
Court orders UK ISPs to block more piracy sites - benev
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21601609
======
shocks
The movie/music/tv industries need to learn from Steam.

I used to steal games all the time. New game came out? Steal it. Open up
BitTorrent or an FTP client and start downloading, immediately. But then Steam
came along. __Now I buy all my games __. I don't just buy games I want, I buy
games I have stolen in the past. I buy new games. I buy games on sale. But the
most important part? __A new game comes out, and I think about buying it on
Steam before I think about stealing it. __Stealing doesn't cross my mind,
because being a legitimate customer (which is what I want to be...) is just so
easy.

Music is getting easier with products like Spotify, but what about quality
freaks? Lots of people want FLAC, but don't buy CDs. When a real solution for
this problem comes out, I'm sure people will flock too it.

TV? How does someone in Lithuania legitimately pay for HD American TV shows?
He or she can't, but they can certainly steal it without any problems. It's
not even hard. My grandma could do it. It's a similar problem with movies.
Ridiculous release times (US only for two months, etc), difficult to get a
1080p mkv legitimately - but that's what people want.

Netflicks is certainly helping to solve this problem, but their catalogue is
not extensive. It is not always up to date.

 __The only way to compete with piracy is to offer a better alternative. __

~~~
lince
Agree with you, except on the use of "steal".

You steal when the owner lose the original. What happens in BitTorrent/FTP is
copy.

More about in copy is not theft video:
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4>

~~~
bobsy
There are really 2 types of piracy. Non-destructive and destructive. I believe
the majority is non-destructive. People download things which they either do
not have access to or do not value enough to pay for. If the option wasn't
there to download it they wouldn't pay for it anyway.

Downloading content which you would otherwise pay for is destructive. It is
like what the OP describes above. He was downloading things he would otherwise
have paid for. Money wasn't going to game makers. He was effectively stealing
and its damaging to people making the games.

Film / Music industry people think the majority of piracy is destructive. I
think they are wrong. I have spent thousands of pounds on things I discovered
through piracy. However, if you are downloading things you know you would
otherwise buy then really it is difficult to deny you are not stealing or at
least conning content owners out of money they are owed.

~~~
_mulder_
>People download things which they either do not have access to or do not
value enough to pay for

Yes, THIS!

I think this is the crux of the entire argument that is completely ignored by
nearly every content producer. People value things differently for a huge
number of reasons. With things with a personal appeal like music, or maybe
TV/Film but I imagine less so, some people will pay more for their favourite
band, others won't. That means the band is undervaluing their product to their
greatest fans (good for the fans) and over valuing for their lesser fans.

Normally, when I download things, it's because I don't value the product at
the price it's being sold, but I do still value it! Film is a great example of
this. I'll happily pay $5 to rent a great film like Django unchained, or
Avatar, etc. But am I going to pay the same amount for the (boringly bad)
Bourne Legacy? No. But I would still pay something to see it.. perhaps $1,
maybe $2. But I can't because there is no option to do this. So instead, I
would consider downloading it.

So what have the film company lost when I chose to pirate instead of purchase?
Not $5 because I wouldn't have paid this in the first place. So they've lost
$2. And what have I lost? I've had to spend some of my time hunting down and
waiting for the film to download (A minor inconvenience) but that's it. So
seems like the only loser is the film company.

For evidence, look at the most highly downloaded film of 2012 'Project X'.
IMDB gives it a 6.6 rating and it sounds a bit lame but fun. Exactly the sort
of film that isn't worth full price rental.

Or perhaps that's just how I see things..

------
bobsy
I was speaking to a friends dad at his last Christmas party. He was talking
about downloading movies. I asked if he used a proxy. He said. "Of course I
do. I use blah." He then told me how he checked to make sure it was working..
I was genuinely surprised that a casual internet user knew about proxies.

As always such domain bans are ridiculous and do not solve the issue of why
people choose to pirate stuff. I now use Spotify. I used to pirate music,
downloading thousands of albums. Most were deleted after one play. I brought
albums, merchandise and saw live bands that I liked. Bands I would never have
discovered without "pirating" the music to begin with.

The article talk's about how piracy is dropping and Spotify use is raising.
This isn't to do with TPB being blocked. This is to do with people realizing
that music discovery is easier with Spotify than it is via piracy. This is the
way it should be.

I am sure less TV shows are being pirated due to the rise of catch up and
streaming services. I only download TV shows and the only reason for this is
the delay in availability in my country. I don't download movies any more
because there is already an abundance of stuff to watch - be it new or old -
on streaming services like Netflix. I recently discovered the TV show Jericho.
Check it out. It was brilliant.

If anything these ban's are endangering users making them more vulnerable to
viruses, keyloggers and becoming a part of a bot net. If someone wants
something THEY WILL DOWNLOAD IT. Sites like TPB have great community
moderation. Dodgy downloads are flagged. Good ones are up voted. I don't
remember the last time I got a bad download.

Compare this to the less known sites which people are being pushed towards.
More bad links, less community moderation, bad site owners pushing dodgy
downloads. A lot of people who are not expert computer users are becoming more
vulnerable.

All this is because the music / film lobbies have convinced the UK Government
that Piracy is destroying their revenues. Its not. The Internet combined with
the glacial speed in which these industries are moving is. Better content,
easier access and fair pricing will crush piracy. Blocking domains moves
piracy to another source.

Music streaming services have done more to stop piracy than anything else. If
music / film industry spent less on lobbyists and court actions and more on
innovating access to their products they would see a far bigger turnaround in
profits.

When TPB was banned I said it would kick a ball rolling that wouldn't stop.
Here we go. I wonder what is next.

~~~
youngerdryas
>If anything these ban's are endangering users making them more vulnerable to
viruses, keyloggers and becoming a part of a bot net.

And hence reluctant to pirate if a legitimate option is available.

~~~
bobsy
The reason a lot of people pirate stuff is because they lack a legitimate
option?

Take Game of Thrones. You cannot afford or justify the cost of the TV package.
You enjoy the show. Your friends always talk about it the day after it is
aired in your country... There is a pressure to watch it and no easy way to do
so. Hence piracy.

My cousin was desperate to watch a football match. She went into the darkest
parts of the Internet and the end result was taking her computer to a repair
shop because the things she had installed basically rendered her computer
inoperable. Will she stop pirating? Probably not. She can probably better
identify files likely to damage her computer.

The worrying thing is a lot of spyware and keyloggers etc are transparent.
Even malware. You notice a toolbar appears but a lot of people do not care and
continue to use their computer..

Someone may become reluctant if they become aware that their computer has been
successfully infected by a virus. A lot of things now are far more sinister
though. They do not want to be noticed or discovered so there is no lesson to
learn until someone empties your bank account. Even when this happens it isn't
obvious your computer was the source of the breach. It could have been
phishing etc.

Piracy is widespread and the police do not even treat it as a misdemeanor.
Socially, piracy is completely acceptable. Smoking has become more socially
unacceptable... and yet these court judgements make the public more at risk
from identity theft, fraud etc etc.. without making piracy any less rife.

~~~
youngerdryas
>The reason a lot of people pirate stuff is because they lack a legitimate
option?

Yes. If your time has little value, i.e. you live with your parents and are
unemployed, then sure it makes sense to monkey around. The rest of your
argument makes me not want to deal with piracy.

------
brador
The slippery slope has started.

This is why it's so important to fight with everything you have over the tiny
scraps of civil liberties you enjoy. Once a bite is taken, the whole cake
inevitably follows.

~~~
UnoriginalGuy
The slippery slope started when they installed these blocks "for child porn
only!" way back when. They even said, specifically, that no other content
would ever be blocked.

Since then they added "violent [adult] porn," "illegal 'terrorist' sites," and
now they've started doing pirate-related content.

So the slippery slope started a long time ago. We are half way down it and it
is only getting steeper.

~~~
DanBC
Aren't these blocks very different to the blocks of sites dealing in images of
child sexual abuse?

This was a private case between industry and a few ISPs. The IWF blocklist is
strictly about images of child sexual abuse (hosted world-wide), images of
criminally obscene content (hosted in UK) and non-photographic images of child
sexual abuse. The block is a temporary block until illegal content is removed.

(<http://www.iwf.org.uk/>)

~~~
desas
The blocking technology (cleanfeed) was installed by most ISPs for the IWF
blocking, once it was installed the industry took the ISPs to court to use it
for blocking other things.

------
JonnieCache
Everyone in the UK already knows how to use the thousands of proxies out there
to access TPB. This will simply force the operators of the current proxy
aggregators eg. <http://ukbay.org/> to start aggregating proxies for these
other sites as well. This will actually make finding pirated content easier.

But as we all know, the purpose of these laws isn't to stop piracy.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _the purpose of these laws isn't to stop piracy_ //

Assuming you mean the purpose is not to stop copyright infringement, then what
do you consider the purpose to be?

------
Lockyy
>However, a recent report from market research firm NPD suggested that there
had been a large reduction in the number of users illegally downloading music,
with fans instead favouring legal options like streaming site Spotify.

The implication that this block is what is resulting in an uptake in services
like spotify is so disingenuous it's not even funny.

