News - UK ISPs and entertainment industry agree on piracy letters

[Corky34]

Copyright infringement can be either civil or criminal, or indeed both. But the situation were talking about here is the rights owners taking legal action against infringement of their intellectual property, and by definition, that's a civil matter, not a criminal one, so the standard wood be whether, on balance of probability, it could be proven that an individual had infringed copyright.

That said, yes, there is some merit to the point about clearly establishing who did what.

Thanks for clarifying things.
The balance of probability thing, I'm guessing that works both ways ? So if their records show X.X.X.X IP address downloaded something and that leads them to accuse someone of copyright infringement, couldn't it be argued that their records are wrong because people downloading illegally are likely to have spoofed their IP.
I ask because of the cases when they accuse people like a young girl, or the octogenarian. Did someone spoof their IP address and that could have been why TPTB took them to court.

[benegerton1985]

that being the decade of
"The Rednecks - Cotton Eye Joe"
"2Unlimited - No"
"Wonderman - Doop"
"Steps - Tragedy" (and it was)
"Vanilla - No Way No Way"
"Mr Blobby - The Blobby Song"
"Celine Dion - (any)"
"Sean McQuire - argggggggghhhhhhhhhh"
"Chumbawumba"
"The cheeky girls - touch my bum"

Not everything 90s was good. But at least there wasn;t xfactor.

Forget the general 'pop scene' in the 90's, everything else in the 90's was the best there has ever been and contains the best music I have ever heard.

For rock/metal fans like me in the early 90's it had Metallica, guns and roses, rage against the machine to name three in their prime, the emergence in the late 90's of nu-metal such as slipknot and korn. As as for the rave scene, the early 90's had everything and dance music progressed to the best there has ever been by the end of the 90's! And I'm sure many people aged 30 and above who experienced it all like me will agree!

And for your information I love Cotton eye Joe! Bring back the 90's!

[Saracen]

It sure is. But in that same vein you're just begging to have your IP infringed when you ignore real world economic demand.

Perhaps, but that's why we have courts, and fines, and jails.

But where do you draw the line? You're begging to have your house burgled if doors and windows aren't locked and deadbolted at all times? After all, LOTS of burglaries are opportunists nipping in through and open door or window, even when the owners are present. So are you begging to be burgled if your house doesn't have security to rival Fort Knox?

Most (though probably not all) people are fully aware that taking copy-protected goods without paying is illegal, and most are also aware that it's morally wrong. They just don't care, because they don't expect to get caught. How much copyright piracy do you think would happen if the chances of getting caught, and heavily fined, were 100%?

That's why people come up with all sorts of hypocrisy in an attempt to justify ripping off other people's work. Oh, it's only big companies, or it's over-priced, or the delay releasing it was too long. And so on.

Sorry, but it's rank greed, impatience, and hypocrisy.

Just because people want something, and want it now, and for next to nothing, doesn't mean they're entitled to just take it. Just because people want something today, and for 50p, doesn't mean ripping it off is justified. There's a 'real world demand' for cheap high-end mobile phones, but that doesn't mean I'm justified in just taking yours if you put it down and take your eyes off it for five seconds, or nicking your laptop because you left your window open on a hot day and I managed to climb in, nick it and climb out while you were soaking in a beer or give in front of the TV. There's a real-world demand for money, but you're not entitled to walk into a bank with a shotgun and take what you want.

Copyright infringement doesn't occur because of "real world demand". It occurs because in our greedy, materialistic (affluent, and largely Western) world, so many people have an entitled attitude and think that because they want it, they're entitled to it, even if it means ripping it off.

And remember, a LOT of copyright infringement is done, or facilitated by, greedy individuals making loads of money by running sites, ad-sponsored, subsctiption or both, allowing those self-same entitled hypocrites to rip off others third-hand.

[Saracen]

Thanks for clarifying things.
The balance of probability thing, I'm guessing that works both ways ? So if their records show X.X.X.X IP address downloaded something and that leads them to accuse someone of copyright infringement, couldn't it be argued that their records are wrong because people downloading illegally are likely to have spoofed their IP.
I ask because of the cases when they accuse people like a young girl, or the octogenarian. Did someone spoof their IP address and that could have been why TPTB took them to court.

