

Deal to combat piracy in UK with 'alerts' is imminent - rb2e
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27330150

======
ewood
From the final paragraphs of the article this seems like a compromise
agreement for both sides. The ISPs have pushed against becoming the rights
holders' enforcers, much like ISPs in Australia and other jurisdictions that
have been through this. While the rights holders obviously see this as a
stepping stone to lobbying for greater powers - 'In the agreement, it states
that an ineffective system would lead rights holders to call for "rapid
implementation" of stronger measures as outlined in the Digital Economy Act.'

I don't think any of these ISPs are working in the interest of their customers
though. There is nothing here that discusses the rights of the account holders
to dispute these warnings or any talk of consulting with customers before
implementation. And while it says that rights holders cannot use the system to
prosecute individuals, surely if the ISPs are maintaining this information to
send warnings a rights holder will use the courts to try to access the actual
IPs eventually?

~~~
Nexxxeh
Why would you dispute someone sending you an educational letter? To tell you
about struggling artists and starving music A&R men? What are you, some kind
of communist? /s

Besides, you can always just ring up or email your ISP with "I dispute your
assertion/implication I was illegally downloading or uploading copyrighted
content."

I'm not sure if the courts would force an ISP to release the information if
going after the account holder would be in breach of a prior arrangement.
Besides, pretty sure it has been shown that an IP doesn't identify an
individual.

The other thing is that the information isn't centralised, which means someone
could just hop from ISP to ISP, never hitting the 4 letter a year limit. If
you port using a MAC code, there's very minimal downtime when you switch.

It would seem to me like the ISPs have acted in their interests and the
interests of their customers by heading off legislation but still not evening
showing teeth, let alone using them.

Edit: replacing typo's and autocorrect mistakes.

~~~
anon4
Also - free paper to doodle on!

------
iamben
£3 million plus to send out a bunch of letters to, assuming 20 million UK
households, what could end up being more than one in 10 of us?

Imagine they'd collaboratively invested that cash into British startups tasked
with finding new revenue streams for the entertainment industry, and then
worked with them to provide legal access to films / music / whatever.

They could be in a completely different place in three years. This feels like
spitting into the wind.

~~~
gnarbarian
Or imagine if they didn't waste your money at all with threats or a pointless
exercise trying to supplant an antiquated business model for an industry who
refuses to adapt themselves.

They are entitled to public assistance as much as the phone book publishing
industry.

If the media companies wanted a creative new approach to delivering their
content they would fund it themselves. They would rather use your government
and your money to maintain the stats quo. If they want to stop piracy they
should do it by providing a legal alternative which matches piracy's
convenience.

~~~
toyg
The phone book industry does not generate headlines and gossip material for
the entire nation. Like it or not, Brangelina, Bieber and their likes are the
cultural backbone of our modern consumerist society, and politicians know it
very well. Hence, they'll bend over backwards to accomodate their wishes.

~~~
gnarbarian
Cultural backbone according to who? Tabloids and E news? Modern societies are
composed of many sub cultures. A better anatomical analogy for awful pop
culture would be a repulsive and visible contagious rash on the face.

------
ekianjo
The same thing was implemented in France several years ago with the HADOPI
(another government body created for the occasion, probably to put relatives
and friends of politicians - easy money), and the alert system had no tangible
results... except that there was a massive move to VPN subscriptions after its
implementation.

Looks like the UK did not learn anything from its neighbor.

~~~
exDM69
> and the alert system had no tangible results...

Well it did put the legislators under a little ridicule when warning letters
were sent to the French prime minister's home after his kids had been pirating
movies (can't remember all the details).

I can't wait to read the news articles that follow when these letters get sent
to 10 Downing Street.

------
ElliotH
Given the background to this, and how bad this could have gone I could not
have been more happy. This is years late and completely lacking in teeth.

I protested in the streets of London when the digital economy act came
through, and I am so glad that despite it passing, this is as far as it got.

~~~
Fuxy
Don't celebrate just yet it may be lacking teeth at the moment but it gets
their foot in the door so they can "adjust" it later.

Just look at the NSA as a good example of an organization that steadily
amassed power over time.

I expect this to happen in about 3 years when the copyright holders decide
it's not working (doubt anybody would actually double check) and they start
making noise to give it more teeth.

Lesson: Encrypt all the things.

