LOL
You are attempting to download File1.rar part 1 of 10.....lets see them figure that as illegal when they dont know what it is!
Epix Fail, GG.
Mandy declares 'three strikes' war on illegal file sharers
Lord Mandelson has reiterated the government’s plans to clamp down on illegal P2P file sharers by declaring a “three-pronged approach” to tackle online piracy in the UK. The biz secretary confirmed today that proposals on unlawful file sharing, outlined in the government’s Digital Britain consultation paper in June, would form …
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 15:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
(untitled)
IMO Mandy seems to need educating with regards to the morality of allowing certain folk to be paid for years, many times over, for the same piece of work, while the rest of us get paid the once and have to work again for more income. Sort out the law in this area and a lot of problems are likely to disappear.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 15:31 GMT copsewood
self serving politicians
Mandy obviously values his being able to rub shoulders with celeb dinosaurs and getting favours from old media editors more highly than the European Convention of Human Rights section 8, which guarantees privacy of home life and private communications:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHR#Article_8_-_privacy
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 15:33 GMT The BigYin
Government scum
Let me understand this. MPs can falsely claim tens of thousands of pounds on expenses, blatantly commit tax evasion, bring their party and the entire government into disrepute and get away it.
But if a prole downloads a few songs you can get chucked off the net?
Is it just me or do our most imperious leaders have their priorities tit about arse?
And isn't the 'netd eclared an essential service? Do they cut the gas and leccy off at the house of a rapist because he uses leccy to watch porno?
MPs, no clue, no honour, no morals. Every man-jack of them.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 15:59 GMT Serif
And if you're daft enough to get caught?
What's to stop you simply going to the next ISP touting for business? Are they proposing yet another national database of people who can't have an Internet connection. What about if you simply get your partner / lodger / cat to join up with next ISP in list? What if it's the family Internet connection, do you plan to punish the children by not letting them do their homework / spouse by not being able to work from home? I suspect these are all things which will be ignored until it's someone else's problem.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 15:59 GMT Kwac
"I'm crap"
"I'm extremely well paid but I'm totally incompetent at my job of selling the musical products of other people.
"I demand that everybody helps me by putting the genie that is that internet thing back in the bottle so I can improve my life-style by trousering the reduced expenses of selling music online".
"All my friends in Hollywood agree with me, so I must be right."
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 15:59 GMT Skizz
Worth and value
"consumers needed to be educated about the “value of intellectual property rights”"
It may have value to the IP holder, but it's only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. From the figures the IP holders often produce, it seems there's a whole lot of worthless rubbish out there. If they want people to buy their stuff, they need to improve the quality, make it something people want to pay for.
I wonder what the ratio of illegal downloads versus legitimate purchases between quality products and the rubbish ones (LoTR vs PoTC3 for example).
Skizz
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 15:59 GMT bertie bassett
Easy Fight Back
Run 2 torrent clients, one for the good stuff with encrypton and one we'll call Mandy. Set Mandy to point to a 'mandy' directory which you then stuff full of open source files e.g. linux distros, or just text files containing 'mandy is a pillock' repeatedly. Rename these files to latest britneyspearssong.mp3 or similar and make em available. When plod/mandy/isp or what have you comes knocking to turn you off, take em to court on the basis they can't prove you've shared anything.
Laugh like a hyena
Is is time for a Mandy icon?
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:02 GMT irish donkey
Open for change but with low expectations
The current mantra of the IP Industry??? (movies and music let's just call it what it is) is to charge as much money as you think the market can stand.
And if you didn't like it you could ***k off somewhere else
Well everybody did ***k off somewhere else and found the Holy Grail. Free music and movies for all.
So is this another attempt to shore u their ailing market. Probably but I am slightly heartened to see mention of new business models to discourage filesharing. Whether this will translate into tangible changes to the end user experience remains to be seen. And it is changes to the end user experience that will determine who will win this race
And remember nobody Voted for that *ucker Mandy, so he doesn't represent us.
If you don't Vote you can't complain. So VOTE for change, and then complain
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:02 GMT Dom S
Mandy = Moron
Mandelson needs to stop listening to the devil on his shoulder (ie the entertainment industry lobbyists) and wake up.
filesharing will happen, filesharing will continue to happen.
this moronic, frankly illegal method of kicking people off goes against basic human rights. does the phrase "innocent until proven guilty" not mean anything any more?!
"I think he's misunderstood how government should work. Consumers, or voters as I call them, have an opinion, then it's up to the government to follow that opinion as they are supposed to be our representatives. They are not supposed to tell us what to think."
