Net users face web ban for illegal downloads

[NottsFan]

Does anyone know for a FACT that if this ban comes in, you can only get banned if you have downloaded something after the ban was put in place, or have they got the power to ban anyone who has downloaded illegal files any time previously?

[+Nik Louch Subscriber²]

Never even heard of this ban. But you can't go making laws and enforcing them on what people did in the past!

[NottsFan]

Does anyone know if this ban act goes ahead, can they only ban people who have downloaded illegal content after the ban is in place or can they ban anyone who has previously downloaded illegal content?

[MiG-]

Does anyone know if this ban act goes ahead, can they only ban people who have downloaded illegal content after the ban is in place or can they ban anyone who has previously downloaded illegal content?

After.

Can't introduce a law and enforce it on days before the law existed :p

I really think the guys who think this **** up have lost the plot. Really, there has to be a way to stop the majority of piracy, yet these clowns come up with some right hair brain schemes. At the end of the day you need to stop the distributors, and find out how they got the material in the first place.

Seriously, banning the downloaders? After they ban people off the internet it'll go back to copying cd's and buying em off "Knock off Nigel". It was common place before the internet and it'll come back if they actually managed to successfully implement the crap they talk about.

Ah well, they need cleverer people working for em. :p

[rpgfan]

I wonder how this would affect things like....VoIP (mistakes happen with "suspicious" packets), legal movie downloading through something like Netflix, etc.

In my opinion, this would be rather stupid on the part of ISPs, but I can understand why the proposal was made. Just as others have said, the idea of constant monitoring is rather invasive.

Whatever happened to the Land of the Free? Oh, right... That only referred to the point in history where the US asked for its independence from Britain and got it. :/

Despite living in the US, I hate the place (and not just because of Bush). I think I'll be leaving the country when I'm older...

[BorgDrone]

It does sound like a good idea to the average joe non-IT person but in practice those who work in IT know this is just comically unworkable, oh yes lets get 200000 people sat around checking what everyone downloads from the internet everyday lol.

Ridiculous and ignorant fools.

Also i was under the impression if you got cut off you can't just ring up BT or any other ISP it is a blanket ban for your name & phone number etc so all ISP's would be banning you.

[tunafish]

Well this is just stupid. If they made the stuff cheaper to purcahse then we would not be forced to dam well download it. We are plain ripped off in the UK for prices of music/movies and software etc.

[Stonkwell Bogtrotter]

Won't happen. Non story. It's only a green paper, which means it will simply fall by the waste bin.

Oh and the so called ?1billion...ahem, "lost"...that money will simply be spent elsewhere within the economy. So not loss to anyone,even our wonderful Government.

[Brian M. Veteran]

merged.

[Azusa]

ok if this get pushed through and this is a big if what will we the internet using public do?

[PENGUINwithM4A1]

And this isnt implemented for surfing child porn ... =/ ****ed up laws inc

[CelticWhisper]

Because everyone knows you NEED the Internet to infringe copyright.

Apparently they've never heard of LAN parties. Apparently they've also never heard of DVD burners, GPG, and the postal service.

Let me spell this out for you, copyright industry: I rip all my CDs to lossless formats (lossless...do you know what that means, corporate fat-cats? It means there's no quality gain to be had by buying the CD, which means even less incentive for people to pay you), wrap them up in .tar archives with no compression (lossless encoding already squeezed 'em down as far as they'll go, believe me, I've tried), and then encrypt the .tar archives with either my friends' public keys or a symmetric algorithm like AES-256 whose key I'm careful about giving out. Then I burn the encrypted files to data DVDs, slip them in envelopes, and mail them to friends.

I've already done this with a friend of mine who lives out west. I walked him through setting up MacGPG and creating a 4096-bit key pair. He sent me his public key, I encrypted about 15GB of music and video files for him, burned them to optical discs, and mailed them out with some hard-to-find candy bars (Abba Zaba, which interestingly enough is only available even further west, but my girlfriend was in California and picked some up...anyway, it doesn't matter) as a care package. Anyone intercepting the mail wouldn't be able to see what was on the (unlabeled - I'm not stupid) DVDs and only he was able to decrypt the files.

The copyright industry can rail against the internet all they want. As long as copper wiring exists we'll have coax, twisted-pair, and other kinds of cable over which to trade copyrighted material. Better not tell them about fiber-optic: imagine being able to trade CD rips at the speed of light! Oh, and wireless! Heaven forbid people set up wireless neighbourhood mesh networks, they'll be able to infringe copyright (all over heavily encrypted connections, of course) with their neighbours without ever having to leave the comfort of their own homes!

The industry is fighting a losing battle. They need to adapt or die gracefully. This thrashing-and-lashing death-throes business is just no good.

[ShaneSparky_YYZ]

Thats just ignorant. So tired of you trolls, really Neowin has gone down the tubes, what a shame to.

