if the riaa etc had any form of intellgence they would create a shadow proxy that blocks the dns all known and found updated serverlist

So, over on this side of the pond, if they threaten you for illegal activity, and you aren't doing such illegal activity, that's the door to a huge slander and defamation lawsuit, as well as possibly "lack of due process" depending on the circumstances.

I assume you folks have no such protections?

I'd love for Comcast or Roadrunner to send me such a letter, I need to pay off my house.

"unlimited super fast broadband"

is it not enough that ISPs can promise the world and not deliver? who's regulating the wild claims for 'super fast' connections and not so unlimited download?!

Fair use? is it not fail that I get to download what I want on MY line that I pay for without a 'fair use' policy.

Even when you download perfectly legitimate files, overstep the fair use limit and you're capped

I hate ISPs

So the ISPs are being held reponsible for what users do on their network; does that mean then that, as in the case of the Madrid bombings, if a terrorist group uses the mobile phone network to their bombs the network operator is responsible, and can be imprisoned, and sued by the victims? Hmmm... bit lacking on the joined up thinking front, I think.

Does this mean that we can hold them responsible for spam?

it's up to the copyright holders to educate the public? If they're not willing to take that trouble, then they're clearly not THAT interested in securing copyright- merely taking your money.

Give it 5 years down this path, you'll be on your phone to your granny and halfway through the conversation you'll get a load of adverts. Or you'll get sued for singing love-song lyrics down the phone (or by letter/email) to your better half.

And what about child porn, terrorist communications and other such nasties? Surely if the ISPs started to introduce this they'd lose their "common carrier" status and be responsible for every illegitimate bit of data that was sent across their fibers?

The ISPs should be entirely neutral parties in this nastiness- not giving information to either side and acting as simply a pipe. A nice phormless water pipe style system.

And is this just not a thinly veiled blackmail from the music industry anyway? And- even worse- from sections of the music industry not even operating in this country? "Do what we say or we will withdraw your internet access!" surely cannot be far from "Do what we say or we'll hit you" or "do what we say or you'll never work in the industry again".

Indeed we should stop this madness forthwith!

All the ISPs have to do is pull some numbers out of their asses.

For example

2006: total files shared: 3,134,223; illegal 2,702,222 (86.22%)

2007: total files shared 4,448,228; illegal 4,081,249 (92.16%)

2008: total files shared 2,100,769; illegal 1,645,953 (78.35%)

See, we're reducing the number of illegal downloads *and* the percentage as well, so give us a cookie.

After all, isn't the numbers-pulled-out-of-the-ass method what the RIAA and BPI use to generate their statistics? Who's gonna disprove these figures?

I can promise that any letter from my ISP containing allegations of this nature will be met with a letter in return to their legal department.

I'm sure whatever they send out will be poorly worded, contain little if any evidence, and will generally leave them open for a good slapping. Especially if it somehow implies they've shared their allegation with a third party.

I'm not exactly expecting anything as I don't download music, but as I suspect evidence has little to do with their letters I guess there's still a chance one will turn up.

If so, great. I could do with the entertainment.

Entanet/Freeola have been doing this for over 6 months now

"Mind you, as FACT is convinced that all piracy is funding terrorism they might just decide to lock up anyone that uses the internet for 42 days and be done with it..."

I've been using the internet for nigh on ten years, am I going to jail? :-0

Be interesting to see how this pans out - all that will happen is that those who are serious about copyright infringement/funding terrorism as it's now known, will just up the encryption ante, in the same arms race that has been going on for a few years now.

Aside - if they can tell a secured torrent connection has copyrighted torrent info in it, why can't they find all this child pr0n that they say is floated around on 't net...?

Steven R

Not very useful today but with this new initiative there's a good chance people will start to migrate from insecure BitTorrent to secure Freenet. More users = better performance...

http://freenetproject.org

Paris, because she's an icon... (you get it? :)

Oh great... so now those of us who have been shafted sideways by VM, first by their dropping of Sky One/News, second by their shite capping system which continues to allow cloned cable modem (L)users to rape their honest customers such as myself out of any chance of getting a decent speed... now this?

I hope and pray that they dare to drop one of these letters on the doorstep of some poor cloned innocent soul who will sue the shit out of them, and maybe they will pull their finger out and do something about these m***f***ing cloners, and maybe we will get our speeds back.

Maybe Im a dreamer, but Im not the only one.

how do they tell the diffenence on an encrypted connection? oh thats right they can't.. so its bloody rude to effectively call you guilty until proven innocent

If my ISP were to send me a letter accusing me of illegal filesharing I would be able to issue a writ against them for libel. However, how would I then prove (as required by law) that the statement they made was false?

