Should illegal downloaders face disconnection?

i think a distinction should be made between those downloading for profit and those downloading for personal use...

I doubt it will work - people will always find ways around it. I feel the government would be better off trying to sort out more serious online crime rather than trying to shore up the profits of companies that are unable to find ways to make the web work for them.

It's also disproportionate. If you're caught shoplifting you aren't banned from ever going shopping again. ISPs could instead ban people from visiting certain sites, or throttle peer to peer connections (which a lot of them do anyway).

This is a bit of a touchy subject :-)

On the one hand, the carriers are supposed to be neutral in what they carry - they're not supposed to look at the content. On the other hand, copyright infringement (and that's all a "pirate" is doing) isn't legal. The rights holders are once again lobbying for hamfisted tactics that will probably only punish a few people - up until they work out that ticking the box "encrypt my p2p traffic" in whatever client they are using will probably work around this monitoring scheme.

I can easily imagine that the mechanism lobbied for to go after such folks will be a simple one, and that it will be readily abused by the RIAA equivalents (BPI, et al). Then there is the whole issue of "scale of infringement". If someone mistakenly clicks on links that download stuff that someone later judges to be an infringing act, do they get one strike per occurrence (i.e. potentially cut off from the 'net for 3 downloads)? Or do they need more serious levels of infringement to trigger each of the "strikes"? I suspect the former, with my rather cynical view of the situation.

It's interesting to note that there are several instances of copyright infringement linked to in lots of questions on this site - the most common ones are the music video and TV theme links. In theory, clicking on/watching any of that content gets you a "strike" under these proposed rules.

The recording industry needs to pull their collective heads out of their bums and realise that the age of the old distribution paradigm has passes. Music has been commoditised, and so the value of it has been completely removed - production costs for decent music can be trivial (most decent computers could manage it, and then all you need is half-decent sound capture hardware in a suitable room and you are almost the equivalent to a professional studio), distribution costs over the internet are also near zero (just paying for bandwidth on your server). The only significant cost is advertising and promotion - big bands (e.g. U2, Rolling Stones) don't even need to promote, little bands can just work gigs (usually the most profitable part of the enterprise, even though it's hard work). There is no room in the music "food chain" for recording industry execs on fat salaries any more, their struggles are just blatant protectionism of an outdated business model - they deserve to fail and fall from grace.

I'm not promoting copyright infringement, I'm just making the point that the whole industry needs to change. Much like when electricity was invented, gaslights went out of business. When cars were invented, horses became redundant. There is obvious demand for the new business models using the internet as a distribution medium (otherwise iTunes would have failed long ago) - they are not doing anything significant about this, yet they are trying to maintain their stranglehold on music.

I have to agree with sias on this one, most of the cost of a CD is taken up in promotion and distribution as well 17.5% tax.

The writer and performer only get a minute fraction of the price paid, performers can organise download sites for their own work bypassing the bloated figures of the media moguls.

My problem with legal download sites is their restrictions on what I put my music on.

The media industry has been fleecing the public for years, charging very high prices for CDs, DVDs and music which are way in excess of the cost of production. Very little of that profit actually goes to the artists, most ends up with the producers.

So I can understand why the big production companies want to protect their interests and control over the industry.

But I don't think that hitting out at teenagers downloading stuff onto their ipods is the correct way to go about it.

How would this work in a family situation, where junior is downloading yet the whole family suffers? Not practical, is it?

When they clobbered Napster for holding the indexes of their P2P network, it wasn't long before similar file sharing software was available which doesn't rely on holding central indexes.
So it didn't prevent illegal file sharing, it just made people be more careful.

To defeat this particular bit of nonsense, just turn on encryption and change port numbers from time to time.



Seems to me this is just another big headline grabber, lots of noise, no real content or substance.
There must be some REALLY bad news about to break...

