Big Society ?
Bollox
Big Government that rules with an iron heel.
Looks like News Corps (20th Century Fox) cosy little chats with Cameron and co paid off.
Film studios thrash BT in Newzbin site-block test case
In a landmark test case, the High Court in the UK has ordered BT to block access to the pirate site Newzbin2. The site makes movies, music and applications available and describes itself as "the Google of Usenet". It's a stunning victory for six major Hollywood film studios who brought the case, with counsel from the Motion …
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Friday 29th July 2011 09:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Making way for Phorm
When did BT rollover? They fought the case in court and the judgement went against them.
Site blocking does not provide ammunition for authorising DPI, if that were the case then all the sites that are already blocked would provide a far greater argument. But why let reasoning get in the way of paranoia.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:10 GMT Dazed and Confused
Now they have a taste of it
how long till some judge decides to extend a super injunction to blocking - say twitter and then say google and Oh look you can still find out the big secret of who kissed who (like anyone gives a s*1t) and blocks the whole damn network.
ring ring... Support here, can I help you?
*&^%*(()
Sorry, did you say your network connection does work?
)^%£$^&*&%^
I'm very sorry but I'm not allowed to tell you why
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:11 GMT g e
Buy second hand and close the roads too
Newzbin2, well yeah, we do know what it's primarily USED for, but it's a very poor judgement and sets and horrifying precedent going forwards. The MAFIAA must be getting emergency surgery to stop the laughter.
Anyway, I propose to buy all entertainment second hand from now on. Stuff 'em. Then they'll try to make second hand purchases of movies & music illegal too, and that WILL be partly Royal Mail's problem...
Oh and UK.gov has knowledge of criminals and that criminals move around and that some of them drive so close all the roads...
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:31 GMT dotdavid
Second-hand
Exactly what I started doing when the RIAA started suing college students all those years ago. Second-hand CDs sound just as good as the originals.
Of course since then someone invented Spotify so I'm back to supporting their evil empire, albeit probably less.
But you'd think the Movie people would have, I dunno, learnt from the music industry's mistakes...
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Thursday 28th July 2011 13:34 GMT noboard
Errrm
A couple of points
1. Both the movie and music industries are convicted cartels in the US and have cases pending over here (amazingly this case has been with the EU for years and doesn't seem like it will ever finish. If they were innocent surely they'd want the case finished)
2. They haven't stopped making content, so they're happily spending their money and generally making record profits, so there's no lack of motivation from the studios
Both the music and film industry want to rip the consumer off. They have no desire to give value for money, or live by the same rules as most other businesses; adapt or go bankrupt. They're also quite happy to screw over the content creators. A friend of mine has been told "This is the deal and if you don't accept we'll make minimal changes and you'll not get a penny".
By all means condone piracy, but defending illegal corporations isn't a great idea.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 13:40 GMT Jason Hall
@AC
No actually.
Your content *WILL* be ripped off no matter what you do. No matter what markets you make.
It's still up to the rights-holders to have something people actually *want* to spend money on.
Try to look at it this way...
People will constantly download all sorts of crap they never have any real intent on actually watching/listening to as long as it costs them nothing (ie Eastenders/etc on 'normal' TV, or pop music on the radio).
*BUT* if every person had to start paying - for every TV show/song on the radio then TV sets and radios would suddenly be turned-off a lot more than they are now.
This is what I find amongst my filesharing friends. If they had no option but to pay for stuff - they wouldn't be watching it/listening to it. Since it's free - they get it anyway, and quite often never actually use it.
Now to say that each and every download they make is a lost sale is nothing short of preposterous. Anyone thinking that is a complete idiot.
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Friday 29th July 2011 12:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
re: @ac / @ Jason Hall
"It's ... up to the rights-holders to have something people actually *want* to spend money on."
All you've done at core is say that the only economic model you'll accept is the honesty-box method. There's so much wrong with this I can't even be bothered to go through it, beyond just reflecting back to you what you've said, per my previous sentence.
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Friday 29th July 2011 15:19 GMT Jason Hall
@AC
"All you've done at core is say that the only economic model you'll accept is the honesty-box method."
Where? No I didn't. Show me where in my post did I say that?
I am willing to pay for content. I'm sure you'll find most people are willing to pay for content.
There are probably a lot of people who aren't willing, or can't afford to pay for that content.
And? For those people there isn't much you can do to stop them really is there?
The current way is to threaten them with prison time and huge fines. How's that working for you?
I don't know anyone in my group of friends who pirate stuff that is remotely scared by this prospect, so will continue to find ways around whatever is implemented.
