| Dark Days Ahead for Irish Internet Users |
[Jun. 22nd, 2009|04:59 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | censorship, copyright, internet, ireland, irma, music, net neutrality, rant, riaa, technology, three strikes | ] |
Just to catch you up. This year my ISP, Eircom.net, settled a dispute with the Irish Recorded Music Ass. (IRMA) who had taken them to court over illegal file sharing. The claim was that Eircom were complicit in the illegal activities of their users. the evidence against them included internal emails showing Eircom execs joking about copyright infringement.
The out of court settlement, so far as anyone can tell, is entirely one-sided. Eircom have agreed to institute both content filtering - censorship by any other name - and a three-strikes rule - very like the situation promised by the recently defeated EU Telecoms Package. The Industry Ass. will put forward to the courts websites and online services that they feel need to be blocked in Ireland to protect their profit margins and Eircom have agreed not to contest any of them. A sorry little MediaSentry wannabe called DTecNet is in place to monitor internet users and provide accusations which Eircom will be asked to act upon by disconnecting those accused without any room for appeal. Remember, this is the same monitoring technique that lead the RIAA to sue a woman who did not even own a computer! Also keep in mind that this is a private arrangement, there is no public consultation, no democratic or judicial process, no tests for legality or constitutionality. This is the Recording Industry successfully inserting a de facto law without any need to lobby politicians or campaign for public support.
Fine, I'll ditch Eircom in a heartbeat, and I'll be sure to let them know exactly why I, and no doubt many other customers are jumping what has become the Recording Industry patrol boat to man the cruise liner across the dock. I'm thinking I'll sign up with UPC, an international company that bought out NTL and Chorus and that offer better stats for a similar price.
But there's a problem...
Since their success with Eircom the Irish Recorded Music Ass. has been sending threatening letters to all the other ISPs operating in the country (and a few that aren't ISPs at all) offering the same arrangement they offered Eircom and backed by the same threats of legal action. In fact both BT Ireland and UPC are already facing legal proceedings over this.
Eircom is the largest telecoms operator in the Republic, the one-time monopoly holder, their pockets are as deep as they get in the local industry. Even they could not face the legal avalanche that the Recording Industry promised to drop on them - appeal after appeal, case after case. Eircom have a maximum possible consumer base of maybe 2 million households and businesses. Subtract from that the customers who have taken up offers from other companies. What's left does not look like much when placed before the international cartels that are applying monetary leverage across the fulcrum of IRMA. All the other operators here are smaller than that, or at least have a smaller stake in the already tiny market. Even BT will probably settle before the cost of legal activity outstrips their profit margin. It seems we're about to find out.
How can anyone select a new provider when it looks like they'll all end up in exactly the same situation?
UPC have publicly stated that they have no intention of folding before the threats. In their own words "UPC intends to vigorously defend its position in court." And this is exactly the stance that lead Eircom to court in the first place. And look where they are now.
Angry yet? |
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| UK Government Under the Control of Hollywood |
[Feb. 22nd, 2008|10:18 pm] |
You may have noticed that the UK government, with the kind assistance of Andrew Burnham MP of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, is bowing to Hollywood and the record labels' various enforcement groups, essentially handing them the power to control the uses that UK citizens may make of their internet connections. ISPs have been given until April 2009 to comply with new regulations that will force them to inspect all data transferred through their systems and magically deduce whether or not it involves the sharing of copyrighted material. In the event that sharing is suspected (nothing more is required) the ISP subscriber will receive a strike against them, if they receive three strikes their internet service will be terminated.
No allowances have been made for the technological requirements for deep packet inspection of all traffic that passes through a service providers system. It may safely be presumed that the customers will end up paying extra to have their private data transmissions intercepted and analysed. I have yet to find any comment form Burnham on the morality of cutting off an innocent user when someone else who makes use of the same connection is suspected of sharing - if one family member breaks the rules then everyone in that household loses access this increasingly essential communications service. Nor have I seen any indication from those involved that they have any understanding of the encryption arms race they are about to enter and immediately lose - that will be an awful lot of money spent and trouble caused for a system that will be worked around before it is even put in place. Naturally there is no hint of how the ISP's are to identify copyrighted works from any other shared files. And what are the procedures for proving one's innocence? How does someone with a strike based on a suspicion show that they are not guilty of sharing (baring in mind the technical hurdles already involved in proving positive proof of sharing).
The most sensible response I have heard comes from a Slashdot commenter:
"if all ISPs in the UK staged a strike by cutting Internet access everywhere for two or three days and claim that would be the only possible way to ensure their customers aren't pirating anything, I am sure that the outrage would force another look at the law. And if they did this 2 different times, like once on Thursday Friday and Saturday, it could cause direct deposit information and payroll services to be interrupted. If they did this on again a week later on lets say Monday and Tuesday, there would be so much upset and confusion that those who think they wasn't effected will be."