I have downloaded the odd one or two films illegally im not going to deny that but those films have stayed on my Pc and have not been coped to disk. and on top of that i have always gone to see the same film again at the cinema so the movie community do not loose out like all those ads about piracy claim. well from me anyway. Rather than fighting against illegal down loaders they should work with them and get them to register with a down loading site and in the registering form state that these films once down loaded from the pc will not be copied. then if a down loader is suspected then a raid done and then charge him with piracy and him disconnected if proven to be making profit from it.
I hardly down load any new films anyway most of the ones i have in my pc are all ones that come out years ago lol

There seems to be some confusion between 2 questions :-
1. Should downloads be illegal
2. If they remain illegal, should violators be penalised.

Most of the answers seems to suggest that, because they don't agree with the illegality of downloading, there should be no penalty for doing so.

I am not going to get into the rights or wrongs of free downloads being illegal, (there are arguments both ways), but while they are then this should be policed. It is not acceptable to have a 'Pick-n-Mix' approach to laws we like or don't (with whatever justification). The correct way is to try to change the law by persuasion if we think it is wrong but obey it while it is in place.

As for this proposal to cut off internet access for persistent offenders, it seems very reasonable and measured if it can work. The trouble is that it probably cannot work effectively against those who really know what they are doing.

Yet again it's proposing a 'brute force' tactic that contradicts other laws (or rather lack of them) & common practices, rather than both investigating more interesting ways of dealing with the problem.

Well, currently, as half suggested in the article, there is no requirement under the law for a customer to attempt to secure their internet connection in any way - i say attempt to since, without not having an internet connection, there is no actual way to prevent a malicious 3rd party from, potentially at least, using your computer/internet connection to route traffic - well, on one hand Microsoft release monthly security updates that are reactive to (existing) exploits in their software, most anti-virus & firewall software updates at least several times a week (again reactive), & it is neither possible to truly secure a wireless connection (since they tend to be more prone than wired connections) nor stop, for example, a 'cloned' cable modem from being used, (etc, etc), &, on the other, both iSPs (such as BT) have actively suggested that you leave your wireless connection unsecured & any place (shops, cafes, bars, hotels, airports, etc) that offered wireless connection would then equally become as liable as the individual whose connection had been misused by a 3rd party (effectively destroying the sense in the service being provided).

You then add in that anonymizing networks (such as i2p & Tor), which are seen as vital to many internet users as they can help to prevent the tracking of their legitimate usage of the internet by 3rd parties, can also be used to illegally transfer copyright material so that it could appear that you were downloading the information rather than simply acting as a relay (yeah i'm all for promoting freedom of speech, so...).

So were the proposals to actually come into law as suggested, not only would there be nothing that could practically be done by an individual or company to prevent a 3rd party from downloading copyright material, but it then means that any of us who use the internet are susceptible & hence stand the risk of having our connections terminated without having done anything ourselves in breach of the copyright laws.


Separately to this, you then have the statement that "Music and film companies say that the illegal downloads cost them millions of pounds in lost revenues" - which they have said for years, but does not necessarily add up; primarily for two reasons - firstly, comparing revenue levels from the pre-p2p age is not an honest methodology since the cost for items such as CDs & DVDs has fallen, & secondly, monitoring downloads is not equivalent to actual lost sales since someone downloading something for free does not mean that they would have paid for it if that was the only option.


Then, mentioning simply as it's relevant to an alternative solution rather than directly relevant, under UK copyright law atm there is no 'fair usage' allowance for the individual - basic meaning that if you buy, for example, a CD, you are breaking the law if you copy it in any way; so anyone who copies music they have bought onto their computer or MP3 player is, to use the language of the corporations, 'stealing' from them & could legitimately be prosecuted in the UK for copyright infringement in exactly the same way as someone who illegally downloads the music from the internet.


Okay, so accepting that there is nothing that the end user can do to prevent a 3rd party... (which the media corporations know), & accepting that there are many millions of people in the UK who are breaking the law by copying music (for their own use) onto their computers/portable devices, & also that, no matter what measures they take, people will still 'pirate' material (before the internet & CD burners people copied tapes etc), an alternative model to penalising (the potentially innocent, at least) internet user.

(too few characters left to finish - will supplement)