EU: ISPs can't be forced to filter pirated content

Excellent

It has never been clear why an ISP acting as a common carrier should be subject to different rules than a telephone service provider or the royal mail.

Or the highways agency, come to that.

Those suffering from piracy should bite the bullet and spend enough to monitor what is going on and then use the courts (who will be cognisant of the applicable rules of evidence) to get illicit activities blocked.

By qpw3141 on 25 Nov 2011

@qpw3141

Or find alternatives, I've heard on other forums how some people have stopped being PC game pirates because of Steam sales.

By tech3475 on 25 Nov 2011

tech3475

Good point about Steam. Their prices, especially during sales, make pirating pretty much pointless. They also upgrade older games to work on modern versions of Windows, something you'll never get with a pirated version.

By Lacrobat on 25 Nov 2011

Or do what Ubisoft did...

... make shoddy console ports with DRM so awful that nobody will ever buy another game from you again. Then loudly blame PC Piracy for your withdrawal from the platform. That works. Nobody pirates UbiSoft games, they're too abysmal!

Seriously though, no private company should have the ability to force your utility provider to spy on you. Or maybe we should have the meter man rifle through a few record exec's homes and see what their take on this would be?

By cheysuli on 25 Nov 2011

Hmm-rant

this is interesting, since i believe BT said it only cost them 5k to set up the block... and how much is it costing them to enforce?
plus i don't get why these anti piracy people just don;t get it... they are going for the intermediary i.e. newzbin is not the source, newzbin is nothing, take out newzbin (nzbsrus is also been caught now but) so many others are out there, that it will be virtually impossible to get rid of all of them... do they not know how newsgroups work, do they just assume that by shutting down pirate bay, they stopped piracy, i laugh in their faces, up until the day the world will collapse under the weight of the greed mans heavy debt (i.e. USA) and then it will be obvious to all that money is a made up illusion, created by the rich to maintain their bitter wealth, and continue to think and make others believe that they are much better than all the rest of us...

By mobilegnet on 26 Nov 2011

@mobilegnet

Re: the cost of the block.

That is not what this ruling is about.

Some of the rights holders are campaigning for the ISP's to actually spy on their customers and to do it at their (ISP's) own cost. That £5000 covered the cost of blocking a site as a result of a court order.

Once a court order has been obtained it should be fairly cheap and easy to block a site - a one off cost to set up the system and then very little to add each site.

By qpw3141 on 26 Nov 2011

Total Information

Here's a quotation from the New York Times in 2002. It's reporting on the Total Information Awareness project, thought up by the people who wrote the Patriot Act to learn all they could.

If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every event you attend -- all these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense Department describes as ''a virtual, centralized grand database.''

To this computerized dossier on your private life from commercial sources, add every piece of information that government has about you -- passport application, driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest hidden camera surveillance -- and you have the supersnoop's dream: a ''Total Information Awareness'' about every U.S. citizen.

Before you dismiss a level of snooping as "impracticable" remember the TIA idea. It would almost certainly not have worked, but think of how much data it might have handed over to whoever could get at it. Think hackers as well as government.

The idea of forcing ISPs to do deep data mining surfaces in most governments sooner or later. I imagine the Chinese do it already.

By Philippa on 27 Nov 2011

Total Information

I should have marked the NYT quotation better.

It starts with "If the HSA .." and finishes with "every US citizen"

Sorry about that - but how about an "Edit" button?

By Philippa on 27 Nov 2011