BANG ON! what happened to the democracy?!?!?!
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:02 GMT Mectron
just another country
now owned the the MPAA/RIAA.
The 3 strikes law is the only law where you get punish on ASSUMPTION with not proof of any kind and no chance to defend yourself.
i wonder how much the MPAA/RIAA paid to buy the UK? (or France)
The MPAA/RIAA as gone to far, they must be DESTROYED as soon as possible and by any mean.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:02 GMT GhilleDhu
Jobs for tonight
Install TOR, practice a bit more safe surfing and bobs your uncle. Not that I bother downloading illegal stuff these days as you can get decent quality non DRM music, but it pays to be careful. Ohh and switch off the wifi while I'm at it.
Engage Dark Ages yet again in the UK, just as soon as we start getting vaguely decent regular connections they go and stuff it up again. Reckon I'm going to enjoy using iPlayer as much as possible, not to watch it of course just merely to ensure that there is plenty background data flying around for them to sift through.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:02 GMT MinionZero
Politicians needed to be educated...
Millions of people file share therefore millions of voters file share. The arrogant greedy Politicians need to learn we vote them in and we pay for them. They work for us and when millions of us *decide* the kind of society *we want to live in* then it is us, not the Politicians who choose what kind of society we want.
Yet now they want to label all file sharers as criminals! ... That is as good as labeling millions of voters as criminals.
The music and film industry adds up to be just one small part of society. But even then I want to see the music and film industry survive but why the hell do they get to inflict a Totalitarian Police State on us all, just to support their out dated business model!!!
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT UncleBob
What's this then?
"...in a move to delight the entertainment industry and anger ISPs." The Entertainment Industry needs to pull their greedy heads out of their arses. They're all shouty at how they are getting screwed out of revenue, yet epically fail to introduce prices to entice punters to actually pay for what is being shared.
Yes, it's a whole lot easier to share music than it was when we had to copy vinyl to cassette tapes (and they didn't like that either), but they haven't really been proactive about the issue either. Perhaps it was a big surprise that this would happen?
Maybe if a song cost £0.10p and a movie £1.00 the illegal sharing would go down, but I doubt it will ever stop entirely. The Entertainment Industry needs to try something rather than whinge.
Paris because she's free and easy.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Mandy is helping local business - The local Gangsta...
Digital copying is here, and the genie of "free" music out the bottle, let's not pretend it can be put back in the bottle. The software to copy a CD or DVD, or rip it to MP3 is so easy to use people are not going to go back to the old ways. Even my mother knows what a MP3 is and how to copy a CD for using in the car.
Close one method and people will find another. It could be high tech (encrypted traffic so you can't see the content) or lo tech ( buying your music at a local carboot sale, getting a months albums on one dvd for a quid) but it's hard to make people see music and DVD's must be paid for when most papers give them away each weekend.
Digital copying is no different to home taping in many ways, it won't stop, as people share music with freinds. I doubt for one minute that sales would go up if copying stopped, I can't remember the last CD I bought, as most of the people I listen to are dead and not making anything else (other than the usual Xmas cash in that are best of albums). Of the few albums I get lent get returned uncopied as I'll listen to it once or twice then not care. Heck most people know someone in the pub who can get them dodgy cd's or the latest films or DVD's, they'll just get more trade if this happens.
The entire entertainment industry needs to come up with viable pricing, not just keep churning out repetative greatest hits, or manufactured pop bands or "exclusive directors latest cut as he needs a cash boost" editions and charging as much as they can get away with. No wonder Jo Public pirates things when the industry is trying to extract top dollar for re-cycled idea's.
Still Mandy is supporting local business as the local pirate boot sellers will do well out of it.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT Jimmy 1
Two strikes and counting...
Twice forced to resign from ministerial office because of alleged dodgy dealings we now have our unelected (and probably unelectable) business supremo laying down the law about the unethical nature of file sharing copyright material. Pardon me, Pete, if I puke in your soup to cover up the stench of hypocrisy.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
More ill planned New Labour legislation
Lord Mandelson said, "I was shocked to learn that only one in 20 music tracks in the UK is downloaded legally." I was shocked to find that somebody pushing through such ill thought out legislation has been so ignorant of the situation that he hopes to deal with.
Surely the point of new laws is to deal with new crimes. In the case of illegal filesharing it is a case of too little, too late.
The aim of this proposed law is to frighten people into changing behavior they have followed for a number of years. There is little chance that it can be enforced fairly against the millions of filesharers that it is intended to apply to. There are a number of technological means to circumvent it and a high risk that it will be applied against people inappropriately.