Each case should be taken on it's merits, and is likely to include a history of transactions, not an isolated one. If, for instance, an IP address shows a history of downloafing from specified sites, over months, it suggests it's that physical address. If, for instance, the ISP changes a dynamixalky allocated IP address, and that downloading immediately ceases on the original address, and commences on the new one, it pretty much proves it's that address .... beyond reasonable doubt.

There is, of course, a distinct difference between accusing someone, and even to "balance of probability" being able to prove it in a court. And don't get me wrong, I'm not justifying some of those letter-threats that, in my opinion, were morally equivalent to (if not legally) extortion. And, some threats no doubt went to people that hadn't done any downloading. I'd bet a lot also went to people that were guilty as hell, too, though.

So .... suppose you own copyright to something, and find you're getting ripped off. What do you do? You point it out and ask people to stop, but they don't. You jump up and down, and people carry on. Sooner or later, if you want to try to protect your rights, you either have to use the courts, or if you're sensible, threaten to.

And, I speak from experience, having had companies abuse my copyright mire than once, and it get to the point where I had to threaten court action, more than once. Fortunately, it never came to court action, and the compsnies settled. But not befire being threatened. One I had to offer to fax the court claim forms before they gave in, and paid > £4,000 owed.

In my case, IP addresses weren't an issue and I had them dead to rights, and they knew it. But note, this was me, a private person, up against a multi-national publisher with in-house lawyers. It's not always the big companies threatening individuals, or individuals doing the ripping off. And, the combined value to me of two of those incidents was just under £10,000. Not the sort of money I feel like just shrugging off, because someone chooses to ignore my IP rights. I work my nuts off creating the material, and I get rightly annoyed when some smug git thinks they can just take it.

The smug gits, by the way, were those in the publishers trying to pull a fast one. I'm not referring to anyone here, in case anyone reads it that way.

[Jingee]

One in six? Surely that's a lot of dishonest people.

[aidanjt]

Perhaps, but that's why we have courts, and fines, and jails.

And those in power have used those same measures and more to oppress opposition to tyrants and all kinds of unpopular acts. That doesn't make it just, or well supported, or respected. You can't legislate or litigate public support for imaginary property ideology. Just as you can't disregard real world economic demand and expect there to be no consequences for it. Copyright holders have the legal right to dictate copyright terms, true, it doesn't mean they have public support to do so. Drug criminalisation and unreasonably high taxation on cigarettes suffer from the same problem, the government may pass the laws to that effect, it doesn't mean the people must support it and that some kind of black market wont form to compensate for idiotic policy. You can never solve demand problems by attacking illicit suppliers, that has never ever ever worked in any regard whatsoever. If it did, the drug war would have been won a hundred years ago. The only thing that'll work is either to reduce, or satisfy demand (i.e. make your goods crappier, or make them more accessible to buy and use at a reasonable price).

That's just how the world works. You can rail against it all you like, but you're just going to waste your time and resources fighting an impossible to win battle. You'd have about as much success commanding the sea to not crash against your shores.

[Saracen]

And those in power have used those same measures and more to oppress opposition to tyrants and all kinds of unpopular acts. That doesn't make it just, or well supported, or respected. You can't legislate or litigate public support for imaginary property ideology. Just as you can't disregard real world economic demand and expect there to be no consequences for it. Copyright holders have the legal right to dictate copyright terms, true, it doesn't mean they have public support to do so. Drug criminalisation and unreasonably high taxation on cigarettes suffer from the same problem, the government may pass the laws to that effect, it doesn't mean the people must support it and that some kind of black market wont form to compensate for idiotic policy. You can never solve demand problems by attacking illicit suppliers, that has never ever ever worked in any regard whatsoever. If it did, the drug war would have been won a hundred years ago. The only thing that'll work is either to reduce, or satisfy demand (i.e. make your goods crappier, or make them more accessible to buy and use at a reasonable price).

That's just how the world works. You can rail against it all you like, but you're just going to waste your time and resources fighting an impossible to win battle. You'd have about as much success commanding the sea to not crash against your shores.