Most filesharing now happens in our school's classrooms. All you need is 1 in 30 of our nations spotty youth to buy a piece of music and before you know it they all have it. Kids bluetoothing music like mad during lessons between mobile phones.

Love to see the RIAA try and ban education or stop and search mobile phone's :-)

Paris, because even she knows how to bluetooth music to her mates...

Someone enlighten me please. How exactly do they know WHAT I'm downloading? Do they see what sites I've visited and make assumptions or do they look at my bandwidth usage and make assumptions? Or do they snoop on the filetypes and make assumptions? Or do they raid my house when I'm out and nick my machines?

I'm feeling a little vacant of knowledge of the method by which they decide on guilt and potential disconnection.

As any fule kno, file-sharing isn't just copyrighted material. If I decide to cane my bandwidth by distributing 'legitimate' files, how will my ISP tell? Are they really going to have an army of people taking a copy of whatever I choose to torrent?

Usual story - extremely crude solution from a government in thrall to big money. Even Paris could think of a better idea.

... if the record companies put in place a fair and usable system which they should have done years ago.

The problem is that they've been overcharging - no way will I pay the same price for a downloaded album as a CD. Afterall - there's no CD production, no artwork, no shipping, no shelf space, no middleman to pay etc. etc. so I simply refuse to be ripped off. I can't remember the exact figure (I'm sure someone round here will have it) which the record company bleated about a few years back that they get back from a CD sale after costs, HMV's pound of flesh etc. I think it was in the region of £1. So that would equate to about 10p a track - which actually is a little generous if its 14 tracks. At 79p a track I expect a free blow job from Paris as well.

My experience a few years back really sums up the music industry's attitude to consumers - and now why I steal all my music rather than give them a penny. I bought an album by a small indie group I like - to support them and the record label. ALL my music is on my PC as that's how I listen to it - so the first thing I did was try to rip it. Due to copy protection my PC cd drive wouldn't even recognise it. So in order to listen to it ... I had to illegally download it. I emailed the label to ask them about this - and got a very terse reply about how I was committing a criminal act by doing this - and copy protection was there to prevent evil people like me from stealing music. When I'd bought the sodding thing ! I returned the CD for a refund and resolved not to bother buying music again.

I just love all these knee-jerk reactions like "when I get the letter I'll sue their asses off for defamation", or "how are they going to tell what i downloaded over my encrypted connection" etc...

Wait till you get the letter, then see what it says.

As for "I can do what I like with my unlimited connection". Yes you can, but if you happen to be sharing copyrighted files that are not yours to share then what you're doing is a tad naughty.

Mine's the flame proof one...

the last person to leave this inter-wibble-thingy...

please turn out the lights....

thank you

We appologise for the inconvienience. Normal services will resume shortly...

ho hum, looks like its back to huddling around the camp fire...

That's what you are if you illegally download music or movies or anything that is copyrighted. You are thieves, plain and simple.

You are not "pirates", you are stealing the fruits of someone elses work.

You may think you are cool but we know different.

You are a tightwad, scumbucket of a thief and if you get caught I hope they throw the book at you and then insert it where the sun don't shine.

Do I work for the music industry? Nope.

Am I sick of hearing tightwads whinge about how their ISP or the government is stopping them from stealing. Oh YES!

You want music or movies, then fucking pay for them!

... sounds like a damn good name for the upcoming backlash campaign.

Folks, the BPI evidence is shaky at best, simply made up at worst. If you're unfortunate enough to be a customer of one of the six ISP's taking part in this charade - switch!

These letters being a mailshot to all heavy downloaders? Er, no. Don't be fooled into thinking that AnonTelco is that joined up. The Abuse team and the Fair Use team are not the same thing and, in fact, never/rarely communicate other than to say "Hi, I've got yet another mis-directed-by-HellDesk customer for you".

Feargal Sharkey: I'm most disappointed in you. Musicians are meant to be rock n roll legends, shagging groupies and throwing things out of hotel windows. Musicians are NOT meant to be CEO's of shadowy organisations!!!

====================================================

This has been bugging me for a while, so I'm gonna get if off my chest now:

BPI protecting the rights of musicians: have any of you actually met a real, live, jobbing musician? It's a job, plain and simple, to the majority of the ones I know. A good fun job that allows the consumption of beer and access to pretty women, admittedly, but still a job. We trade on a talent for making a nice noise, in much the same that a greengrocer trades on a talent for recognising a decent cabbage.

Yeah, we pretend we're cool and we allegedly get hot chicks but at the end of the day we're doing a job.