Where's the tubes? I don't see any tubes? :woot:

Btw, read this 5 Reasons Why Illegal Downloaders Will Not Face a UK Ban from TorrentFreak

[Umbrello]

it would back up the courts for years if they even prosecuted 1% of those that file share ..sounds like a scare tactic ..besides how much jurisdiction do they have in forcing isps into complying?

[Noveed]

Where's the tubes? I don't see any tubes? :woot:

Btw, read this 5 Reasons Why Illegal Downloaders Will Not Face a UK Ban from TorrentFreak

Great read, not sure how france have some sort of system in place then as they are part of the EU.

Anyways i doubt it will come to that

ISPs will loose customers and money and whichever government introduces the legislation is going to loose votes, lots of votes too, anyone with a slight sence of howto use the computer and internet will have downloaded something illegally or will intend to in future. I cant really see any internet saints out there.

[Lyric]

I don't see how this is even possible, the only way they could track you having downloaded a ton of music is if you've downloaded a huge amount of music and share it all. When I finish downloading a movie or album I move it to a non-shared encrypted (hidden) folder...the people who get caught by the MPAA or RIAA I bet are the people that have downloaded a ton of movies and not relocated the files to different folders (non-shared folders) so therefor they are seeding them 24/7 most likely and they don't even know it.

So the RIAA / MPAA goes and "browses" their shared folder and see's over 2,000 music files & a ton of movies and then they trace the hosts IP and contact the ISP and get their address and other information and come raid their house or however they go about contacting these people.

But if it wasn't for these "seeders" no one would beable to download the movies or music in a decent time-frame.

Then again there are always "proxies", and I'm sure the people that make the software like LimeWire and BitTorrent will probably develop some sort of encryption for their software in the future to prevent them from even knowing what you are downloading.

[grik]

Imagine 6M without Internet ehehhe, well if those 6 use 2 or 3 PC?s a day, imagine the connections beeing terminated.

Kaputt Internet

I mean this guys doesnt know the whole porpuse of the internet since the begining of the internet is to share, started with porn, now music, but still porn of course.

[Tha Bloo Monkee]

I just had to add this.

:laugh: :laugh:

4,381 years! Wow! :p

[7Dash8]

The industry is fighting a losing battle. They need to adapt or die gracefully. This thrashing-and-lashing death-throes business is just no good.

Adapt to what...giving away their stuff for free?? I hate all this BS kids seem to have learned to say everytime copryight comes up "oh businesses need to adapt to new business models". What kind of business model can work against FREE STUFF? How can a company compete with a movie or a song which costs nothing...???

[Kushan]

Adapt to what...giving away their stuff for free?? I hate all this BS kids seem to have learned to say everytime copryight comes up "oh businesses need to adapt to new business models". What kind of business model can work against FREE STUFF? How can a company compete with a movie or a song which costs nothing...???

Microsoft seems to be doing quite well against linux...

[CelticWhisper]

Adapt to what...giving away their stuff for free?? I hate all this BS kids seem to have learned to say everytime copryight comes up "oh businesses need to adapt to new business models". What kind of business model can work against FREE STUFF? How can a company compete with a movie or a song which costs nothing...???

Once again, not our problem. The technology is there, it's being used, and it clearly cannot be stopped.

If you have an answer to your question I think there are some record companies who would like to hire you. Fact of the matter is that there may be an answer to the question. The record companies may very well be simply doomed to go out of business in an age where their services as middlemen are not required.

The only thing I can think of that would work against free stuff is "free stuff + for-pay bonuses." Treat songs like advertisements, give away low-to-medium bitrate copies of everything, downloadable as zip files containing the song (no DRM, industry wiseasses) and a text file with links to online stores to buy either the CD or lossless copies of the files.

Alternatively, there is that thing called "customer good will" they might want to try to recultivate. I like buying CDs. I like having the disc in my hand, flipping through liner notes, getting the whole package deal. But I will NOT buy CDs from companies that treat customers like criminals and rail against technology that they don't understand and can't stop. Last CD I bought was the new E.S. Posthumus album from CDBaby. No DRM, fast delivery, good customer service, and I got the impression that the company was actually happy to have my business instead of feeling entitled to it. They'll get me as a repeat customer. Sony, Warner, Universal, and EMI will not.

[7Dash8]

Microsoft seems to be doing quite well against linux...

Wrong analogy. Linux is not an exact replica of a Microsoft OS. Pirating software and entertainment is essentially identical to the stuff being sold in stores.

Once again, not our problem. The technology is there, it's being used, and it clearly cannot be stopped.

Wrong on both counts. By not taking any personal responsibility and just pirating everything that isn't nailed down, all people are doing is driving big business to keep pushing for harsher and harsher Internet laws. Who do you think will win?

Piracy hurts everyone. It hurts the people who you steal from, it hurts the artists they represent, and ultimately it will come back to hurt you and me.

Maybe it's time people actually grew up and realised there are no free meals and freedom does not equal free.

[CelticWhisper]

By not taking any personal responsibility and just pirating everything that isn't nailed down, all people are doing is driving big business to keep pushing for harsher and harsher Internet laws. Who do you think will win?

