Six Major ISPs Join P2P Crackdown Comments

This is ISPs trying to get around their stupid business model of selling 'unlimited' (a seemingly unambiguous word abused beyond recognition) broadband for prices that are too low and then complaining when people actually use it as such. Well, that and parasitic media organisations trying to screw the consumer and hold on their flawed business model too.

I sense a renaissance for newsgroups...

To anybody jumping ship over this news, I recommend http://ukfsn.org/

While it (generally) remains cheaper to buy a high quality physical CD from PLAY or CD-WOW or the like & then rip to MP3/WMA (at whatever quality you want) than it is to download low quality DRMd digital copies then I have absolutely no sympathy for the record companies at all.

Re: a subscription service; I personally don`t think this is the way to go at all unless you buy A LOT of music and you have a LOT of time to listen to it all - PAYG works best for me (maybe 4 - 6 albums a year + free internet radio :) ).

Out of curiosity it will be interesting how much stuff you have to download before you are targeted by one of these letters. One wonders if it'll be just the bigger users, who download 100s of gigs a month, or everyone. I myself use uTorrent, and can download between 0 to 12 gigs a week. I shall keep an eye out for a letter...

I've heard mention of the idea that there should be ISPs set up specially for downloading, whereby you pay a small premium for complete unlimited, uncensored download limits.

I believe the term "hypocrisy" is used very well.For me the main issue is concept of price that people are forced to pay in once country versus another.

Perfect example on amazon. National Treasure 1 and 2 Bluray on amazon.com = $40 about £20 but here in the UK we pay £29. Who is screwing who. Global release dates would also help.Another complaint is that our privacy is being taken away. I just hope other companies like Be can stand up to BPI and the likes and defend their clients. I almost feel sorry for the other ISPs if they can, the minute Virgin send me a letter is the minute I phone up Be.


Another consideration around the downloading of bad quality mp3s is a solution to maybe sell songs/albums in FLAC or some other lossless format. I know the files are bigger but broadband is getting faster for generally the same price that of course barring f'ed up traffic management policies which get mentioned in the 'What you Need to Know' section rather than what I would calling the contractual binding "Terms and Conditions"

Evil one user reported getting a letter saying someone in his house downloaded a single song. The music type of song was one he would never even download so maybe case of hijacked wifi...Agree with Martin usenet with the ability to use ssl is the way, however I know isps can use certain software to decode ssl traffice albeit it being a little hard to manage based on the sheer volume of traffic.

I think of file-sharing as a multi-headed Hydra, you chop off one head and lots more grow in its place. I think file-sharers will just find new, more subtle, ways of getting their mp3s & movies.

The other problem I see is that legal movie & music download services just aren't good enough at the moment. I can think of loads of instances in the past where iTunes hasn't got the song I was looking for in their catalogue. And the movie situation is even worse with nobody offering a comprehensive catalogue of films, from all studios, available for legal download online.

i listened to this on BBC news - maybe i heard wrong, but the newsreader claimed "among a list of government proposals include a flat monthly 'download whatever you like' service for music and films".

i was about to build a throne and lay a red carpet for whichever politician said that - somebody higher up the chain must have seen sense.

oh, and Zeus now has a new best friend: Lossles/Uncompressed music has to be the way forwards - DRM free Apple Lossless on iTunes isa must, now, i don't know anybody who sells lossless music.

How are they going to monitor encrypted p2p connections?
Zeus: SSL, which has been superseded by TLS theses days, both using combinations of RSA, Diffie-Hellman, ECDH, SRP, PSK, DSA, ECDSA, RC4, Triple DES, AES, IDEA, DES, Camellia, RC2, HMAC-MD5, HMAC-SHA, MD5, SHA, MD2, and as such decrypting them is well into being an NP-complete problem, the computing power required to break the encryption is astronomical, which is how it works. So no, ISPs, or anyone else, cannot decode them. If in doubt, use a larger modulus and exponent on your public key.

so how do you distribute that securely.. making it irrelevant imo.

I would pay a flat rate fee, as long as they had all types of music not jus mainstream but more indie albums and mixtapes.

It's a smart move by BPI (dont see what the ISP's get out of it) as they dont sue, so regardless of if the wifi was hacked (easy!) or anything else the account holder can still be punished easily.