I'll say it again - please listen carefully:
If you can make content that's worth having, then people will pay for it. Maybe not everyone will pay for it. And? It will never happen. I'm not saying just give up - like you seem to think (bad reading comprehension?)
*BUT* overpriced tat is not going to work when compared with free downloadable content.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:12 GMT Lee Dowling
Holdon
So, hypothetically, if an image, document, or any other type of file with MY copyright is found somewhere, I can force BT to block that site?
What about if, purely hypothetically here and not encouraging anything, a big band's website was hacked and content was inserted into it which allowed people to download my copyright. Can I ask BT to block that website for all of its subscribers, in theory?
What about if I notice that, say, bittorrent is used to download lots of infringing copyright material - can I ask that BT block access to that software, website downloads of it, etc. or just every torrent?
It seems far too far-reaching a judgement to stand as it is. What about if, for instance, someone like Anonymous or Lulzsec decided to file several thousand copyright complaints against the website of the big record labels with regards to images, text, CMS software, etc. and they couldn't answer them in time via their lawyers... could someone then force BT to block their websites until they do?
And how, exactly, should this blocking be mandated? DNS? IP? Application traffic type? It seems an incredibly stupid and out-of-place judgement that just leaves more room for mischief than it does for common sense.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:19 GMT Scott Mckenzie
High Profile
I think it's because Newzbin was so high profile and to be honest so good - Giganews are being investigated and lets be honest that's the root of the issue, Newzbin are in trouble because of how easy it makes it to find the stuff, sub categories of films, in HD, with DTS audio, over 10Gb in size - you don't get that from Giganews, that's the provider doing the work and charging for the service.
It's pointless blocking Newzbin or any of the others as they'll keep popping up.... they need to go after Usenet itself on this one or they're just wasting time and money.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 13:53 GMT Scott Mckenzie
Clarification
Re-reading my post... i'd like to clarify that in no way to i agree with what's going and am against blocks, but there are cases currently against Giganews, obviously Usenet isn't exactly something that can just be blocked anyway and as such providers that offer services to legit aswell as illegal (unknown to them they'll claim) may be ok.
I was merely saying that there is no point going after the sites like Newzbin for what they're trying to do.
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Friday 29th July 2011 11:14 GMT Scott Mckenzie
Tricky
Not that I can post with direct access, read on other nzb distributor forums.... lots of issues with films not completing and certain broadcasters material not appearing through them.
It may have been a red herring but there was and still is a lot of talk surrounding the issue.
I don't use them as they're expensive though so can't personally comment.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Easy to get around, but incredibly worrying
Where this is used to block access to a site that everybody already knows about (Newzbin - everyone knows *now*) it's trivially easy to circumvent, leaving this as an ineffective tactic for the stated purpose, but in doing so creates a terribly dangerous precedent. We're left with the assumption that it's fine to block "unsavoury" or "a little bit iffy" or simply "the wrong [political] colour" sites. The fact that it's only ever the people with piles of cash who get to define "iffy" is just a cherry on top.
The MPA are causing a lot of collateral damage to society with their completely ineffectual attempts to prop up their broken businesses. Arguments about the right/wrong of piracy take valuable attention away from the big issues of erosion of longstanding freedoms in the name of business.
Mine's the one with Martin Niemöller's "They Thought They Were Free" in the pocket
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:19 GMT Alex 14
Words
"It's fascinating to hear arguments such as BT's contention that it is not an internet service provider, or that Newzbin2 members were passive recipients, and just happened to have anime and pirate movies pop onto their PCs ... or that after notification from a copyright-holder, an ISP could claim that it hadn't been notified."
Why tease? Why not share some quotes in context to demonstrate how BT supposedly claimed dogs are cats? I bet it WOULD be fascinating.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why would BT fight this ?
Surely BT is happy to ban newsbin2, even with the bad publicity it will bring.
Think of it like this, users that use newsbin2 are likely to be downloading large quantities of SSL encrypted traffic from the likes of giganews or other usenet providers. If BT can shed a few of these high usage customers, its a better experience for everyone else ?
I'm sure once the marketing department have got hold of this, it'll come out smelling of flowers.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 12:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Because saying "no" stops people asking
Think of it like the boss who always says "no" to any requests for new gadgets etc (adjust example for your own situation). People stop asking for anything at all.
BT have been saying "no" up to now for requests like this because if you say yes once, that's it, everyone is going to ask and your time will be taken up entirely with weighing up pros/cons of each request because you can't dismiss them out of hand any more.
Admittedly, that's a massive oversimplification - another important factor is that not blocking anything at all (or having just a voluntary list for blocking stuff that everyone agrees with) means you have more of a defence when questionable content does travel over your network. Looks like the days of "well I didn't know ______ was going on" are numbered now though anyway.
Regarding traffic, I doubt it'll make much difference. Newzbin/Usenet downloading isn't the simplest method by far, so a large proportion of the users will be technically savvy enough to simply bypass the blocks and carry on
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Thursday 28th July 2011 13:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
It amazes me...
That even after Napster\iTunes the movie industry really hasn't cottoned on how the internet works, that downloads can and should be nurtured, not beaten with a stick.
The way I see it, and probably the way everyone reading this with any piece of intelligence sees it, music downloaders can be split into three groups as below.
Legal downloaders that buy any old tripe. These are the folk that put singles and albums to their designated position in the charts.
Try before you buy downloaders. They'll download illegally then if they like it, seek out the original, probably in hard format as apposed to digital.
Downloaders who never have and never will purchase music. These folk will download whatever they can get their hands on, or maybe just something they heard on the radio. They have no intention of forking out for goods. They probably used to purchase CD's, copy them then take the original back and earlier to that, use a tape cassette to do their dodgy deeds.
None of the above parties hurt the industry. FACT. If anything they all help the industry as downloaders will tell their friends/family about great tracks/albums they’ve heard and so group 1 will toddle off and buy it.
I myself fall into the second category having being burnt by purchasing Gorrilaz album without listening to it (what a load of shit). My CD collection contains more unopened albums than it does opened.
Now let’s step to the movie industry. We have no services allowing us to apply the same rule, any movies we buy are either in hard format (DVD/Blu-ray) or shitty quality DRM movies such as the XBOX Zune player.
For this reason of course more people are encouraged to download illegally, or rather there are no discouraging arguments to not download. I am a movie pirate. I will not download a HD movie unless it meets specific requirements, requirements Zune fails to meet. I will not buy Blu-ray because quite frankly I have no confidence this media will be around in 5 years, I've already spent a fortune replacing my Simpsons collection from VHS to DVD, I won't be doing the same for Blu-ray only for x264 to become the dominant format in the coming years.
The MPAA really need to wake up and smell the coffee. Throwing money at lawsuits such as this will not stop people downloading content, there will always be a way, a new technology, or just very determined people, people will download. Embrace this technology. Offer a service that allows us to download high quality movies transferable between devices, you will see a difference, iTunes is proof of that.
Sigh. Never mind, if newzbin2 does fall over there are far better alternative services out there already.
Oh, and one more thing, I do so love this article. Cracking film by the way...
http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/internet-piracy-is-good-for-films-1
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Thursday 28th July 2011 18:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Star Wars is the perfect, but obvious, example
I was born in 1968. Like most boys of my generation, I queued at the cinema to see Star Wars several times. I queued for the two sequels. I bought some stickers and computer games. I watched the adverts from the TV channel that bought the rights to show the films.
George Lucas made that first film probably hoping he would make that enough money to make some more. That economic model (cinema, some merchandising, tv revenue) was sufficient for him to obtain funding for his 'artistic' endeavour and make him a millionaire many times over.
However, with new technology, I ended up renting the VHS videos, buying the videos, then buying the DVDs. All this has made George Lucas a fat, lazy billionaire and provided him with billions to waste on useless wooden prequels and special effects technology with which he has tried to obliterate and ruin the original films.
I, like many technology literate people I know, refuse to pay yet again for ***the same content*** in a superior format to make people far removed from the original artistic endeavours rich again. I won't spend a fortune again on stuff I've already paid for. I've had cash ripped out of me with the VHS to DVD and vinyl to CD transitions and won't do it again - which is why I've refused to play the physical media game and not purchased a Blu-Ray player. I suspect a lot of people feel the same way. The film studios were happy to sell me DVDs at high prices but now they want me to buy expensive Blu-Rays when I'm lucky to get 50 pence for old DVDs at a car boot sale. Stuff the bastards.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 14:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
Doing nothing is not a solution to there not being a solution
In the legal world, making "a reasonable effort" is often key. The ISPs know and <rosetintedglasses>the courts should make an effort to research</rosetintedglasses> and certainly the MPA and their gang know the methods that may circumvent any blocking.
They will block it anyway, safe in the knowledge that just the fact it makes it slightly harder for you or I to access it is the best legal defence they have.