Apart from starting phoney wars, New Labour's legacy is likely to be the raft of bad laws that they have created. (I'm beginning to hope that New Labour go the way of New Coke...)
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT CraigRoberts
@Fred 1
We need to try something... The bastard's politically immortal now what with being a "Lord"
Never needs to be elected again (wasn't this time)... There's nothing stopping the fucker from switching sides to the Tories or the Lib's after the next election and staying in the damn cabinet...
Decapitation is definitely my favourite option!
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
Not bad, no, it's good, because...
... big business is more important than consu^Wcomra^Wpeopl^Wcitizens. So, mandy turns the communications watchdog in the communications police at the behest of ``rights holders'', a nice euphemism for multi-milliard companies that bought those rights from the people who actually did the creative work, and have grown very fat on overhead on the proceeds. Splendid, carry on.
I say that the creative industry needs to reconsider its business models and figure out how to make money out of things people actually want to pay for instead of trying to change the wants and needs of the customer. Suing your own customers wholesale means you've lost it.
Worse, the 'biz knows this very well even if they don't want to admit it. They've been rehashing and rewarming old hits with ``contemporary sauce'' on them for a decade or two and have known this is ultimately bad for business for a decade. No sympathy for them.
I also say we need an overhaul of copyright (and the patent system, while at it), because it hasn't facilitated anything but marketeering onslaught in half a century or so. Perhaps not as radically as the pirate parties would have it, but something that comes close to doing what it says on the tin would be nice. But that would mean the government would be doing something useful instead of gathering lobbyist favours, and we can't have that, can we?
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT DS 1
mooo
Its very simple, if you believe forcing this issue home will make me, the consumer - go back to buying walled in products, run by evil monopolies, and regain the control and market of what was lost, you are wrong.
If you treat me badly, I won't buy your products at all, period. And infringing my rights, privacy, and meddling in my freedoms makes me very very angry.
As for this Labour scum, I never voted for them, they have been scum forever, and will be forever, and these past 13 years they have destroyed everything, every institution, every culture and fabric of society. Their mix of arcane 1984 and enforced 'multiculturalism' are hated, and detested, and most cannot wait to be rid of them.
We really must start to learn that no matter if they are all unfit, we don;t need to give them more than 4 years so they can commit such unending damage and destruction.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:10 GMT Ross 7
Big fish
To be honest, I don't see the rights holders paying to send letters to each and every dodgy downloader. They'll just hit all of the big fish that download crazy amounts of stuff. All El Gov is doing is moving the actual coal face work to the people that want it to be done. A bit like you and I campaigning for zebra crossing to be put in and the Council handing you a bucket of paint and a roller and telling you to get on with it.
The difficult bit is what is actually illegal? I hardly P2P anything - the odd ep of tele now and again. This weekend I d/l'd eps 1 and 2 of Dollhouse S2. However, that was after checking scifi.co.uk for an iPlayer type app. I pay to get SciFi UK via Sky, so I don;t see it as dodgy in the slightest. If I had recorded them onto VHS, DVD, HDD it would have been fair use. The fact someone else did it for me and I watched them later should still come under fair use, but I bet the copyright holders would argue otherwise.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oberholzer‐Gee & Strumpf, 2007
One of the largest empirical (i.e based on real downloading and sales statistics) studies on illegal downloading and filesharing:
"We match an extensive sample of downloads to U.S. sales data for a large number of albums. To establish causality, we instrument for downloads using data on international school holidays. Downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero. Our estimates are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during our study period."
DOI: 10.1086/511995 , for anyone wanting to read the whole article.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
@ the "Just use ssl" crowd
It seems a lot of you don't understand bit torrent (and yes i know a couple of you didn't specifically mention bt, but a lot of people did and a lot of people implied it), you can encrypt your connection all you want, but it's not going to make any difference if you're connected to a tracker than announces your ip for all to see. The only way to torrent something and not get seen on the tracker is through a tunnel/vpn unless you're good at spoofing.
It's like advertising something illegal in the yellow pages but taking the precaution to close the curtains.
Worst case scenario: people will go back to the days of trust-based sharing.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:15 GMT Grease Monkey
@Matt21
"I think he's misunderstood how government should work. Consumers, or voters as I call them, have an opinion, then it's up to the government to follow that opinion as they are supposed to be our representatives. They are not supposed to tell us what to think"
Sorry Matt, but I think it is you who does not understand how a parliamentary democracy works. You vote for your local MP. The winning MP then gets to sit and do what s/he wants in the house for the term of their membership. There is nothing to say they have to stick to their pre-election promises. There is nothing to say that you get to tell them what to do. They can even switch parties if they so choose. You as a constituent have no control over this. The local party could deselect them, but they wouldn't lose their seat. All you can do to control them is vote for somebody else at the next election.
