Regurgitated Vomit, Guardian Style
February 12th, 2008Internet users could face disconnection for illegal downloads
Sarah Knapton
The Guardian, Tuesday February 12 2008Internet users who illegally download music and films could lose their access to the web under legislation aimed at cracking down on those who flout piracy laws. Powers being drafted by the government will compel internet service providers to take action against customers who access pirated material.
The Department of Media, Culture and Sport will recommend the plan in a green paper on the creative industries to be published this month, a source with knowledge of the paper said. Under the new sanctions users will face a “three strikes” regime. A warning email will be sent for the first offence, followed by suspension from the service and finally termination of the internet contract.
Shouldnt that be, “download and you are run out”, or “share music and its LBW” as in cricket? Three Strikes laws like this insane RIAA driven drivel come from the USA and have no place in civilized societies.
These laws, as we all know, are actually drafted by the MPAA and the RIAA, not by British legislators, who are as computer literate as an apple. Collectively.
A draft copy of the green paper said the government “will move to legislate to require internet service providers to take action on illegal file-sharing,” although it has yet to decide if information on offenders should be shared between the ISPs, the Times reported.
The government has come under increasing pressure from the music and film industries to penalise users who download pirated files. Although piracy is illegal, prosecutions are rare.
Like we keep saying about the Guardian; they always take the side of The Man in these issues. Any newspaper that seeks to be taken seriously would never repeat this twaddle unchallenged, but this is exactly what we expect from these idiots, and this ‘report’ is 100% in character; i.e. not journalism, but simple, unthinking regurgitation.
For the record, there is no such thing as a ‘pirated file’. This is the irrational language of the RIAA. ‘Piracy’ is the act of making a copy of someone else’s work and then SELLING IT FOR MONEY. That is what piracy is; it is nothing more than that. File sharing is not piracy. Copying files between computers is not piracy. The Guardian claims that everyone who does not believe this is wrong. This is no surprise. They are an old media dinosaur struggling to make sense of and to fit in with the modern world…the real world. If I were them, I would start by never regurgitating a government PR piece unchallenged in the way that they have opened their mouths, accepted the vomit from HMGs stomach, swished it around and then spat it onto the page, brown chunks and all.
The UK’s four largest internet providers – BT, Tiscali, Orange and Virgin Media – are already in talks with studios on a joint voluntary agreement to share information on web violators.
There is no such thing as a ‘web violator’, any more than there are ‘newspaper violators’. Substitution. TRY IT! And as for ISPs sharing information’ that phrase is a euphemism for violating the privacy of customers…’customer violators’ if you will.
But under the legislation they could be forced to cut off customers. ISPs which fail to enforce the rules could face prosecution, and suspected customers handed over to the courts. It remains unclear who would be responsible for arbitration in disputed allegations, for example when customers claim that other users have “piggy-backed” on their wireless internet access.
This is bullshit, and the ISPs know it.
In order to bring a prosecution against an ISP, the person or party bringing the claim has to prove that the user is doing something illegal. Lets consider a Bittorrent user torrenting a file. The entity bringing the prosecution has to prove that the person who ‘owns’ the IP address was downloading a so called ‘pirated file’. Then they have to prove that the owner of the IP was the one who torrented it. With Bittorrent it is easy to see the IPs of seeds and peers, so the entity bringing the claim does not need help from the ISP to identify who is copying a file, and this legislation is not needed.
In the case of FTP, DCC on IRC and other types of sharing there is no way to identify who is sharing without getting logs from ISPs. That means either ISPs policing their traffic in real time or keeping extensive traffic logs. Traffic logs do not contain any part of the actual files that were transferred, so anyone naming a file ‘Pirates_of_the_Carrabean_at_Worlds_End.rar’ could claim that what was ftp’d was something actually totally unrelated to the title; photos of a party themed on that movie for example. The principle is that you have to have PROOF that someone has committed a ‘crime’ before you prosecute them or start snooping into their private communications. This is where the legislators completely fail.
A spokesman for the Department of Media, Culture and Sport said: “There are still meetings going on and consultation to take place, so nothing is finalised. The strategy document is to be released within the next couple of weeks.”
Yet another consultation, where no one has seen the proposals in advance, and the initial document is being written by industry. Its called ‘a sham’.
The green paper is also expected to call for a £200m national film centre, as well as 19 other schemes intended to turn Britain into the “world’s creative hub”. Other pledges include the launching of a global arts conference, dubbed the “World Creative Economy Forum” modelled on Davos, the creation of a new college of digital media and the protection of live music venues such as the Astoria and the Hammersmith Apollo in London.
Now here is where we get into the Neu Labor Soviet Diktat fantasy world. They want to make Britain the “world’s creative hub”, but do everything to stifle people freely interacting on the web, by encumbering ISPs (driving up the cost of getting and staying connected, diverting energies and monies that should be spent in improving the networks to pointless surveillance systems) enacting legislation that makes people look over their shoulders etc etc, the very OPPOSITE of what you need to be doing to attract the most creative and talented people.
What a total bunch of pathetic puppets and nincompoops.
If you want to support the new economy of the 21st century this is how you do it. You support those people who are changing the world for the better, not the buggy whip salesmen. The guardian should, of course, know that the Swedish Parliament supports file sharing, and has refused to be a puppet of the USA. That context is crucial in this story, and of course, there is none of it in this shabby article.
The government is also expected to reveal plans for a new creative festivals season, a new film centre on London’s South Bank and a permanent home for London fashion week.
And of course, all the ‘non dom’ designers will not come here to create their haut couture, preferring countries that actually support entrepreneurial people by getting out of their way and not trying to steal every penny they create.