Here's the thing - IMO this has nothing to do with ISPs and their "unlimited" business models. If I wanted, I could stream iPlayer and spend loads of cash at the ITMS and download LOADS of gigs each month. Case in point - my housemate lost his Steam folder and had to re-download about 40GB worth of LEGAL games.

So it's not about bandwidth. It's about the studios having a big moan and bullying anyone they can. As has been said already, they're always one step behind and blocking one thing just forces pirates to change tech. They should focus on improving their own product to the point where the balance tips in their favour.

Hold on just a minute... If I was to use a well known file storing web service to store my documents, pictures & music etc. which amounts to quite a collection - many GB's! (legal I must add) and I upload / download on a regular basis for backups and so forth - does this mean Virgin Media or similar are going to look at my personal stuff and restrict my internet speed for doing it? Is it me or is this completely illegal and an invasion of my privacy?? Data protection act must come into this spying somewhere!!

If i buy a CD then download the the songs on that CD using bittorrent, is that illegal. Havent i just purchased the right to have an MP3 of the music and isnt the method i use to get the MP3 irrelevant. I am just wondering if i got a warning letter and sent back a receipt from HMV would I be let off.

It's absolutely outrageous but this has been on the horizon for quite a while now, you can expect the legislation being banded about for next year will be another disaster. The ISPs are certainly no saints and deserve our absolute scorn for their deceptive marketing, poor infrastructure reinvestment and unfair usage policies, but make no mistake - it is the government that is forcing them to capitulate to the whim of (largely) American corporate interests here. The government have repeatedly threatened them with heavy regulation if they didn't fall in line.

This whole affair is just the ISPs saying "Look Mr Brown, we're doing our best, honest guvna!" to limit the damage to themselves. I suspect they will send out a fair few scary letters but enforce the harsher penalties loosely in practice, and when inevitable false-positives start hitting people with threatening letters and loss of a critical infrastructure service they paid in full for, it will get viciously slapped down and consumer lawsuits will begin (crack out the popcorn!) Failing that almost certain outcome, technology (as always) will evolve to level the playing field - P2P services will force heavy encryption, increased anonymity and traffic pattern obfuscation. The key thing here is that they don't even have to make it an impossible job for the ISPs/Goverment/BPI, just too costly and difficult for them to continue pursuing effectively.

@ Stephen - Zeus is actually correct. You are thinking about decryption in terms of brute forcing key combinations to break the cipher, which I agree is next to impossible with common modern algorithms like AES or TwoFish. However, your ISP doesn't need to brute PKI keys because it acts as a permanent MITM with any connections to or from your modem, and has the capability to monitor the complete TLS handshake process to obtain all the data they need - the cipher, keys, hashes, MACs, pseudo-randomisations etc - to get at the contents. They certainly can't do it en mass (for technical and legal reasons), but it's within the capability of any network administration... there are even COTS products that do the legwork for you.

Computer Security 101: There is and never will be such a thing as a completely secure encryption algorithm, protocol, system or network. SSL/TLS is both secure and efficient in many situations, but like everything else it's not a magic bullet.

ok if im going to be hounded by the BPI FBI MPAA various ISPs till i stop downloading there is no need for me to have a "high speed connection" anymore is there? what the hell im i going to do with 50megs download speed when im not allowed to download anything? i on average download about 20gigs a week on HD films alone not to mention a few albums from itunes and torrents on a regular basis. i would happily pay a download tax just to shut them up we have been paying it for years anyway on tapes and cds why not the net?

I have to say that 90% of my downloading is for (mostly) older games. Things like Dark Messiah, Riddick etc. I'm not aware of any service that offers the option not only to download music and films, but also to download a large collection of games, bar things like Xbox market place etc.

@ Zeus: If they're gonna send out a letter to everyone who has ever downloaded a song, then they're in danger of getting rid of large portion of their customers in one move. This has the potential to seriously back-fire in the faces of the ISPs, and it's only a matter of time before some enterprising soul capitalises on that, and comes up with a "download friendly" set up.

The only reason I use Tiscali is that it's one of 3 ISPs I can get in my area. The others are BT and Virgin, which dosn't bode well. Thing is at the end of the day sharing illegal files is just that: illegal. It's hard to argue a point for fairer usage when that usage breaks the law, however dumb it may be...

@Simon

This used to be exactly true in the UK (in america you're allowed to make a legal backup) however just recently the copyright law has been ammended:

It used to be that buying a legal CD, bringing it home and ripping to MP3 was illegal "OMG you copied it (for personal use) A copy OMG!" similarly, if you buy a song on iTunes, then copy it to your iPod, that was illegal! (SERIOUSLY!!!!)