There isn't even anything to stop the prime monster appointing to his cabinet people who are not elected members. Mandy being a case in point.
This may not coincide with your view of how democracy should work, but it is how our democracy works, and indeed how most other democracies work too. Democracy is only an illusion of popular control.
In terms of the article it appears that Mandy is confusing "sharing" and "downloading" rather too often for my liking.
Downloading is getting something for which you didn't pay. It's not actually stealing. At best there is the argument that you deprived the publisher and IP owner of income, but this would only be the case if you would otherwise have bought the album/movie/software/whatever. After all it's not actually a crime to buy fake designer goods at your local market.
Sharing on the other hand is providing the content to others, which is a different thing altogether. However I do think this differs from manufacturing or selling counterfeit goods in one important respect; the sharer does not make any money from sharing.
The problem here is that one thing British law has had going for it for a very long time is that it evolves to meet new situations. The courts make fresh interpretations of law in light of changes in the way the world works. How it should work is that when the completely new situations arise parliament then pass new legislation which will then be interpreted by the courts. Because we deal in common law what we have is one big law and any new legislation has to be intepreted in the light of the existing law. This matter of law being interpreted by the courts is a useful foil to parliament passing ridiculous laws.
In this case what Mandy seems to be trying to do is cut the legal system out of it altogether. The proposed system as explained seems to work by the rights owners passing complaints to the ISP and the ISP acting upon them. So that the rights owners are judge and jury and the ISP is cast in the role of executioner. There is absolutely no way that such a system complies with our laws. The best that could be said of it is that your contract with the ISP could make this legal, however I can see no way that the government could legal force such contract terms on the ISP. If an ISP refuses to impose such conditions upon it's users I can't see that Mandy would be able to do anything about it.
Mandy has a lot in common with Burlesque-oni (apart from the bit about young ladies, natch) he seems to think that he has the right to create and implement his own laws without the involvement of parliament or the legal system.
Yes the law needs to be changed to deal with this situation, but this isn't the way to do it. If somebody is sharing files then the rights owner should have the right to take them to court. The law should be changed to impose a formal structure upon what punishment can be meted out to the sharer and what restitution can be rewarded to the rights holder. It should not be changed to impose a system which cuts the law courts out of the loop. It is not up to the rights holders, the ISPs or, indeed, the government to decide who is in the right or wrong and what the punishment and compensation should be. That is the job of the law courts.
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
what about streams
When I want to watch the latest film I just use google and type "watch (moviename) online" I then then watch a stream of the show. Do have a question though, could this still be considered infringement as I dont keep a copy. It plays onscreen and then is gone, no copy for me.... hmmm. Maybe streaming media is the way to go! And for music you cant beat Spotify :) Oh and thats legal..
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Wednesday 28th October 2009 16:17 GMT Robert Hill
Great message, shame about the messenger
First, @jonathan 3: Unless you have a chain of off-shore IP-redirects (think somewhere with few legal qualms), they can set up their OWN machines to see who is downloading what and how frequently, and follow the IP address chain to your ISP. Your ISP has your name, billing details, etc.. You can try jumping around wirelessly, but honestly they don't care about the few that will try to penetrate hotspots or even their neighbor's access point.
There will always be ways to make yourself anonymous - it's just that most people DON'T, because the easy ways are easy to defeat, and the hard ways are, well, harder. So the intent of the law is not to make it impossible, it's simply to change the cost/benefit analysis for the average downloader.
Now, I actually agree with the intent of the law, but it's too bad Lord M. has so little personal credence left. He is a terrible messenger for a well-intentioned bill - and one that intellectual content industries need. And like it or not, the UK and US NEED intellectual content industries, because we don't do f£(%-all better than anyone else in the world. We can't make anything cheaper than China, we can't do rote programming cheaper than India (and even some advanced programming is best done there), and the UK is only agriculturally advantaged in a few areas. In short, we have precious little else to offer the world besides our intellectual content, so we had better start protecting it OR ELSE our children can get ready to start working for a Chinese corporation and living in corporate barracks and getting paid Chinese wages - in Slough or Birmingham. (OK, some of them will anyway, but hopefully we can change the percentages...)
It is simple as that really. Protect what we are good at, or get ready to not have anything that anyone else wants to buy and become their vassals.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
