Isp's to Target illegal downloading

kingmonkey

It can be easily circumvented by using TOR + encryption - however download speeds will be reduced + increased ISP network traffic.

piggeh

The announcement today basically comes down to sending out an 'informative letter' followed by a few more letters before the customer is cut off. I hardly think this is going to act as a deterrant. If you receive one letter filesharers will soon be browsing the forums looking for ways to mask their IPs, or those that crate P2P software will enhance how tihngs work so everything is heavily encrypted. The BPI need their IP details so if they cant get them then the whole process they go through falls apart.

TBH if they didnt rip the UK public off so much in the first place I doubt so many people would fileshare

grb55

Friends have we not been ripped off for years by the music companys.They are the ones who charge to high for there music compared to the,US. Get peerguardian2 , its free and hides your IP ADDRESS

DatabaseError

grb55, pg2 does not hide your ip from those who are downloading from you, if you believe it is giving you some 'security' you are wrong, what it does do is block connections to known (suspected) 'bad' ip ranges.
safest way to 'share' would be, i believe, https via a newsserver

tomstickland

If it's a technological battle then there's always a way.
I have some sympathy with the labels - they're the party that pays upfront to develop new artists.
However, they could never explain why CDs were more expensive in the UK than America.
Furthermore, they need to move on. The internet allows pretty much anyone with a computer and a connection to upload their music to a global audience.

A certain amount of file sharing is of benefit to an artist. There are loads of things out there that were never released. I used to belong to the mixing bowl, a p2p file sharing community that had countless hours of mixes from radio shows round the world. None were available in the shops. People will try things out that they wouldn't have bought in a shop.

Personally I like to have the original CD with artwork etc, so I buy discs of things I like. However, this is often via Ebay or Amazon though.

Sylvester

Wouldn't people just start downloading via proxy?

Would a program like Hide IP or Easy Hide IP hide who you are?

I've often thought of using one just so I wouldn't be 'watched' whilst I browsed (not that football news sites and MSE would be of much interest to ISP's!)

weegie.geek

Sylvester wrote: »

Wouldn't people just start downloading via proxy?

Would a program like Hide IP or Easy Hide IP hide who you are?

I've often thought of using one just so I wouldn't be 'watched' whilst I browsed (not that football news sites and MSE would be of much interest to ISP's!)

Maybe low-bandwidth stuff like browsing is viable for using through a proxy, but only a few people using P2P could choke a proxy pretty easily, and instead of 1GB from you to the peers, it's 1GB from you to the proxy and then 1GB from the proxy to the peers, so it doubles the necessary bandwidth.

tonyhague wrote: »

grb55, pg2 does not hide your ip from those who are downloading from you, if you believe it is giving you some 'security' you are wrong, what it does do is block connections to known (suspected) 'bad' ip ranges.
safest way to 'share' would be, i believe, https via a newsserver

Indeed, PG is basically a firewall, rejecting connections from IP addresses on its blacklist. In the case of torrents, the organisation you're blocking can still see your IP and what you're sharing by downloading the .torrent file, they just can't request that you send them any of the data.

I disagree that the safest way to share is via a news server. It's a central server where illegal material would be stored. One person uploads to it, others download from it. For some bizarre reason the MPAA etc have deemed not to go after easynews and the other providers. They could at least put pressure on them to stop carrying the groups who provide illegal stuff. alt.binaries.warez and the like are a bit of a giveaway. I've no idea why easynews and the other usenet providers are allowed to carry on hosting warez. It's nowhere near as big a problem as torrents, it's true, but they're making money basically from hosting warez. How many people use usenet binaries these days for anything else? I'd love to see statistics proving me wrong, and that alt.binaries.totally.legal.stuff has by far the most traffic.