The users. All that needs to happen is for technology to continue to progress to make the laws against it irrelevant.

Filesharing becomes illegal? Everyone starts encrypting.

Cryptography becomes illegal? Advanced steganographic technology arises.

Internet connections monitored across the board? Sneakernet makes a comeback, people trade hard drives and burned DVDs (or BD-Rs once they come down in price).

Piracy hurts everyone.

I'm not sure that's necessarily true.

It hurts the people who you steal from,

But I'm not stealing. I'm infringing copyright. The worst that can happen is that I'm taken to civil court for copyright infringement. I will not face any criminal larceny charges because I haven't stolen anything. I just happen to have infringed on some copyrights.

Also, you say that it hurts record companies like that's such a bad thing. The instant they started suing grandmothers, children on welfare (it did happen), and people who don't even own computers, the gloves should've come off and we the users should have set out to purposely decimate their business by pirating everything they sold on a massive scale and giving it away on street corners to drive their executives to being penniless and naked on the streets, eating out of dumpsters and dying forgotten in back alleys. They deserve it.

As it is, though, some of us had doubts or figured the lawsuits were just a short-time stunt. Now, 5 years later, it's clearly no game.

Point is, I'm glad piracy hurts record companies. It makes me want to pirate more, because I want to hurt record companies. I'm not talking about the truly independent record companies like Magnatune, Spinefarm, Nuclear Blast, Napalm, musicians sold on CDBaby, and other such organizations - they have nothing to fear from me. They don't sue, they don't DRM, they treat their customers with respect and actually sell products that are a decent value for the price asked. I'll support their businesses as best I can as often as I can.

Big record labels, though, like Sony, Warner, EMI, and Universal, I will pirate from as much as possible deliberately to damage their bottom line as much as I can. I will encrypt. I will route anonymously. I will avoid Internet channels as much as possible to avoid 100% the chance that they can find me by snooping connections. I'll send DVDs or HDDs full of encrypted copyrighted material through the mail. To say that I don't care that it hurts the record company would be a bigger lie than the cake. I do care. I care that it hurts record companies because I'm happy that it hurts record companies and I definitely want to keep doing it. I can't wait until they go bankrupt. It'll be a happy, happy day.

it hurts the artists they represent,

Not nearly as much as they hurt those artists. This is a big reason why I want to see the companies go under. They screw their musicians time and time again. Promise big, nail 'em on the fine print. The sooner these vile scum go out of business, the better.

Yes, I know that there will be collateral damage. I know that some artists will stop making music as a result of this. Hopefully it will be mostly those who play for money and not so many who play for the love of music. Even some of the latter will probably give up their work, but there will be more in the world - those already on indie labels, those who are still up-and-coming, those who haven't even gotten started yet - who will benefit from the demise of large record companies because the only ones left will be small labels who either:

A. Need their musicians as much as the musicians need them and thus have no choice but to strike fair deals, or

B. May be big, but learned from the mistakes of the Big 4 and aren't willing to take the same risks that they saw bury the likes of Sony.

and ultimately it will come back to hurt you and me.

How, exactly? Anti-filesharing laws can be made irrelevant by new technology. The loss of certain musical performers will be unfortunate, but there will always be new ones that take their place (hell, that's just the nature of music as it is already). You could argue it would damage the national economy, but if you're talking about the US of A, this idiotic Iraq war has already f*cked that up far worse than the loss of revenue from manufactured tripe passing as music ever could.

Maybe it's time people actually grew up and realised there are no free meals and freedom does not equal free.

No free meals, but there is free music. Remember that food is tangible and requires real materials of which there is a limited supply in the world. Music can be copied theoretically infinitely and no resources, other than some space on hard drives and a few watts of electricity to transmit it over the various data connections involved, are consumed.

Edited February 13, 2008 by CelticWhisper

[grik]

Adapt to what...giving away their stuff for free?? I hate all this BS kids seem to have learned to say everytime copryight comes up "oh businesses need to adapt to new business models". What kind of business model can work against FREE STUFF? How can a company compete with a movie or a song which costs nothing...???

Adding better quality and making yourself want to buy the product. You buy a CD or DVD not jsut to hear it, its a little box of memmories. What im trying to tell you is that people dont jsut buy CD?s or DVD?s for the music in it, its a special piece of something concrete that you want to give or have cause you really like it.

Your thinking low on this, try to open your mind, better Marketing can and will make better revenues for the labels, they just need to see what the consumer wants besides the tunes inside.

I still buy CD?s to offer people or to me if i really really like im sure i want to have something more concrete than the music itself.

Regards

[+mrbester MVC]

Great read [torrentfreak article], not sure how france have some sort of system in place then as they are part of the EU.

Because they're French and as such have final say on whether they adhere to any EU-wide laws. The fact that they adhere (and pursue those countries that don't) when it comes to laws that specifically benefit France over and above other countries, possibly excluding Germany, is completely coincidental... :whistle: