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Court orders UK ISPs to block more piracy sites
- JonnieCache 14y agoEveryone 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/ 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.
- nodata 14y agoGood. Let's see what new technology this creates.
- alexwright 14y agoI'm not sure, and I'm not sure how we could know for sure, but I think it's already prompted the creation of the largest ever DHT. Which peer-to-peer file sharing aside I think is really pretty cool. Along the same lines of cool as BitCoin being the largest ever distributed computing project.
- vy8vWJlco 14y agoIt 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!).
- alan_cx 14y agoNone. If fact the TPB ban work-around rely on old technology, a proxy, or a VPN.
- Lockyy 14y ago>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 14y agoMakes 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 14y agoExactly what happened in Denmark is about to happen here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Denmark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Denmark
- casca 14y agoCorrection - UK _Court_ requires ISPs to block more filesharing website. This is about the UK courts, not the ISPs.
- arethuza 14y agoActually, as this was an English court, I wonder if this has any effect in Scotland and Northern Ireland?
- EwanToo 14y agoI 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.
- brador 14y agoThe 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 14y agoThe 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.
- nwh 14y agoAustralians don't have to worry. Our filter is child porn only. It'll never be used for anything else. Child porn and morally offensive websites. Just those two. We swear.
- DanBC 14y agoAren'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/ http://www.iwf.org.uk/)
- desas 14y agoThe 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.
- rmk2 14y agoIt seems to be a deep-seated cultural phenomenon http://youtu.be/vt0Y39eMvpI?t=47s http://youtu.be/vt0Y39eMvpI?t=47s (Monty Python)
- pisarzp 14y agoIt'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.
- bobsy 14y agoI 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.
- benev 14y agoA friend's mother is fairly non technical to the point that she gets into a state every time her web-mail provider changes the page layout. However, she uses a VPN to get round geographical restrictions on video streaming services. I think we're reaching the point where ordinary people are starting to understand how the internet works, and how to make it work for them. That's a good thing.
- DanBC 14y agoI'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 14y agoSky, BT, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2 and Virgin Media. Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/28/online-piracy-isps-block-access http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/28/online-piracy-is...
- shocks 14y agoThe 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.
- JonnieCache 14y agoIndependent music places like http://boomkat.com http://boomkat.com are good. I can have flacs downloading at high speed much quicker than I can find a torrent etc. these days. Once you've registered an account and they have your card details it's about 15 seconds from clicking buy to the zip downloading. It's still too many clicks, but it's good. Of course, they only cover niche music. itunes does lossess doesn't it? Is it not convenient enough for you? I've never used it, but I was under the impression it was a very smooth experience.
- shocks 14y agoI just searched for a few of my favourite Metal bands and didn't find them on iTunes! :( A quick Google is telling me iTunes doesn't support buying lossless codecs. One thing I have been trying to do recently is sending messages to bands I like asking to buy a CD from them that is signed. I get to show my support for a band I really like, and I also get something more than just the CD. As for TV, I have a TV license in England which allows me to stream TV and 4OD is pretty good. I tried NetFlicks but I was unimpressed by the selection available. The problem is that streaming real HD movies/TV is not particularly easy, and no service I have come across lets me download them. I could rent BluRay's from a place like LoveFilm, but I don't have a BluRay player... I would willingly pay £30-40 a month for a legitimate service that lets me download full movies/tv shows in 1080p .mkv format and keep them to watch again at another time. edit: I'd like to point out I want REAL HD. iTunes/Android/YouTube/etc offer horribly compressed 720p videos with lossy audio. <--- Quality freak here.
- rheide 14y agoThe 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 14y agoIf 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/ http://www.openrightsgroup.org/
- Fuxy 14y agoOk. 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.
- meaty 14y agoTime to move to Andrews and Arnold if you are in the UK: http://aaisp.com/ http://aaisp.com/ They have an explicit no censorship policy: http://aaisp.com/news-censorship.html 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 14y agoIt 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 14y agoIts 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.
- phpnode 14y agothanks for the suggestion, but using their online calculator it looks like they'd charge me £300+ / month for something I currently get for £~20
- meaty 14y agoLook at their Home::1 package.
- cantlin 14y agoThe 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.
- drucken 14y agoThere are already proxies for these sites, as many Italians would tell you...