Personally I will be happy to lose access for a few days if it will do anything to prevent this travesty from going any further. Frankly, the harm done to individual users will not even register compared to the harm done to UK financial sector, not least the content industry. They must learn that the environment has changed and all the legislation in the world cannot change it back. Technology has moved forward and they have failed to follow. Their demise is inevitable, and is only hastened by making enemies of us all. |
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| Glitch |
[Dec. 5th, 2007|10:49 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | civil liberties, copyright, drm, economy, movies, mpaa, music, net neutrality, news, p2p, politics, rant, technology | ] |
Listen, Glick, the movie industry is already doing the one thing that guarantees I will never illegally download their 'products', namely they are now making such deficient, low-brow, half-assed, worthless, over-hyped, over-funded, overwritten, sub intellectual, inadequate, substandard, ridiculous, inferior, scoff-worthy, malodorous, cringe-making, mismanaged, shoddy, insufferable, incompetent and defective low-com-dom crap, that I would never ever even consider wasting one single byte of my precious bandwidth on any of it. I would be perfectly happy to see every last bit of your meritless trash forever erased from the internet were it not for the fact that you are trying to do it by introducing a radically disproportionate mechanism: ending Network Neutrality!
Don't cover your ears Glickster, you need to hear this: Shrek 3 is not important enough to bring an end to our freedom. The only reason the movie industry can say it's losing money now is because they spent way too much on producing something that nobody actually needs and nobody really wants. The Western World will not crumble because they can't turn a profit, but it might if we lose the integrity and security of the single most important communications tool in history.
One way or another the IP delusional industries are one the way out. It's only a matter of time before the average consumer figures out that their 'entertainment' just isn't worth it any more, that the busker on the street outside the cinema is a hell of lot more creative, interesting and memorable than the claptrap movie they just walked out of. How long do you think they'll watch their technology subverted, their personal data ransacked, their legally purchased media disintegrating, and their communications tapped and blocked before they think: "But I didn't even like the Bourne Appendectomy!"
Anyone invested in the movie or recording industries with even an iota of common sense should be selling up now, while their stock is still worth the ferromagnetic material it's stored on. You know it can't go on like this. It just isn't reasonable in consider this a survivable scenario for anyone involved. I mean it. Get out now. This is going to end badly, and you know it.
Glicky, you are not adding to our culture in any positive way beyond uniting the rest of us against you. You are not curing any horrible diseases. You are not on a crusade of righteousness. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You are not welcome here. |
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| Internet's End |
[May. 21st, 2006|10:22 pm] |
Net Neutrality was a very simple concept that produced two useful conditions. It provided a level playing field upon which all entities were offered an equal opportunity to succeed within the confines of the network. But also, and perhaps more importantly, it made the end points - the content producer and the content consumer - responsible for the nature of the traffic on the network.
This last point is important for two reasons. Firstly the users could make the choice of which traffic deserved priority (that is, their choices decided the distribution of data and this democratic pressure shaped the network). Secondly, the carrier of the traffic was never held responsible for the actions of its users, thus protecting free speech online while also provided a clear path of accountability with regards to illegal activity. Now, with the end of Network neutrality within grasp of the carriers, we will see the end of clear accountability and the end of the democratic Internet.
For the moment, let's set aside the issue of carriers like AT&T extorting money from service providers like Google, who are already paying for the bandwidth they use. Lets also set aside the fact that the double whammy of charges will be a disincentive to those with new services and new ideas to offer, that this will stifle innovation. And we cannot forget that this could end independent IPTV even before it's begun. These things are a disturbing promise but, if you can imagine, not the most worrisome.
The issue of responsibility is far more pressing. You see, if the carriers win this and bring about the end of neutrality, not only will they be able to control the traffic traversing their potion of the Internet, but they could well find themselves under pressure to exert that control beyond the simple economic demands of a tiered system. It is not enough to say the Slow Tier is going to remain free and that it's merely access to the Fast Tier that will be controlled. The fact that the carriers will have provided themselves the ability to discriminate the sources and destinations of any traffic means that they have the capacity to identify and shape all traffic, and with that comes the potential accountability for not doing it.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that, since they have control, they will be under a legal and (some may argue) ethical obligation to exercise that control. The no-brainer example of this, and the one that will most likely be trotted out to force a carrier's hand, would be the restriction of access to sources of indecent images of children. Very noble, I think we can all agree, but also very misguided - if the carriers make themselves responsible for this sort of content then perhaps they deserve the ensuing nightmare, you may think. But what happens when such responsibility extends to political content, or religious, or...
Okay, here's a disturbing connection: what if the promised restrictions on the reporting of Anti-IED technology through the press are extended to network carriers? Will some pages of Wikipedia suddenly become inaccessible, will defence and technology sites have to limit their content for fear of being blocked?
If the carriers start acting as content filters then we face the very real possibility that they could be used as a way of bypassing civil liberties and defeating free speech, limiting the nature of the information that reaches the public without having to deal directly with those who's voices are subsequently silenced. In effect the whole Internet could become an edited publication, a walled garden, no longer a common ground of freedom but rather a state and corporate-controlled medium where only the most innocuous information may be transmitted. Certainly there will be small sites who can say what they like simply because they are beneath regard, but as soon as their outspokenness draws the attention of someone who might be offended or threatened their message will be lost to everyone.
With this in mind, one has to wonder if Google's questionable actions in China were not simply a rehearsal for the coming order in the US.
savetheinternet.com |
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