The safest way to share is to not share anything illegal. If you do share something questionable, share it only with people you trust, not anonymous people you've never even spoken to, who could be literally anyone.

edit: I know that this is a legitimate discussion based on current affairs, and I've tried to not encourage or enable illegal filesharing. I'm pretty much against illegal P2P personally. I don't agree that people should be prosecuted for it, but at the same time I believe people should support people making Good Stuff. Support your favourite bands or whatever. My point is that if I've crossed a line in what's allowed on the site, PLEASE edit or delete my post rather than closing a thread that highlights a pretty important issue.

Sylvester

So what about things like Rapidshare? Are these things P2P?

Is it just the music industry? What about other downloads such as Movies, !!!!!!, Applications etc etc?

Seems to be alot of ifs/buts/maybes and how do the ISP's differentiate between legal and illegal?

I think this needs to be thought out alot more.

EDIT: I also agree with the buying of the physical product over a download. Having the actual product complete with artwork just feels right. It's just a shame the artist who you may appreciate sees a miliscule amount of your £GBP

weegie.geek

Sylvester wrote: »

So what about things like Rapidshare? Are these things P2P?

Nah, rapidshare is server based. You upload to a server, it hosts the file. Again, rapidshare and these things have pretty much taken over from newsgroups. Easier interface I guess. I didn't even think of rapidshare earlier, but they host almost exclusively warez stuff, so how they can get away with it is beyond me.

Is it just the music industry? What about other downloads such as Movies, !!!!!!, Applications etc etc?

Apart from a few big players in the Applications market like MS, Adobe and suchlike, nobody really has the legal clout and finances to go after people. Short of serving a takedown notice on a torrent site, they're not able to do much. The movie studios are loaded though, of course, and would and do cause a fuss. !!!!!!, although it's a massive industry, doesn't seem to attract the legal attention movies and music do. Or at least I've never heard of a !!!!!! production company suing anyone.

Seems to be alot of ifs/buts/maybes and how do the ISP's differentiate between legal and illegal?

That's the problem. I think the ISPs are just making a big fuss about it because of the paperwork and communication that needs doing when BMG request customer details from them. I doubt any ISPs will make any real effort to check up on what you're doing. They're just saying they will be to put people off.

I think this needs to be thought out alot more.

EDIT: I also agree with the buying of the physical product over a download. Having the actual product complete with artwork just feels right. It's just a shame the artist who you may appreciate sees a miliscule amount of your £GBP

Yeah, but the labels have to take money from the popular artists' sales to subsidise the ones who don't sell. It's a broken business model, and the artists have a way around it now, with itunes etc.

There are a few artists who've released things exclusively on itunes, and
there are a few who've given stuff away completely for free via their websites or/and P2P. Nine Inch Nails, Saul Williams and Radiohead to name but three. They should all be applauded for making the effort to do something new.

I'm not sure where he stands legally on it, so I won't mention names, but one person who had a tv show in the mid 90s got hold of the masters and released it all on P2P. It was a minority interest show at the time, and would be even less relevant now so it's got no hope of a DVD release, but it had/has a cult following so he put it up for people to grab.

P2P has its place (fastest way to grab Consolevania for one!) so I hope ISPs don't start throttling it. I guess any ISP who does will find themselves a lot worse off financially when people move to better ISPs, but the number of people who still sign up to Tiscali purely on price baffles me, so maybe the ISPs have nothing to fear by treating customers badly.

normanmark

weegie.geek wrote: »

There are a few artists who've released things exclusively on itunes, and
there are a few who've given stuff away completely for free via their websites or/and P2P. Nine Inch Nails, Saul Williams and Radiohead to name but three. They should all be applauded for making the effort to do something new.

Coming from someone who works in the music industry i wouldn't read too much into those artists who release their 'tracks' for free via their websites. It'll never work as a business model just purely because they have such a huge fan base in order to make free stunt releases successful.

However applauded i don't think they should, they're not doing anything new because they want to, they're just doing it because it makes them different. Nothing more.

As for the ISP's cracking down, it was only a matter of time. Any argument people put forward as to why file sharing of copyrighted material is ok doesn't carry any substance unfortunately. Long overdue imo.