And the other side of that is that if everybody was greedy and selfish and wouldn't pay to consume create content, there wouldn't be any for the selfish ones to "demand", because people that create it couldn't afford to do so. The pirates are just the self-serving leeches that are parasites living off those that do pay for content, and trying to justify their actions, probably as much to themselves as anything, with lots of pathetic excuses.

Cooyright law doesn't have to be popular to be right, and the public regularly demand more and better public services, and at the same time, lower taxes. Wanting something doesn't make it feasible. "Real world demand" is not some magic mantra to justify taking what people have no right to take. There is another side to economics, and that is real world supply.

What might be some imaginary property ideology to you is a living to me, it's a roof over my head and food on my table. And it's not exactky a millionaire lifestyle, either.

Trying telling a plumber you called to fix your plumbing or the mechanic fixing your car that his labour is an imaginary property ideal, and he'll tell you to fix your own damn plumbing or car. Because he cannot afford to do anything else. If you don't pay to create conrent, there will be little or no content created.

In my case, someone takes my work published in the UK and publishes it in, say, Australia, and they destroy my ability to be able to publish in Australia, when I chose, and with the publisher of my choice.

Copyright is not some imaginary property ideal to me. It is what allows me to be a content-creator, not an accountant. Without it, I'm back to balance sheets and the P&L .... and heaven save me ftom that fate.

And, by the way, it also allows sites like HEXUS to exist.

[KeyboardDemon]

My biggest issue is that I can't get everything I want through one service and don't want to pay for several services in order to watch the content I want to see. That's no justification for piracy though, and even when it was easy to torrent content I stopped after a few attempts becuase I found all too often the content I got was not what I thought I was going to download, the quality was poor or in some cases it downloaded and then when I tried to view the content I found that I needed to install a proprietry player, which I would never do.

I have nearly all the music I want through the service on my Windows Phone so I don't need to pirate that and these days I don't get the time to watch content anyway so I don't need to download it, but when I want it I would like to have it playing locally rather than streaming so I don't end up with buffering or quality drops during actual viewing of the content, if this could then auto delete after a period of time it would be even better as I would never need to do this myself, like it does on BBC iPlayer.

[welshyc]

I live in a country where there is almost zero availability for stremaing. No Netflix or Hulu.
Here you can be fined huge amounts of money for downloading illegally.
Luckily, it doesn't seem to be enforced much so far.

it funny. I go to the movies alot, so generally will pay to watch a movie in that format.
Then if I want to see it again, I rent it when it's out on blu-ray (nothing beats that quality).

If i want to watch it a 3rd or 4th time, I will download it. If I could subscribe to a service for a resonable price to let me watch it, I would. But I'm not going to pay for a physical copy of a movie that will become obsolete after already paying to see it (usually twice)

And yet im called a criminal because i won't give all my money to the million dollar studios.

[DarthRager]

My brother got one of the scaremongering letters over a year ago from BE.....I told him to ask them to prove his Wifi was not compromised as he had no knowledge of the downloads in question.....

They tried a couple more times to scare him into giving them a fair amount of money but eventually gave up.

I guess a lot of people did the same and they realised they had no ground to stand on.

That probably wasn't the best idea. Replying makes them think you take it seriously and will make them persue it more actively.. if you had just ignored it you probably wouldn't have got another one.

I had one of these years ago, just ignored it. Never got one again, though I have moved on to private trackers.

[shaithis]

That probably wasn't the best idea. Replying makes them think you take it seriously and will make them persue it more actively.. if you had just ignored it you probably wouldn't have got another one.

I had one of these years ago, just ignored it. Never got one again, though I have moved on to private trackers.

Wasn't an option, my brother could not sleep because of how much they were scare-mongering him, he's also on disability and could not afford the ridiculous amount they were asking for. He also did not download what they said he had.

[wasabi]

And remember, a LOT of copyright infringement is done, or facilitated by, greedy individuals making loads of money by running sites, ad-sponsored, subsctiption or both, allowing those self-same entitled hypocrites to rip off others third-hand.

It didn't start that way and the MPAA et al created the current situation. Back in the early days of online file sharing (read piracy) it was a bunch true peer to peer applications. For example edonkey or early Napster. And people shared a lot of obscure stuff with no ad-funded websites involved. The rise of the torrent site is because of legal measures scaring people off sharing lots of stuff at once. We now have the torrent site problem of very fast hit and run downloads.