The law has now been updated so that if you own the physical media, you can make as many personal copies as you like (rip to MP3/FLAC, copy to MP3 player) Similarly if you purchase individual tracks legally, you can copy those to MP3 players.

The best bit: If the CD is one with the f***ing stupid copy protection that stops it playing on a PC, you're legally allowed to download the MP3s - by any means - so you can play it on PC/MP3 player!!!

Look folks, lets not get to deep into technicalities here. We all have a degree of influence here by hitting the respective ISP`s where it hurts,ie `in there pockets` ! If we were all to cancel our contracts with the offending parties and jump ship to an ISP which has to chosen (and is committed to) not being part of this oppresive intrusion we can really shake things up. This attidude we have to taking things lying down so to speak is partly the reason why we pay more for things in this country (ignoring tax of course). Hit them hard were it hurts most, this will cause panick on a grand scale, and who knows things may change for the better !
Can anyone recommend a good ISP out there who is prepared to be brave and make a fortune to boot ? I'll go first !!!

@ Overdrivesdl: The problem is that for some of us in more rural areas, we can ONLY get the larger ISPs, ie the ones that are causing all this fuss in the first place. Smaller ISPs that are less likely to use throttling etc, don't have the coverage needed to supply a service to those of us not living in a large town or city. We have little option but to stick it out.

Man-in-the-middle attacks by the ISP against SSL are possible using an SSL proxy - basically, the client thinks it's talking to the target site, but the proxy intercepts it. The proxy then negotiates with the target web site.

I don't know about Usenet and BitTorrent clients, but a stock web browser would scream if the ISP tried this. The browser would be expecting a certificate from ebay.com (or whatever) but would actually get it from your ISP.

Well I'm sure you've all read the new post Be told BPI politely get lost.:)

@Life must admit I do kinda like your way of thinking there but someone invading my privacy no matter their intentions is still wrong.

@Evil thats what I'm hoping that everyone will just get tired of all the admin work which I hope costs a lot of money and I hope the result is even less revenue when people do leave.


Copy protection, monitoring of things by ISPs is always gonna take a back seat 'where there is a will there is a way'
The idea is they need to get rid of the 'will'. Give people what they want like lossless format downloads, pay the same price for DVDs here in the UK as in America and so forth will definitely reduce that.It will always be a loosing battle until the global population is treated fairly. I will admit I download a lot but most of what I download I would not buy anyway. I go and watch most of the great movies in Cinema sometimes more than once and I do my bit in buying legitimate media.

Often when this argument comes up there seems to be a prevalent opinion that record companies are staffed exclusively by Mercedes driving executives and that they deserve what they get. Even if this were true, it cannot be used to justify theft and certainly not when said companies employ thousands of people across the globe from the people who package cds to web designers to sound recordists and the artists themselves, all of whom eventually get the bulk of their income from record sales.

I cannot condone what the BPI are doing, but the issue is one of invasion of privacy and not of the morality of illegal downloads. As a professional software engineer my income depends on people paying legally for the products I develop, so I can certainly sympathise with others in the media industry who are losing money due to theft of the products that they work so hard on. The fact that some people perceive media as too expensive is no justification for theft.

Just a follow up to my earlier comment. I have now cancelled my BT contract and will be switching to Be in the next couple of weeks.
Vote with your feet folks (if you can !)

Yet another instance of our freedoms being slowly but surely taken away from us.

@Pazza - no your ISP wont monitor your downloads and if you do have backups of music etc online downloading them should be fine.

From my understanding of how the BPI will monitor P2P, is by searching for Artists appearing on P2P programs. I havent used Kazaa and the like for years and years, only use Bit Torrent myself, so will use that for my example.

There are many free sites that are search engines for torrents that show you torrents hosted on different sites for you to connect to. When you connect to a torrent the torrent client will show you the IP of all the connected computers, similarly your IP will appear on every other PC your connected to. So if you have BPI search for a torrent and they connect to that torrent then your IP will be visible to them if you are connected to their PC.

So with that theory you may or may not be caught so to speak, it all depends on you being in the right place at the right time. There are programs that try and filter out IP addresses that are known to be bad, whether they work or not Im not sure, if the IP there checking from isnt in the banned list then you've had it.