I'm struggling to think of a good analogy here, but I guess it's like this: Most jobbing musicians (that I know) are like good/high quality sunday league footballers. We're never going to be well known, and we're never going to be make a lot of money out of it. The best could will make a living, if they're lucky, the majority of us have to supplement that with other things.

The BPI protects the Beckhams and Ronaldo's of the music industry, and very definitely not your everyday musician. So as a (very much part-time) jobbing musician, do I give a toss about the BPI?

Nope.

So let's stop with the "protecting the rights of musicians" lark, shall we? It just pisses me off. If I want my rights protected, I'll join the Musicians Union.

Virgin are increasing 4Mbit Broadband to 10MBit free of charge at the end of the month.

In one hand I have the ability to download 1.25MB of Data a Second or 75MB a minute, or 4.5 GB an hour or 108GB a day. In theory then how long exactly would it take me to get past the fair usage policy? I would imaging less than a day.

In the other I have a letter threatening me with disconnection due to sharing illegal files.

What is the frigging point in having 10Mb then for?

Does the data protection act not protect me, or has the terrorism act overridden that. Will it become illegal to encrypt everything just incase you are sending instructions on bomb making.

Where will the complete and utter B*ll*cks stop

That would be the same hypocritical ISPs who are proposing mass copyright theft of web pages using Phorm Webwise spyware?

Infotainment video for ISPs who don't understand why stealing copyright pages might get them into lots of trouble;

http://www.dephormation.org.uk/video/copyright.wmv

And for everyone else, cut them off. Find a Phorm free ISP.

'Aside - if they can tell a secured torrent connection has copyrighted torrent info in it, why can't they find all this child pr0n that they say is floated around on 't net...?'

Oooh difficult one... perhaps because they aren't 'losing' revenue.

Oh won't somebody think of the children^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h profits?

Working towards having a completely pirated music collection here, I'm format shifting all my old vinyl and tape collection onto MP3. Raise the skull and crossbones me hearties...

F*ck the BPI and Fergal Sharky, bunch of teenage pricks who can be beat.

Paris, she knows what it's like to have media shared illegally...

Someone asked how they'd get information out of the ISP for evidence of the 'crime' they are supposed to have comitted when they get one of these letters

Use the Data Protection Act. 1 month for them to give all the personal info they hold about you i.e the traffic records from your IP address.

It will cost you a nominal sum but a few of these request and the ISP's will be soon backing off as their costs rise.

Most ISPs are too bloody lazy to do it properly, they will simply see how much your pulling down, if it's coming via port 6889, then that's that, you get a letter.

Most will simply see it as a bloody good excuse to send nasty letters to high bandwidth users for the bloody sake of it, regardless of the type of traffic!

There was a time when I downloaded copyright material, but thanks to iTunes I can now buy my favourite individual tracks without shelling out for a whole album, and thanks to the various catch-up TV services on the net I now don't need to download that missed episode of Doctor Who. And of course I have my digital TV card so I can record most of what I want to keep long-term straight on to my PC anyway.

My use of bittorrent these days is legal downloading - copies of VMWare OS images is the biggest slice. Will my ISP (plusnet aka BT) do some leg work to find out what it was I downloaded before hitting me with a warning? Of course, that would involve interception of my traffic and/or downloading the same torrent themselves - after all who's to say that a torrent named 'ubuntu complete archive 4' isn't actually Dr Who series 4 complete in HD? Or visa versa - something that might sound like an illegally shared file might in fact be legal - "Windows XP SP2" could be the entire OS (definitely illegal) or just the service pack (probably legal). Go wrestle with that one, ISPs.

All Bittorrent users are about to be tarred with the same, very large, brush because the alternative is commercially unsustainable - the ISPs would have to inspect every torrent and decide if it is legal or illegal. Cheaper to provide that extra bandwidth we were all told we have, methinks.

I don't think that this approach will work long term - once a couple of legal file sharers have been incorrectly pursued and then sue in return. Either the ISPs will stop. After all, they can't block unidentifiable traffic - for example running Bittorrent using SSL on port 443, the ISP can't tell what it is, the traffic looks no different to any other SSL traffic, just that there is more of it.

It's long past time that the copyright holders - here I mean mainly the music and film industry - move on from the outmoded licencing terms that they are trying to enforce. Copying and distribution will continue with or without current file sharing technology and the internet.

Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" explores the concept of large-scale encrypted information exchange and the likely impact of attempts to control what information is shared via the net. An interesting read.

Look on the bright side chums. All you people moaning about the shit connection speeds you currently endure due to these little issues of line contention... the throttled bandwidth that results when the likes of VM put caps your line....

... there will be a remarkable improvement in your service (If you haven't had one of those llittle letters naturally).