free" and stick ever greater restrictions on the public until the public finally grow sick of them and force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry.
Services like Spotify make far smaller revenues than music sales, so can hardly be considered a success for anyone other than Spotify.
I don't disagree that rights holders should make their services as user friendly as possible, but it's disingenuous to infer that will fix the underlying problem.
I'm not sure what you mean by your final paragraph. Why would the public 'force politicians to move decisively against the film and television industry'? The film and television industry are the ones producing the content that the public want.
The other 10% can barely afford food every day so there's no point in getting upset over it.
If you're wondering why they have internet then the answer is simple information is power and there's no other place on the planet where you can find so much free information.
(TBH it's slightly annoying: some public networks have portals that will block VPN connections, so in those cases the phone gets stuck trying and failing to turn on the VPN)
In the past, people could at least buy Game of Thrones through iTunes per-episode or on some sort of season pass. As of this season, they've changed so the only option is a $50/mo pay-TV subscription. The one person I knew who was paying for GoT in Australia, now doesn't.
I don't think any of these ISPs are working in the interest of their customers though. There is nothing here that discusses the rights of the account holders to dispute these warnings or any talk of consulting with customers before implementation. And while it says that rights holders cannot use the system to prosecute individuals, surely if the ISPs are maintaining this information to send warnings a rights holder will use the courts to try to access the actual IPs eventually?
Besides, you can always just ring up or email your ISP with "I dispute your assertion/implication I was illegally downloading or uploading copyrighted content."
I'm not sure if the courts would force an ISP to release the information if going after the account holder would be in breach of a prior arrangement. Besides, pretty sure it has been shown that an IP doesn't identify an individual.
The other thing is that the information isn't centralised, which means someone could just hop from ISP to ISP, never hitting the 4 letter a year limit. If you port using a MAC code, there's very minimal downtime when you switch.
It would seem to me like the ISPs have acted in their interests and the interests of their customers by heading off legislation but still not evening showing teeth, let alone using them.
Edit: replacing typo's and autocorrect mistakes.
Looks like the UK did not learn anything from its neighbor.
Well it did put the legislators under a little ridicule when warning letters were sent to the French prime minister's home after his kids had been pirating movies (can't remember all the details).
I can't wait to read the news articles that follow when these letters get sent to 10 Downing Street.
I'm warning you
Now I'm really annoyed
I'm really upset with you
.....
That's the real sting: building infrastructure to keep tabs on who is accessing what. Once that infrastructure is in place, you only need to flip a switch in Westminster in a few months (because "the system isn't working", of course -- ever seen any rights-holder data saying piracy has decreased?) and the mass-punishment will begin.
Which is idiotic, really: the French HADOPI law was built on the same principles, and it only made VPNs more popular.
I protested in the streets of London when the digital economy act came through, and I am so glad that despite it passing, this is as far as it got.
Just look at the NSA as a good example of an organization that steadily amassed power over time.
I expect this to happen in about 3 years when the copyright holders decide it's not working (doubt anybody would actually double check) and they start making noise to give it more teeth.
Lesson: Encrypt all the things.
It helps that the ISP seem to on the whole not want to cut peoples internet off, it is rather bad for business.
These systems are separate and distinct.
Images of child sexual abuse are handled by the Internet Watch Foundation.
Pirate sites are handled by a court process.
I don't know if there is any scrutiny of the IWF, or if anyone has ever published a list of things they have blocked. And researching that list is legally problematic in the UK - if you're given a list of sites blocked by IWF how can you confirm that they were righfully blocked apart from by visiting those sites?
This is not to say that I agree with the way the UK does things. I especially do not like the amount of power that rights holders appear to have under UK law.
Imagine they'd collaboratively invested that cash into British startups tasked with finding new revenue streams for the entertainment industry, and then worked with them to provide legal access to films / music / whatever.
They could be in a completely different place in three years. This feels like spitting into the wind.
They are entitled to public assistance as much as the phone book publishing industry.
If the media companies wanted a creative new approach to delivering their content they would fund it themselves. They would rather use your government and your money to maintain the stats quo. If they want to stop piracy they should do it by providing a legal alternative which matches piracy's convenience.
Similarly, I pay Lovefilm, Orange.fr and the NFL directly for access to paid content. I streamed a Game of Thrones episode to my TV here in France last night, possibly making me the first person in history to watch the show legally.
But when I head back to our house in England in a few months, I might want to watch the next episode so I'll download it. I have paid for access to it, but BT has no way of knowing this so they'll add me to their list of "Bad People".
There's simply no way they can correctly track who paid for what, so it leaves us in a situation where, regardless of whether you have a right to the content you watch, you're still labeled a criminal.
Kinda makes you wonder why bother paying at all if the end result is the same.
We'd answer them and ask, yes, please do send somebody out. We'll show you around. That really pissed them off, since now we're not only lying but calling their bluff.
Eventually after several months of this, a very angry looking man came to the door, stormed upstairs, looked around a bit, searched a few cupboards, and apologized.
I often think that if they took the time and effort they spend harassing people who don't watch television and instead directed it towards making television programs that people might want to watch, they would actually get more people to pay them for a license to watch television.
The fact that you paid for it in one format doesn't mean you're legally allowed to format shift it, especially if by doing so you have to download a torrent which involves some amount of uploading.
I am not saying that I agree with the laws.
Old media will never win this battle. Perhaps they should focus on making their content available reasonably - having to pay a yearly TV tax plus a subscription to Sky or Virgin just to watch what might well be a single programme is ridiculous. Netflix is far better, and I use it, but its catalogue is still tiny and often released an extremely long time after a programme was aired on TV.