There are private sites that you can go to and they can be safer, but again someone from the BPI could be a member so they maybe equally as unsafe as your general free torrent.

Well its has been a long time coming. only thing is then why should we pay for huge amount of money to Virgin or BT for fiber optic line and 200MBPS speed. I dont need that much speed to read trustedreviews.com, DO I?
I totally agree with Andrew Marshall illegal downloading is theft no question about it and you can't justify it. but I don't like the idea of getting my privacy breach like that. whats next CCTV at every house, A.I. equipped wheele bins, Irish scanner on every tarin and platform like Minority Report.
I won't say that I don't do a fair bit of downloading myself with torrent, after all I'm no saint.
But I've for blockbuster US movies always go to the cinema (hell I even saw thoes new CCTV they got inside theater in surrey quay Odeon even before the news hit the papers) and I dont listen to thoes BPI artist's song anyway. the ones I downlaod are items that I can't get hold of in DVD's or any other medium with english subs. yes I'm a big fan of Japanese, Korean drama and japanese anime. The dramas I can get hold of with good subs are all imported from USA and I have collected quiet a few but most of them never gets a release in US. And I have loveflim membership so which ever anime gets UK release I rent them out. but for stuff that are japan only, the only way of getting it is torrent. If they air the show over here or release DVD then I don't need to do that but I guess you can't get everything you want. well then again this all can be just me trying to justify myself.
I guess then I'll just wait for my ISP to say that they gona disconnect me bcoz I (didnot) download Amy Drughouse. OH! I guess not. I'm safe for the moment as I'm with Be*.

Theft, n. Dishonest appropriation of another's property with *intent to deprive him or her of it permanently*. [From the Oxford English Reference Dictionary]

Copyright infringement is not theft. Neither is it stealing or robbery (stealing is synonymous with theft, robbery is similar but usually involving coercive force).

Apples: Theft is a criminal act that involves permanently depriving the owner of their property, which copying bytes from one system to another does not achieve. To treat file sharing as theft is to cheapen the very definition of a crime that is damaging to our entire society. Do you really equate someone listening to music or watching a film they didn't pay for with someone stealing your car? How about removing money from people's bank accounts, snatching a pensioner's purse or taking drugs from hospitals?

Oranges: When someone infringes copyright, the legal content owner may not be compensated as they should be, but they are also not losing ownership or the right to distribute that property. Nor do they incur any cost to replace lost material. There is the rather flimsy lost sale argument, but a *potential* lost sale does not equal deprivation of property ownership.

Downloading content freely without any intention of compensating those who created it is a civil wrong to be addressed. But please do not get sucked into this propaganda that it's equivalent to theft; taking away something someone owns. It's not the same thing at all, and it's a damaging over-simplification to suggest that it is. That is precisely why copyright terminology exists in the first place... an apple is not an orange, even if both are rotten.

We can only wonder how many people would be using P2P today if an affordable system had been created that legally and safely offered the same range, quality, speed, flexibility and permanent ownership that illegal file sharing does. The content industry wilfully chose not to provide this service, seeing online distribution as a risk rather than an opportunity, and instead lashed out at their entire customer base. The black market simply expanded to fill the gap in demand that they failed to supply. Now it has so much momentum that they are losing out... let me crack out my tiny violin in a show of sympathy for their incompetence, greed and lack of vision.

@life

Your argument is pure sophistry. The issue is not one of copyright, but whether it is fair to obtain media for free when the owners of that material to not wish it to be so.

You claim that a crime is only theft when it "permanently" deprives someone of their possessions, but a dictionary definition is not the same as a legal one. To illustrate, you use the example of someone removing money from a bank account. This too is digital information, and covered by a bank's insurance but I doubt that you would claim that such an act is not criminal. Someone has to pay for that insurance and that someone is the consumer of the bank's services. Similarly, someone has to pay for the security precautions that media providers believe that they need because of the lost sales argument that you say is flimsy. Where do you think the money for that expenditure comes from? From the CEO's pocket? Hardly.

I do not make this argument as someone "sucked in by propaganda", but as someone whose income is directly affected by lost sales due to piracy. A company's failure to respond to a changing marketplace is indeed their failure, but it cannot excuse theft. I cannot believe that you think such behaviour is acceptable, or moral.

This is stupid. what about web-based <a href="http://www.fileswire.com">P2P</a> services like FilesWire. This can be used from any computer to share files so how can they be sure who is sharing what.