See Tort law for lots of examples of "reasonableness". Some precedent comes from a case about someone wanting nets put up around a cricket pitch and having it denied due to expense and reasonable expectations of harm. I don't remember the case name though.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 13:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
(Untitled)
I get the impression that this is another example of a judge that has no idea of the real world, and so has made themselves look foolish. Obvious enough that the site can move elsewhere, one can not chase forever all such sites. But worse, it has made BT, who are a provider of data comms, act as if it were a law enforcement agency. Slippery slope that, usually only expected of countries with controlling governments. Yet here we see the legal profession making the decision. I don't think this is the path we should wish to travel down.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 13:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
And so the dawn of the Internet censorship era begins
Or should that be censorship war begins... because how exactly are the ISPs going to block this site?
Since Newzbin was already shutdown by a previous court order - that lasted approximately 2 weeks before it became newzbin2 followed by another year for the this case to block it.
So, how then?
Block it at BT's DNS servers - that's hardly going to work, just change your DNS servers, OpenDNS etc.
Block the IP - they'll change it, mirror it etc etc.
DPI - what exactly do you DPI for to ensure it is that site or incarnation of and not something else?
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Thursday 28th July 2011 14:14 GMT Anonymous Coward
Whatever it is, it'll be far from bulletproof
Even DPI is no good - HTTPS negates that.
All they can do is try and keep up with the changing names, IPs, whatever, but it's hardly in their financial interest to put too much effort into it. The MPA will have to keep gently "reminding" them.
"The internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it" - that applies both to the technologies and the culture. The MPA are forcing BT to try and play tennis with jelly - it ain't gonna work.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 22:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
tell that to the [insert vile description here] that deploy bluecoat, etc.
While it does require that they install an SSL cert into your browser; once that is done, they can proxy HTTPS traffic. Do you bank online? Do you examine every certificate presented to verify that it was issued to the site you're visiting? My browsers (ff, ch, ie) only contain the CA's that I have to trust to do what I need to do. All of the rest have been removed.
On the other hand, I manage a couple of web application firewalls, and I have to be very careful configuring them so that no sensitive data (re: PCI DSS) gets logged. When it does, on testing sites with ONLY fictitious data, people have to be notified, passwords changed, etc. I think I'm more of a stickler for testing/corner cases than the QA guy, because I don't want allow any such exposure in the production environment.
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Friday 29th July 2011 09:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Certificates
There's no need to verify every HTTPS certificate. Browsers are good at picking up mismatches between cert issued for and hostname - they're even good at telling you that the certificate has changed "since last time"
As you mention, removing all the CAs except those you need is a good idea. Certainly, voluntarily installing a cert from your ISP as trusted is a bad idea.
SSL is there to prevent MITM attacks, which is essentially what your ISP is doing in that scenario. Use it right and you're golden.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 14:13 GMT Anonymous Coward
What worries me ...
is the slow, but methodical joining of the dots we have here ...
"the man" doesn't like a website
invents law to justify dislike
ISPs now have to "obey the law".
As a concrete example - I like to read about growing cannabis (it's relaxing an theraputic). I frequent a .com site hosted well out of the UK.
With this reasoning, the government can said "you shouldn't be reading that", and get ISPs to block it.
Or wikileaks ....
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Thursday 28th July 2011 14:18 GMT Jan Hargreaves
revenue
i think the issue here could be that newsbin makes a rather large sum of money for this "service". most of the sites i have seen that link to content (you can include google) do not charge you for the privilege. profiteering off selling access to copyrighted material... well what did they expect?
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Thursday 28th July 2011 14:18 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oh Good
This will also do away with the calls for FUP and other unlimited download schemes. With usenet and P2P taken out of the loop, there wil be no need for 500 GB download caps, and more. Even if you buy a new game every month, what are you going to do with the remaining 490 GB ? Watch youporn ?
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Thursday 28th July 2011 15:57 GMT Richard 12
Erm, Steam, iPlayer, ITV Player, 4OD et al?
It doesn't take any questionable content for you to wind up downloading 500GB in a month.
I already stream iPlayer on my TV set-top box as well as my computers, and I expect I'll soon be doing the same with ITV Player, 4OD and other catch-up services. as they roll out.
A lot of new TVs have some/all of these services built-in already - how many TVs in the average home?
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Thursday 28th July 2011 14:32 GMT Mad Mike
Idiot Judge
This judge obviously has no concept of modern technology or enforcement. Firstly, whether it's against the law or not, they won't stop it. No way. It's a self-inflicted wound caused by the music and film industries prior practices that the same governments and courts failed to act against.
As the site is simply giving the location of content, they are not actually breaking copyright as he suggests. That's rubbish. At best they are aiding and abetting. The breaking of copyright is being carried out by the person downloading from the target website. Also, if you take the logical argument to it's conclusion, any indexing service is now liable for the actions of the entities they target. So, if yellow pages points you in the direction of a tradesman who commits a crime against you, aren't yellow pages guilty as well? After all, they indexed the tradesman and made his contact details (effectively his URL) available!! Same difference.