~~~
alexwright
Makes total sense; Spotify launches in 2006 and has had increasing revenue and
user base year over year since, UK Courts block TPB in 2012. Clear cause and
effect, plus time travel.

~~~
shocks
Exactly what happened in Denmark is about to happen here.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Denmark>

------
meaty
Time to move to Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK:

<http://aaisp.com/>

They have an explicit no censorship policy:

<http://aaisp.com/news-censorship.html>

Not only that, they offer IPv6 and their connection isn't a total piece of
shit! Rather glad I moved from O2 (Telefonica) who apply the censorship and
horrible traffic shaping even though they say they didn't on my contract.

~~~
Silhouette
It sounds like this is all happening in response to a High Court order.

An ISP that doesn't obey High Court orders isn't going to be an ISP for very
long, so while switching like this might seem attractive, it's probably more
about staying with the little guy under the radar than any real guarantee of
anything.

~~~
meaty
Its a high court order for a bunch of specific very popular ISPs. By nature, a
court order can only be applied to corporate entities (people, companies).
They would have to enumerate every possible computer connectivity provider to
be effective or introduce a law to stop it. Andrews and Arnold are very small
and of no interest (for now).

This is basically the legal system sucking off a corporation and shutting down
a common body of offenders.

------
pisarzp
It's really sad to see phonographic industry fighting piracy that way. There
is a million of proxy sites which make Pirate Bay available in UK anyway...

The only way to deal with piracy is enable users to have access to they
content they want in any possible way at affordable prices!

I used to download a lot of music, but since spotify offered Premium service
for just 4 pounds a month in Poland I bought it instantly (I have Polish CC).

If Netflix had good XBMC app I would gladly pay for that as well.

------
rheide
The only thing this article did was let me know the names of some torrent
sites I didn't know about yet. Thanks for sharing the love, BBC.

------
casca
If you'd like to support the fight against this kind of stupidity, please
consider supporting the Open Rights Group. It's the UK equivalent of the EFF
and they do great work.

<http://www.openrightsgroup.org/>

------
casca
Correction - UK _Court_ requires ISPs to block more filesharing website. This
is about the UK courts, not the ISPs.

~~~
arethuza
Actually, as this was an English court, I wonder if this has any effect in
Scotland and Northern Ireland?

~~~
EwanToo
I don't believe there's any legally Scottish or Welsh ISPs that are large
enough to fall into the ban's scope (over 500k residential customers?).

The six ISPs that are currently forced to block these sites are BT, Sky,
Virgin Media, O2, EE and TalkTalk.

------
cantlin
The torrent user experience is poor. You interact with tacky, ad-rich sites to
download files that you have to open up in often buggy desktop client software
before receiving a product of highly variable quality.

Contrast this with private trackers, which often offer:

    
    
        1) Extremely high quality files.
        2) Extremely well curated.
    

Having used Spotify for the last year, I find the experience vastly inferior
to when I used private torrent sites. Of course, I get to massage my
conscience with the knowledge that I am paying real money. More and more
though, I'm sceptical of how much of my money content producers ever see. I'm
starting to feel the same distaste for Spotify as I do the traditional media
distribution companies. More, I've lost that sense of building my own library
of music.

Can it be so hard?

    
    
        1) Low cost. Low middleman fees.
        2) High quality product.
        3) Absolute ownership of what I buy.
        4) Good UX.
    

Once this is done, there'll be no need to lobby for breaking the internet.

------
nodata
Good. Let's see what new technology this creates.

~~~
vy8vWJlco
It goes without saying, but: we can't wait and hope. Open your editor and
start predicting the future by inventing it...

Some ideas: work on retroshare, or cjdns, or yacy, or a bittorrent-like rootfs
for linux to pivot to after pxe-booting like a network virus, or anything else
that will help seal the doors of history and shut out this dark age of
artificial-scarcity digital-protectionism and the information-luddites bent on
making copying _harder_ (zomfg!).

------
Fuxy
Ok. I really didn't care that the piratebay got blocked except for the legal
precedent that created but as expected here comes the banning of every site
remotely considered as "bad" by any corporate party. We will all be old and
gray talking about this magical thing called the internet where everybody was
free to do whatever they wanted but young children would be looking at us like
we're crazy because the never experienced it. It's all down hill from here
folks.

------
DanBC
I'm curious about which ISPs they're targeting, and whether that'll mean more
business for the other ISPs.

A small number of file-sharing users can take a lot of bandwidth which
wouldn't be a problem if the plans were priced realistically, but plans are
priced for lowest-common-denominator use while being described and sold as
premium product.

~~~
sdfjkl
Sky, BT, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media.

Source: [http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/28/online-piracy-
is...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/28/online-piracy-isps-block-
access)

------
drucken
There are already proxies for these sites, as many Italians would tell you...