~~~
ElliotH
I take victories where I can find them. (Not giving up the fight though)

It helps that the ISP seem to on the whole not want to cut peoples internet
off, it is rather bad for business.

------
jasonkester
The closest thing I can relate this to in the UK is the way they handle TV
licensing. That's another government sponsored organization seemingly designed
to find and harass false-positives with threatening letters. Yes, I own a
screen. Yes, there theoretically exists a mechanism to hook it up so that it
would receive broadcast television were you to broadcast any television in my
area. But no, I'm not going to pay you for a TV License regardless of how many
times you threaten to send somebody over to my house.

Similarly, I pay Lovefilm, Orange.fr and the NFL directly for access to paid
content. I streamed a Game of Thrones episode to my TV here in France last
night, possibly making me the first person in history to watch the show
legally.

But when I head back to our house in England in a few months, I might want to
watch the next episode so I'll download it. I have paid for access to it, but
BT has no way of knowing this so they'll add me to their list of "Bad People".

There's simply no way they can correctly track who paid for what, so it leaves
us in a situation where, regardless of whether you have a right to the content
you watch, you're still labeled a criminal.

Kinda makes you wonder why bother paying at all if the end result is the same.

~~~
glomph
You register like once and they stop sending the letters.

~~~
jasonkester
We did. That just made them even madder because they _knew_ we had a TV in
there and now we were lying to them about it. They're definitely sending a guy
out now, you'll see.

We'd answer them and ask, yes, please do send somebody out. We'll show you
around. That really pissed them off, since now we're not only lying but
calling their bluff.

Eventually after several months of this, a very angry looking man came to the
door, stormed upstairs, looked around a bit, searched a few cupboards, and
apologized.

I often think that if they took the time and effort they spend harassing
people who don't watch television and instead directed it towards making
television programs that people might want to watch, they would actually get
more people to pay them for a license to watch television.

------
blueskin_
Seedbox hosts are going to be happy with this.

Old media will never win this battle. Perhaps they should focus on making
their content available reasonably - having to pay a yearly TV tax plus a
subscription to Sky or Virgin just to watch what might well be a single
programme is ridiculous. Netflix is far better, and I use it, but its
catalogue is still tiny and often released an extremely long time after a
programme was aired on TV.

------
higherpurpose
By far the single most effective solution to dramatically slow down piracy is
to make all content available globally for reasonable prices, for a digital
"watch at home" copy", that has none of the costs of something like a cinema
ticket, and benefits from large economies of scale (especially if the content
is distributed P2P, and not many central servers are needed, other than
keeping a seed on all content at all time).

This education thing won't do much to turn people away from piracy. If threat
of prison or bankruptcy-inducing fines didn't, then neither will this,
especially when there's little to educate them about when the content people
want isn't actually available in their countries and soon after coming out.

Hollywood is its own biggest problem.

~~~
digitalengineer
You named the real problem allright: "for reasonable prices". They're going
for _maximum_ prices. I predict a great rise of VPN in Great Britain. And
about VPN: Does anyone know why my iPhone can only have a manually 'on/off'
VPN when company phones can have VPN-ON-all-the-time? VPN always-on would
really improve my privacy.

~~~
MrScruff
I'm fairly certain the industry understands the relationship between pricing
and revenue. It's hardly a fair market when they're forced to compete with
free though.

~~~
elohesra
> It's hardly a fair market when they're forced to compete with free though

Surely, as a member of an entrepreneurial-focussed community, you can
trivially see why this argument isn't valid? The content holders are only
competing with free if they're offering the same service as the free service.

The games industry has managed to cleverly counter 'competing with free' by
making their paid services such as Steam value-added over simply providing the
same content as the free content. The rights holders just have to find
something that they can add that pirates cannot. As Steam gives community and
ease of storage, and Spotify gives recommendations and playlists, so too must
Hollywood find something that they can give.

Netflix already goes a long way to being the Spotify of the film and
television industry, but it's hampered by only being allowed to show out of
date content, and having its content culled fairly often. If the film and
television industry were to introduce a Netflix+ with all the newest films and
television shows, then I expect that they could attract a much larger number
of people at a much larger price.

Of course, they could always just sit around whining that they "can't compete
with free" and stick ever greater restrictions on the public until the public
finally grow sick of them and force politicians to move decisively against the
film and television industry.

