UK's biggest ISP forced to block file-sharing website

Robert

Robert

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/jul/28/high-court-bt-filesharing-website-newzbin2

Hollywood film studios won a landmark UK high court ruling on Thursday forcing BT to block access to an illegal file-sharing website accused of operating "on a grand scale".
The Motion Picture Association, the trade body whose members include Warner Bros, Fox, Disney and Paramount Pictures, has been granted an order requiring BT — the UK's biggest internet service provider — to block its customers' access to the website Newzbin2.
Thursday's verdict will be viewed by the creative industries as a landmark that could set a precedent for the widespread blocking of illegal filesharing websites by ISPs, helping to stem the flow of digital piracy in the UK.
"In my judgment it follows that BT has actual knowledge of other persons using its service to infringe copyright: it knows that the users and operators of Newzbin2 infringe copyright on a large scale, and in particular infringe the copyrights of the studios in large numbers of their films and television programmes," said Justice Arnold in his ruling at the high court in London.
"[BT] knows that the users of Newzbin2 include BT subscribers, and it knows those users use its service to receive infringing copies of copyright works made available to them by Newzbin2," Arnold added.
BT had argued that forcing it to ban its 6 million UK customers from accessing a website would usher in a new wave of online censorship.
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Thin end of the wedge....
 
Robert said:
Thin end of the wedge....
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No. We are well in to the meaty bit of the wedge and getting close to the payoff. The thin end of the wedge was filtering for child porn. Gosh, who could be against that - you'd have to be a pervert to oppose it, right? But it was how they started getting the infrastructure and the legislation in. People couldn't give a rat's arse about file downloading - they really couldn't. But child porn? Sure - put in whatever draconian controls you want - but you won't use them for anything else, right? OK.

Prepare for the final reaming of content control. Already France has 3 strikes your out for file downloading and it's the prototype that everyone else is building on. Once they have legislation to cut off your internet for one offence they can expand it to others. Imagine getting along being banned from the internet when so much is done on the internet today. It's another coercive threat that can be used against you - like the threat of having your credit rating damaged.
 
aka, slippery slope. It's the real thing alright.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
No. We are well in to the meaty bit of the wedge and getting close to the payoff. The thin end of the wedge was filtering for child porn.
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And just by sheer awesome timing, we have this article: British Telecom ordered to blacklist Usenet search engine
A judge has ordered British Telecom to begin blocking its subscribers from accessing Newzbin2, a members-only usenet search engine that is heavily used for copyright infringement. The mandated blocking is modeled on the Cleanfeed filtering system currently used to block alleged child pornography.
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response from BT:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/07/29/bt_on_web_blocking/
"We believe in an open internet – we won't do any other blocking," he told us. "We will never stop our customers getting to any service they want to get to.
"Unless a court orders us to."
Although the case went against BT, Milner points out that a test case has finally made the law clear. And since web-blocking requires a court order, he says BT is satisfied with that. Each web-blocking request will have to go before a court – where a judge must examine it on its merits.
"There's no suggestion in this judgement that BT has done anything wrong as an innocent intermediary. We said it's questionable whether an intermediary can have these obligations put on it. Now we know.
"It provides a level of clarity we've never had before.
"We've invested a lot of money in making our argument to the court, and we've got a pretty well-reasoned judgement that gives the lie to the idea that the law doesn't protect rights-holders."
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Now watch as the 2nd generation Darknets arrive and render all of this moot.
 
In light of this other Whyzzat thread and the use of child pornography to clamp down on the internet, that story of a kiddie-porn ring bust seems to be well timed, it's almost a perfect advertizing campaign, to create a stampede of support for the introduction of some new legislation. Something like the The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011.

under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells you Internet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you've been assigned.
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Watch the every online move of 300 million people to catch maybe a few thousand deviants? Sure, that sounds like a good trade. Of course, the cost of storing all that info will fall to the end user, of course. And once that information is collected in digital form do we really think that government agencies (even really dodgy and shady ones) won't be running searches on all this stuff? Maybe they'll find out you have the wrong friends, support the wrong parties, criticize politicians too much.

Well, at least you can't say you haven't heard about this now. Question is, are you going to do anything about it? I would if it was my country.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
Watch the every online move of 300 million people to catch maybe a few thousand deviants? Sure, that sounds like a good trade. Of course, the cost of storing all that info will fall to the end user, of course. And once that information is collected in digital form do we really think that government agencies (even really dodgy and shady ones) won't be running searches on all this stuff? Maybe they'll find out you have the wrong friends, support the wrong parties, criticize politicians too much..
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The people that dream up these ideas have absolutely no idea how basic networks function, let alone how ISPs work. They'd need to deep inspect every packet hitting their radius (or equivalent) systems and store gargantuan amounts of data the likes of which even Google would pale at. We're not talking about some nice apache2 style access log with some user credentials next to it. Existing packet accounting data from systems like radius are used only to estimate (note, not accurately record) the amount of traffic a given user is generating. Logging what it was all for is a wholly different prospect. No amount of throwing money at the problem will fix it, there's just too much traffic to log that kind of data.
 
Karlos said:
The people that dream up these ideas have absolutely no idea how basic networks function, let alone how ISPs work.
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That's the beauty of it. They don't have to know how stuff works - they just mandate what they want. It's up to other people to figure out how and to foot the bill. Of course it's ludicrous but wave some kid diddlers around and watch the stampede. And if it all does work out to be technically possible or partially technically possible it is a huge huge automated spy network that you can use to ferret out whatever kind of behaviour (or viewpoint) you don't like.
 
The irony is that these arrests prove that the current system works. Still, there's a good chance the ISPs will unite against this and crush it.
 
Glaucus said:
there's a good chance the ISPs will unite against this and crush it.
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Not BT. They've already thrown the towel in, if the article can be taken at face value.
 
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