News - Movie group attempts to force BT to block Newzbin

[Saracen]

You may be surprised how effective it may be given the exact nature of the blocking.

It is not transparent, the list is not published, you do not know you are on it and when users trip it they get a generic error, not a "this page is blocked" message. There is also no recourse in typical situations, this is the same list that nuked wikipedia not so long ago and there was a huge fuss about it - only overturned due to the public (legal) nature of the site hit.


Techs will work around ANYTHING, but they're trying to stop Joe Bloggs who can just about work facebook. It's about combating the casual ease of piracy, not stopping it. The factors above, however make it so abusable it is beyond ridiculous.

Yeah, to be honest, I would be surprised.

I understand that this is aimed at Joe Public, not those that will use anonymous proxies, or a different service to the one their ISP provides, etc, and it would certainly slow things down, but I'm not convinced that it'll stop anyone determined enough, or that the methods necessary to get past such steps won't filter down to Joe Public after a period of delay.

Put it this way, all this is is a rehash of an argument that's getting on for 50 years old maybe more. The studios tried to get cassette recorders banned because they were used to copy LPs and singles, and they were cheap, consumer-oriented devices. The same was said, with some justification as well, about video recorders. And then CD-writers. And computer copying has been going on since, well, I had access to bit-copiers for Apple-based software back in the late 70's.

My point is that it's like an eternal game of technology leapfrog. Those that want copying stopped come up with some method,be it legal or technical. It either doesn't work, or works for a while but someone comes up with a way round it and the game moves on. For instance, a site puts up a copy of a downloaded film. The studio gets that link removed, but by then, it's on 100 other sites. The studio get a software service closed down (Napster, anyone) but a new service springs up that doesn't have the centralised points of attack.

This game goes on and on, and on.

If anything much changes, other than the way things get passed around, yeah, I'd be very surprised.

Oh, and I'm not saying I approve of that. Just that I expect it to happen.

[roachcoach]

Oh I agree, I more meant this filter actually has an above average chance of filtering sites in question.

It'll never have the intended effect of halting progress though.


The knock on effects of this are really bad though, don't really like the idea of censorship at the best of times, but putting it in the hands of an industry, any industry? No thanks.

[Defiant]

Yeah I think they are going to have a hard time going after the owners of Newzbin these days since they are based out of the Seychelles lol