Bits Digital Economy Act Judicial Review Analysis

We talk to the Open Rights Group and the BPI about the implications of the Digital Economy Act.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2011/04/22/digital-economy-act-judicial-review/1

 

Thats good news right? Making it more expensive for the rights holders to accuse people and so making sure they don't abuse the procedure.

 

Wow we are f'ed

 

http://youtu.be/ALZZx1xmAzg?hd=1

 

The really great thing is that no corporation has ever bent or abused a law for it's own financial gain. And no UK politician has ever bent or abused a law for political or financial gain.

So don't worry folks, we are completely safe. We never needed our "innocent until proven guilty" rights anyway.

 

One thing I think is another limiting factor is the quality of routers in general use. As far as I know not a single ISP provides a router which is sufficiently clever to control or even monitor the applications used or the addresses accessed.

In a shared house this is a huge problem - there can only be one internet connection with one person's name on it (joint accounts are also not possible, but that would really solve the issue either). My name is currently on the internet bill, even though it is included in the rent and must be shared with the other occupants, and I have not control over what the other people get up to.

Until they give people a means to police their connections, then they cannot reasonably enforce this. It is like passing a law that if a valet parking attendant causes an accident then it is the car-owners responsibility - you have to give him the keys, after which you have no control.

 

The ISP's should just do some collective "studies" and give a quote of around 10 Billion (10,000,000,000) as the potential cost to develop the technology, hire the staff, and fabricate the hardware to implement the system. Then complain the company will go bankrupt, and the prospect of paying out 7.5 billion might give the people in favor of the bill a little bit more to think about...

And if every ISP gives similar cost figures... I think the bill might have a chance to go down in flames.


It always helps to talk at people's wallets

 

I was thinking the same

 

The alternatives to downloading are all too expensive. It's either free movies or no movies IMO.

 

I download from torrents - I bet you've all just assumed I pirate stuff?

I download from the piratebay - I bet you've all just assumed I pirate stuff?

Strangely enough, torrents and the piratebay are not illegal, you can have torrents that share legal material and they can be obtained on the piratebay. So if this is the case, does that mean our ISPs will actually have to scan what we are uploading/downloading to see if it's 'illegal content'? Because I'm not comfortable with that. Maybe we should just save them the time, and let them scan our PCs for material whenever we're online.

And I do pirate films. Why? Because after I buy a film I really don't want to have to sit through the damned adverts, especially those terrible anti-piracy ones. And it's faster for me to download a copy than rip it off the disk without them. Why is it that if you pay for these things, you have to suffer with crap. Games are similar, with it's DRM, hell even music has it. I have a music CD that won't play on a PC without installing something. Does all this not just seem a bit crazy? And yet if I illegally download any of these, I have no trouble.

I think the reason pirating has gone up a lot, is because pirated software/music/videos are actually of better quality than that of 'legal' material. I think the industry needs to sort itself out.

 

I buy more music when I can listen to it free. Fact. I used to spend hours in record shops cueing up tracks on vinyl before deciding what I'd buy. Only difference these days is I listen to my free music on LastFM.

Spotify and LastFM have probably had a more substantial impact on digital "piracy" than any single piece of legislation, I'd wager.

 

Urrrrr more ******** for clueless idiots from clueless idiots. Viva la revolution

 

^^ This. Just look at what the UK politicians were claiming expenses on. It'll be run by the 'Entertainment' industry.

 

I think the point is, from the ISP's perspective, that they [the rights holders] should pay 100% of the costs, not just a portion of them with the ISP's paying the rest.

Why are film and music rights holders considered such a special case that they get special, preferential legal rights and treatment over and above everyone else?

If somebody steals from you or I and we had to take them to court, we'd have to pay the full amount ourselves - nobody would subsidise us. We may win our legal costs back if we win the case, but that's the risk we'd take - we couldn't offset a portion of that risk onto someone else.

If you bought something from someone over the internet, and they didn't send you the promised goods, you couldn't then claim 25% of the costs of retrieving your item or money back from your ISP. The very idea of it is absurd, yet that's fundamentally what this bill does: it says other people have to pay for the special legal protection for film and music rights holders.

The ISP's have to pay for it, hence they'll have to put their prices up to cover the extra costs, hence the general public will, as always, end up paying for it. I'm not convinced of the morality of making the general public foot the bill for the (often vexatious) lawsuits of multi-millionaires.

I don't see the fact that the crime took place over the internet as really relevant either.

If you get robbed in the road, can you then sue the highways agency for 'allowing' the crime to happen on their road? Of course you can't. It's exactly the same principal.

What about bank fraud and credit card fraud? A lot of that takes place on the internet now, are the ISP's supposed to monitor and underwrite that as well?

What about people who buy weapons, drugs etc over the internet? The ISP's should underwrite all that too? Our internet subscriptions are going to get very expensive if we start following the logic of the digital rights holders precedent.

They got this legislation passed because they are rich, powerful, vocal, and were able to 'persuade' uniformed and disinterested politicians, (in the parliamentary wash-up) that this was necessary and fair.

It's just plain daft.

 

How insane... now they're on about censoring specific websites... Sure one step from "We're going to blocking all websites that have anti-government slogans on" is concerning... We aren't fething China.

This government needs to wake up and actually listen to the users of the Internet, not Corps... but feth that ain't ever gonna' happen.

 

The whole damn bill should be repealed.

 

I was explaining to someone that because the term file sharing is used in the media so there for ALL file sharing is illegal. Mini Nova now is a site dedicated to free and open source movies, photos and music and its always got loads of stuff on it. If i get a patch for WoW or Champions Online i use utorrent because its normally quicker than getting it from their own server, and if its a 1.6gb patch, which before they have been i can shut my pc off and let it continue when i want.

Ok, there is alot of people downloading things illegally but that doesn't mean everyone should get labeled as an "illegal file sharer".

 

I also have an idea: why not make new legislation that states that the content producers are forever banned from making crappy content? same logic imho.

Or a three strikes rule: produce three crappy movies, and you're forever banned from making movies. Same for games. This would reduce illegal downloading greatly i'm sure!

 

The government is out of its depth when it comes to the internet. As are most industries to be honest. They need to all step away and have a rethink. Especially the current UK government, which I'm pretty sure nobody ever voted for in the first place.

 

I was thinking:
Is it possible for one to send an ip address to a torrent swarm that belongs to someone else?