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Thread: Filesharing law 'unworkable'

                  
   
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    Won Hung Lo wraggster's Avatar
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    Forum Filesharing law 'unworkable'

    Any move by the government to introduce legislation that forces the UK's broadband providers to police the internet by clamping down on illegal sharing of copyrighted music and movies would be technologically unworkable and create a legal minefield, experts have warned.

    In a wide ranging review of the UK's £60bn creative industry, culture secretary Andy Burnham this week called on internet service providers (ISPs) to come up with a workable plan to stop music and movie piracy, or the government will bring in its own laws next year.

    The industry's trade body, the ISPA, has spent months in discussions with music and movie companies about ways of preventing illegal filesharing, but buoyed by recent success in France, the major record labels and Hollywood studios have lobbied the government hard for faster action.

    One senior internet industry executive, who did not wish to be named, said this intensive political lobbying has "given the government a completely false idea of what is possible with current technology".

    Legal experts, meanwhile, pointed out that if the government does opt for new legislation it will need not only to rip up parts of the current legislation and amend data protection laws, but its plans could fall foul of wider human rights laws that entitle people to a degree of privacy in their communications.

    "The big issue, frankly, is the impossibility of the internet service providers getting in amongst it and monitoring what goes on on their networks," warned Alex Brown, internet law specialist at Simmons & Simmons.

    "Technically speaking, it's near impossible to do. The sheer volume of traffic means it just cannot be done fast enough. And this is a technical problem, not a legal problem. What is going to stop people stealing content is not the law — these people already know it is illegal; what will stop people is a technical solution that adequately protects both people's rights and copyrighted material. But we do not have one."

    The sheer scale of online piracy in the UK has been highlighted by new research from price comparison site Moneysupermarket.com today, which shows that nearly one in five British internet users admit to having illegally downloaded copyright material.

    Rob Barnes, head of broadband and mobiles at moneysupermarket.com, said many internet users do not actually know that the content they are downloading is illegal when they access it.

    "The government is trying to prevent this growing problem, but it's clear people are not always aware they have infringed on copyright law," he said. "Perhaps the government should focus on educating people on the penalties of copyright [violation], as well as what actually constitutes piracy."

    Among the 26 commitments made by the government to help the creative industries is a pledge to "promote better understanding of the value and importance of intellectual property" through school education programmes. It also wants to increase the fine that magistrates can impose on "pirates" from its current limit of £5,000.

    The music and film industries welcomed the government's backing in the fight against piracy, which they claim lost them £460m in 2006, but the government's Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy document provided little detail of how the ISPs are supposed to stop the online pirates.

    The music labels and Hollywood studios, however, believe recent plans announced in France could provide a blueprint for the UK market. Last year French president Nicolas Sarkozy backed an industry proposal that would see the country's ISPs monitor all their traffic for illegal filesharing.

    British internet technology experts, however, believe the lack of detail in the French proposal shows the sheer complexity — and expense — of any system that requires service providers to check out every bit of data that travels across their networks.

    Data traversing the internet is split into "packets", around which is wrapped information about where that piece of information is going. Like the address on an envelope, that data can easily be read, and initially it provided information to suggest the contents of the packet might be illegally copied copyrighted material. But peer-to-peer filesharing technology has evolved and now merely reading the so-called "packet header" will give no clue as to what's inside.

    Inspecting the actual contents of the packet is much more difficult. It is also currently illegal. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) the UK's ISPs are not allowed to inspect the contents of packets without proper authority and only when such action is necessary and proportionate in the context of the issue being investigated.

    These powers are used by the police to intercept and copy email and other traffic in terrorism investigations. Legal experts doubt that snooping on everyone's internet traffic just to protect the commercial interests of the music and film industries would be allowed under the current legislation. In addition, the police do not translate their intercepted material in "real time", as would be necessary in any UK-wide piracy clampdown.

    Experts also warn that even if the technology evolved to make real-time, so-called "deep packet" monitoring — or "sniffing" — easy and cheap to do, the serious filesharers would simply start encrypting their content. As a result, only first-time or inexperienced filesharers would end up being caught.

    Already there are several programs that use the popular bittorrent filesharing technology — such as Azureus, which can encrypt files so they are harder to spot.

    One suggestion mooted by the music and film industry is for the ISPs to flag up as potential filesharers any customer with high data usage. But the booming popularity of legitimate broadband TV services such as the BBC's iPlayer and ITV.com, as well as the arrival of downloadable film rental services from sites such as Amazon, means that being a heavy consumer of bandwidth will increasingly be no indication of wrongdoing.

    One voluntary way of dealing with major filesharers might be for the ISPs to prevent their users accessing the "tracker" websites that help filesharers set up the peer-to-peer connections they need in order to swap content.

    A similar voluntary system of website blocking already exists for sites known to contain child pornography. But such a blacklist of sites risks wiping out all trackers, some of which do not signpost copyrighted material.

    Forcing the ISPs to start monitoring what their customers do also ends their legal protection as a so-called mere conduit, leaving them open to lawsuits if they cut off a user who has not been doing anything illegal.

    The ISPA warned today that any forced monitoring of internet traffic could lead to the collapse of many of the country's smaller ISPs.

    Getting a workable system in France is easier as the country has less than a dozen ISPs. In the UK there are more than 140, and if they have to start spending millions of pounds installing new equipment, many of the smaller players could go bust without support from the hugely profitable music and film industry.

    "Internet service providers are not law enforcement officers," said a spokesman for the ISPA. "And rights holders such as film and music companies already secure their rights in other formats, so it's only right for an industry to help pay to protect its intellectual property."

    A spokesman for the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform said: "We would of course prefer a voluntary solution and we are certainly not pretending it will be easy."

    The government intends to consult the internet industry about possible steps it can take after Easter, but if the industry cannot come up with a solution then the government will look at legislative solutions in 2009.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology...22/filesharing

  2. #2
    DCEmu Newbie Cerepol's Avatar
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    wow, they want ISP's to moniter all the traffic...

    Are they completely insane, if they make it a law to moniter traffic most isp's will not be able to keep up with the sheer volume of traffic being used. If they don't make it a law people who download illegal files can just switch over to any ISP who won't inspect their packets.

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