They think creativity and economies can be created by pronouncement, that all they need to do is swill back beer and curry and greasey chicken shawarma, puke it into the mouths of the gyroscopists at rags like the guardian and then, by magic, their bile soaked pronouncements…make it so. The film industry needs, more than anything, tax breaks. That is one of the main considerations when people shoot film…or at least, it used to be, because now with synthetic scenemaking, you can be anywhere and appear to be shooting somewhere else. But I digress. Sort of. Opening a film centre does not mean you will get a revived film industry where people shoot, edit, score and most importantly, finance films from England. That is what film making is about, not opening ‘centres’.
Under plans to be announced by Gordon Brown and the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, children will be given the right to “five hours of culture a week” encouraging them to visit galleries and museums, attend the theatre, or study a musical instrument.
And some 1,000 creative apprenticeships for young people are also being proposed, which will be managed by a new Skills Academy.
[…]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/12/piracy.politics
And there you have it.
No only do these people have no idea of what a right is, they do not know how to preserve and support culture. That is why they are stupidly driving away the very people who create the culture they falsely claim that they support. In fact, these people loathe culture with the same hate that communists hate religion. Did you know that ballet is not considered valuable by these monsters because they say it is ‘not a sport’? This is a verbatim quote from a teacher at one of London’s most prestigious schools, repeated to me personally during a conversation about how ballet schools and their staff are struggling to survive.
Finally, look at who is in charge of this; the scumbag Andy “Nazi” Burnham, ex-excuse maker for the ID car debacle. This man, who thinks that its OK to enslave people, is now charged with giving children, “The right to culture”.
If it wasn’t so sick it would be hilarious.
February 12th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
and now, the rebuttal.
This is wrong thinking, and displays computer illiteracy. The computer literate downloaders are not the ‘threat’. The small number of software developers who are working on the next generation of file sharing tools are the real threat. Once these tools that anonymize and sanitize traffic are released to the public, they will replace the old, traceable and accountable tools. ISPs will not be able to distinguish between different types of traffic and therefore will be able to plausibly deny that they knew anything ‘wrong’ was taking place. The threat of disconnection will disappear, resentment against the buggy whip music industry will continue to rage and will increase to even higher levels, and music will spread all over the world
In the USA, telecoms are not responsible for what their customers do under what is known as the common carrier exemption meaning that as long as the carriers do not look at the traffic, they are not responsible for its contents. Any ISP that goes along with this is insane. They will be forever burdened with monitoring and violating their customers instead of ensuring their networks perform well. THe worst part is that file sharing actually helps the record companies sell music, and there have been studies to prove this. What a monumental waste of time.
Workin for the man!
That is complete and utter BULLSHIT. There is no general agreement (except in the offices of the guardian) that ‘something must be done’, you asshats. Legislation cannot solve this ‘problem’ software will always put the user ahead of the game. All of these people need to grow up, wake up, smell the coffee and take advantage of the new reality.
Gosh these people are THICK.
Joost and iPlayer; think about what they are; they are tools to show you TV shows. If you were to record them on your machine and then send them to someone else, in the world view of these imbeciles, that would be piracy. The traffic of Joost and iPlayer is identical to Miro, and all other internet traffic; its just bits. What makes something piracy is not what it is, but what you do with it.
What is disturbing about packet sniffing? What is much more disturbing is the computer illiteracy in journalism and its hollow sound. Once the bittorrent clients go encrypted it will be impossible for those packet sniffers to tell what is or is not a ‘bad’ file. Everyone who is computer literate knows it, and they also know that this war will be won by the punters and software developers. This will become more true as everyone gets their tv from the internets. There will be lots of traffic out there, all of it indistinguishable and there will be NOTHING anyone can do about it.
mmmmmm! getting warmer!!! is the light bulb about to be switched on over this dudes head?
almost there, but no glowing tungsten. or since its the guardian, glowing coil of gas in a sustainable long life enclosure?
Either way, when they say ‘experts say’ it means that they do not know themselves, and had to ask someone. Why do they never get these experts to write the article so that we can read some common sense for once? These computer illiterates do not know if they were lied to or not, because they know nothing about the subject themselves, so its more regurgitation.
But in the end, none of this matters.
They will not be able to regulate the internets. They will not EVER stop file sharing. These efforts are going to fail miserably, and every time they make an effort to control the internets, it acts like a vaccine that strengthens the body of the internets. First there were the BBSes, then came the Eilte FTPs, then the DCC channels on IRC, then Napster, and out of napster came opennap, then came bittorrent and the big trackers like Suprnova, and then came trackerless torrents, and next will come encrypted bittorrent and it will go on and on, each iteration getting stronger, not only in terms of keeping peoples privacy intact, but in terms of how many people can be reached.
Who would have thought, even in the days of Napster that you could have 172,370 people all downloading the same file at the same time? Mininova has had 3,945,738,266 torrents downloaded. That is just shy of FOUR BILLION TORRENTS on a SINGLE SITE.
You will never stop file sharing, not only for the technical reasons, but for the purely human ones.
Sharing is human.
Hoarding is inhuman.
Good always triumphs over evil.
DEAL WITH IT.
Finally, the guardian has a whole section dedicated to ‘piracy’. It is mostly drivel of course, like calling The Pirate Bay a ‘Piracy’ site.
Duh!
February 13th, 2008 at 2:18 am
And Simon Heffer chimes in at full throttle. Perfection!
July 24th, 2008 at 9:56 am
[…] I do not need to go any further in this post about how filesharing is not stealing. We have been over this before on BLOGDIAL. […]