And piracy is driving online distribution. If it weren't for the illegal stuff over the internet, the legal stuff wouldn't be following. I doubt we'd have, for example, Spotify or Netflix without piracy having paved the way. Big media would happily still have us buying CDs and DVDs or watching only live advert-ridden cable TV. Yeah, partly it is freeloading, but partly piracy is the voice of people saying 'your service sucks' and doing something about it.

[ik9000]

It didn't start that way and the MPAA et al created the current situation. Back in the early days of online file sharing (read piracy) it was a bunch true peer to peer applications. For example edonkey or early Napster. And people shared a lot of obscure stuff with no ad-funded websites involved. The rise of the torrent site is because of legal measures scaring people off sharing lots of stuff at once. We now have the torrent site problem of very fast hit and run downloads.

And piracy is driving online distribution. If it weren't for the illegal stuff over the internet, the legal stuff wouldn't be following. I doubt we'd have, for example, Spotify or Netflix without piracy having paved the way. Big media would happily still have us buying CDs and DVDs or watching only live advert-ridden cable TV. Yeah, partly it is freeloading, but partly piracy is the voice of people saying 'your service sucks' and doing something about it.

which doesn't excuse the breaking of law. But is a fair point that a lot of the pernicious copyright claims come from backwards looking companies who are scared of potential markets they don't understand. I remember sitting in a corporate strategy lecture 15 years ago with the speaker berating Sony et al for their lack of foresight. Instead of closing down napster and trying to keep people on physical medium they should have been seeing the way things would progress digitally, and buying up Napster to steal a march on their rivals, and led the way (as they had done with the Walkman etc). The problem is they were too blinkered into trying to get us back to the days of CDs costing £15 a pop... I wonder if the option just to stream things had been around then whether the situation might have been different.

However, piracy is still not right. But then they go and stick that annoying "duh-d-d-d-duh You wouldn't steal a handbag/mug a granny/joy ride a car/buy the daily star" so why would you pirate a DVD?" The irony being it makes me want to rip all my legally bought DVDs and strip the crappy menus and autoplays, company logos and other non-skippable BS from them so I can actually watch the thing I have paid for without the taddle. And someone who torrents it? Gets none of that hassle. Talk about preaching to the choir!

[Saracen]

My brother got one of the scaremongering letters over a year ago from BE.....I told him to ask them to prove his Wifi was not compromised as he had no knowledge of the downloads in question..... They tried a couple more times to scare him into giving them a fair amount of money but eventually gave up. I guess a lot of people did the same and they realised they had no ground to stand on.

I seem to remember a firm of lawyers getting into trouble over the rather indiscrimate and intimidatory nature of some of those letters.

And, of course, two wrongs don't make a right.

But of course, if people are illegally downloading, then getting sued is the risk they run when doing so. I'm sure lots of people know that, though I suspect a lot, especially younger people, don't. And, done right, it's a legitimate recourse for rights holders.

[Saracen]

.... The irony being it makes me want to rip all my legally bought DVDs and strip the crappy menus and autoplays, company logos and other non-skippable BS from them so I can actually watch the thing I have paid for without the taddle. And someone who torrents it? Gets none of that hassle. Talk about preaching to the choir!

The real irony is that's about to become a lot less illegal. In fact, in a few weeks, the mere copying won't be illegal at all, due to changes in copyright law. As I understand it, breaking copy protection measures will still be an offence, but actual copying, of legally owned material and for personal use by the owner of that copy, like format-shifting to out your CDs on your phone, etc, will become one of the statutory exemptions in the updated Copyright Act.

A formal post, and the implied change to HEXUS moderating stance, will be forthcoming shortly.

[ik9000]

A formal post, and the implied change to HEXUS moderating stance, will be forthcoming shortly.

<pictures Michael Palin's MP policeman> Riggggggggggghhhhhhhhht you orrible lot. Atten-shun, shut-up and lis-ten good. From henceforth, herewith and wot-with mentioning of how Alexander solved the guordian knot may be about to become a legitimate posting behaviour. Got it? Good. Now hit me with this herring....