~~~
MrScruff
In the music industry, there are plenty of digital download services that
offer convenient and reliable distribution of DRM free audio files. Yet it's
commonly accepted that their business is still severely impacted by copyright
infringement, ie. competing with free.

Services like Spotify make far smaller revenues than music sales, so can
hardly be considered a success for anyone other than Spotify.

I don't disagree that rights holders should make their services as user
friendly as possible, but it's disingenuous to infer that will fix the
underlying problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by your final paragraph. Why would the public
'force politicians to move decisively against the film and television
industry'? The film and television industry are the ones producing the content
that the public want.

------
bananas
I'm terminating my Sky account over this today. At no point is this in my
interest as a customer. They took £750000 to voluntarily violate my privacy.

They obviously will have to develop a heuristic for suspicion and store
suspects somewhere. If that list becomes available by accident or court order
then it puts people at litigation risk. Unfortunately despite guarantees
supposedly mandated by law, if you're confronted with a case then you're
screwed either with respect to costs or defense.

I would suggest people start moving to Andrews and Arnold or a similar smaller
ISP immediately.

~~~
lclarkmichalek
This must be the mildest agreement ever, and you're in outrage? Considering
the alternatives, this is amazing. The only information that rights holders
get is the number of letters sent out. How is this not a win for the consumer?

~~~
bananas
Yes I because:

1\. They actively monitor your connection to be able to determine whether or
not you have "infringed". This has non legitimate utility.

2\. They are building a mailing database which whilst is under a mild
agreement may in the future be made available under different terms.

So this is not a win, it's a tragic first step towards what we don't want.

~~~
mike-cardwell
"They actively monitor your connection": This isn't the case is it (for this
purpose at least)? It's the rights holders that contact the ISPs with a list
of IPs that they claim are infringing. All the ISPs are doing is mapping IP
addresses to real addresses and sending letters? The ISPs don't actively
monitor for copyright infringement...

~~~
kiallmacinnes
It sounds to me like this agreement changes that... that's what the £750k is
for - to implement the monitoring and heuristics...

I think!

~~~
mike-cardwell
No, that's definitely not the case. Read the section titled "How the system
will work". It specifically says that the rights holders will be doing this.

Which is something they are already doing anyway.

------
AliAdams
I Wonder how many people are actually 'for' this. It seems those against it
should far outweigh those in favour.

~~~
rwmj
Don't underestimate the army of technologically illiterate voters.

The best thing we can do is vote, as often and loudly as possible.

~~~
collyw
Voters don't have much say in this.

I wrote to my MP a few years ago regarding some copyright issue (I think it
was the proposed extension to 70 years). The reply was pretty much, "Our party
believes this and that is what we are going with" (their stance was pretty
much the opposite of what I was writing about).

I wrote a second time explaining that I though representative democracy was
supposed to be about the politicians representing the people, and their
wishes.

The next reply seemed to acknowledge that, but I have my doubts that I was
actually represented in any way.

~~~
rwmj
Voters absolutely do have a say in this. Look at how disproportionate the
influence of UKIP is. Only a small number of people vote for them but it's
causing enormous panic in mainstream parties and (sadly) reflecting in policy.

The voting system is hardly perfect, but if, as the young and technically
literate are wont, we don't vote much, then sensible policies don't happen.

~~~
nly
'disproportionate' is the operative word here.

------
SixSigma
Please don't do this

I'm warning you

Now I'm really annoyed

I'm really upset with you

.....

~~~
toyg
"... and by the way, your name is now in a database that might be made
available to rights-holders who want to sue you."

That's the real sting: building infrastructure to keep tabs on who is
accessing what. Once that infrastructure is in place, you only need to flip a
switch in Westminster in a few months (because "the system isn't working", of
course -- ever seen any rights-holder data saying piracy has decreased?) and
the mass-punishment will begin.

Which is idiotic, really: the French HADOPI law was built on the same
principles, and it only made VPNs more popular.