The argument about whether a person or company makes money out of the link isn't relevant as nowhere does it say you don't commit a crime if you don't make money at it. So, this argument is irrelevant. Google is just as guilty as anyone else as they are the ultimate in indexing all sorts of illegal content. Every search site would be the same.
In essence, they are introducing a legal precedent which they will enforce at THEIR choosing, against people and companies THEY choose to. Other people and companies will be allowed to keep doing the same thing because they're too big or too important or too whatever. So, they will be breaking the law just as much, but they won't be touched. Google will be amongst them.
And what will this result in? The rise of more and more encrypted networks and sites doing this underground where nobody can see them. They will spend millions (if not billions) simply chasing around after these people. As soon as they take one down, another ten will be created. It's a war they can't win, even if they have won the first battle. And in the meantime, you can bet a lot of innocents will get hit in the crossfire.
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Thursday 28th July 2011 14:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Meaningless waste of time
While I'm sure the MPA are happily patting themselves on the back the whole exercise is utterly pointless...
Even if BT do comply and block access to "newzbin2" or whatever its fairly simple for them to change domain names and IP's outside the scope of the existing block. So then is the MPA going to go to court every time to keep adding new sites to this?
Let alone the hundreds or other newsbin sites and providers that are outside the block. So the MPA are going to go to court to get every site blocked? By every ISP ??
Not feasible.
That's before we even get into encrypted connections, p2p, or even just ripping straight from disk and you don't exactly have to buy them to get hold of the physical media.
Sure illegal downloading and copying is taking money away from the industry, maybe Tom Cruise will have to take a bit of a pay cut! But the lesson to be learned is the public want a high quality fast access to this stuff at a reasonable price point, which is something they don't seem to want to provide...
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Thursday 28th July 2011 15:25 GMT Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
The EU has an opinion on this
Court of Justice of the European Union
PRESS RELEASE No 37/11
Luxembourg, 14 April 2011
Press and Information
Advocate General’s Opinion in Case C-70/10
"the Advocate General proposes that the Court of Justice should declare that EU law precludes a national court from making an order, on the basis of the Belgian statutory provision, requiring an internet service provider to install, in respect of all its customers, in abstracto and as a preventive measure, entirely at the expense of the internet service provider and for an unlimited period, a system for filtering all electronic communications passing via its services (in particular, those involving the use of peer-to-peer software) in order to identify on its network the sharing of electronic files containing a musical, cinematographic or audio-visual work in respect of which a third party claims rights, and subsequently to block the transfer of such files, either at the point at which they are requested or at the point at which they are sent."
http://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/2011-04/cp110037en.pdf
Added to this is the idea that blocking a single site is going to actually achieve anything, there are so many ways around this that the legal case taken by the copyright mafiaa makes it clear that the mafiaa haven't a fucking clue what they are doing. They are a latter day king Canute (or Cnut which I think is the correct spelling, so more than one similarity with the mafiaa) trying to hold back the tide.
The claim that newzbin has earned "millions" from its activities would seem to point at the fact that some people are willing to pay extra above the cost of their internet connection for "free" content, but that also points to the fact that these people may also be willing to pay for good proxies and seed boxes as well!!!! Blocking avoided.
Sadly the mafiaa will view this as a victory and proof that they are doing the correct thing. I’m inclined to say this is just the mafiaa rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic, no, its more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg
As a slight aside to all this, does anybody know by how much CD sales increased when oink was shut down?….. anybody??…… anybody????
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Thursday 28th July 2011 15:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Anyway ...
going back a few years, it was Kazaa ... then that got borked, and torrents took off. Then Piratebay was attacked, and loads of "salted" torrents (i.e. you don't realise till you have downloaded the whole 350Mb that it's either crap, or "needs" a new codec) ..
as far as I can see the current channel of choice, is Rapidshare, et al.
Encrypt file (optional)
ZIP and break into 100Mb chunks
upload with randomised filenames, and no indexing link
post links on favourite forum of choice. Of course this could be a members only, encrypted website, so it's pretty hard to keep up with things ...
what the dozy judge failed to see, is that there is no problem with *storing* the illegal content. Storage is dirt cheap - and getting cheaper. It's just indexing it. And as long as the indexing (which is an insignificant amount compared to the payload) can be controlled on a buddy-buddy basis, then the rights holders will *always* be one step behind.
If the big labels had put a 100th the time and effort they have put into chasing smoke, into devising a fair and equitable licensing system, they would be much the better off for it. I can't help but feel these antics are really the last - dangerous - but last thrashings of a mortally wounded beast.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
