Tracing file sharers

[Clippy]

Interesting. Wonder if they will get anywhere with this.

[centurian]

Interesting. Wonder if they will get anywhere with this.

Who - O2 or ACS: Law


ACS: Law have been sending out letters for a while - basically demanding £500-700 for downloading a single item (music track, game, movie).

If you pay up, then they'll probably trawl through their records and find another item for which to bill you - until you run out of money.

If you don't, you run the risk of it going to court and having to pay thousands - for each item.


Another firm sued a woman and got £16K - for a Pinball game...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7568642.stm


I can kind of understand the copyright holders point of view, but given the amounts (the original items probably only cost a few pounds), I get the sense it is more about making money than protecting copyright.

[Fred Bloggs]

What if........... I had accidentally left the security off my wireless LAN connection and a neighbour had been using my network to download illegally. Would I be liable even though it wasn't me? Neither I nor the copyright holder could prove this one way or the other.

[centurian]

What if........... I had accidentally left the security off my wireless LAN connection and a neighbour had been using my network to download illegally. Would I be liable even though it wasn't me? Neither I nor the copyright holder could prove this one way or the other.

Remember that this is a civil court, not a criminal one. They don't need to prove anything.

They just need to show that their version of events is more likely than yours ("balance of probabilities").

[The Wikir Man]

What if........... I had accidentally left the security off my wireless LAN connection and a neighbour had been using my network to download illegally. Would I be liable even though it wasn't me? Neither I nor the copyright holder could prove this one way or the other.

I asked my MP the same question when I wrote asking her to oppose the bill. Her assistant / researcher / gimp (no idea who he was, but he had been asked to respond rather than her actually doing some work) told me that this was an unlikely scenario.

That certainly put my mind to rest.

[Ardesco]

Just use secure sockets in your torrent app, they can then only intercept packets that look like garbage and will have no evidence.

I personally don't see why they pursue this, if they keep it up everybody will switch to SSL and the ISP's will not be able to work out what the traffic is anyway. Trying to decrypt secure traffic to find out what is being sent around a network is a whole different ball game to scanning plain text network traffic.

I guess they are pursuing it because the people who are driving it have no idea how technology works and don't realise how easy it would be for people to block them. Then again I must also assume that most people don't know how easy it is to block them otherwise there wouldn't be a long list of people getting fined...

[doodab]

They aren't looking in unencrypted packets to see what people are downloading, they are joining the P2P and torrent networks and harvesting IP addresses that connect to their specially customized clients and download copyrighted material. SSL won't stop them doing that.

Personally I'm 50/50 on the rights and wrongs of this. These people have a legal right that is being systematically eroded simply because technology has advanced and we seem to live in a society that refuses to respect laws that aren't enforced with an iron fist.

On the other hand, it's easy to look at a major record or film company and see a victimless crime, or rationalize that the artists themselves aren't losing out, although this view is somewhat misguided I think.

[Advocate]

They aren't looking in unencrypted packets to see what people are downloading, they are joining the P2P and torrent networks and harvesting IP addresses that connect to their specially customized clients and download copyrighted material. SSL won't stop them doing that.

Isn't that a little like me baking fairy cakes, putting them on a table outside my house with a sign saying "Free cake" next to them and then arresting everyone who takes one for stealing?

[doodab]

Isn't that a little like me baking fairy cakes, putting them on a table outside my house with a sign saying "Free cake" next to them and then arresting everyone who takes one for stealing?

Not really. The people downloading this stuff know, or ought to know by now, that it's illegal. The media companies have been very vocal about it.

Now if your sign said "£1 each" and someone took one without paying you would be well within your rights to accuse them of stealing, wouldn't you?

[DaveB]

Isn't that a little like me baking fairy cakes, putting them on a table outside my house with a sign saying "Free cake" next to them and then arresting everyone who takes one for stealing?

Not really. The people downloading this stuff know, or ought to know by now, that it's illegal. The media companies have been very vocal about it.

Now if your sign said "£1 each" and someone took one without paying you would be well within your rights to accuse them of stealing, wouldn't you?

Although in the US the RIAA have been trying to say that anyone who does this ( apart from them obviously ) is breeching copyright by "making available" copyright works regardless of whetheer anyone actually downloads them or not. They've had mixed success in the courts with it but they are still doing it.

The US have been far more active in this area with a couple of high profile cases at the end of last year feature fines in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

So far the courts seem to have been ignoreing most defences offered by those being sued.