Danish ISP Doesn't Understand Why It's Supposed To Block Pirate Bay
from the fighting-it dept
Earlier this week, we noted that a Danish court had told ISP Tele2 that it needed to start blocking access to the Pirate Bay. Last year, a court had also ordered Tele2 to block access to AllofMp3.com. Tele2 complied with that first order, though apparently it was quite easy to get around the block (no surprise there). However, apparently sensing the outrage being felt concerning these blocks, Tele2 is considering fighting back against the order (with support from other ISPs). The company claims that it needs "clarification" on the ruling, though doesn't seem to provide much more detail than that at this point.
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Filed Under: blocking, danish court, denmark, pirate bay
Companies: pirate bay, tele2
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I'm confused because...
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Re: I'm confused because...
ISPs have an ethical responsibility to to avoid knowingly aiding and abetting a law breaker.
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Re: Re: I'm confused because...
Let's ban the internet to prevent terrorism shall we?
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Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
How will blocking a perfectly legitimate search engine help any one?
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Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
It doesn't mean we have to analize every packet on the network, however it does mean that we need to take basic measures to prevent illegal activity.
For example, we aren't liable for someone getting instructions for a bomb on Google or Wiki, but we are responsible for someone sharing copyrighted material using our IP range.
Internet use and liability is still a very grey topic. this is another example of someone who isn't familiar with technology setting rules for those that are.
"The internet is a series of tubes."
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
I notice how you conveniently left out just exactly which country you are supposedly talking about. Afraid of being contradicted?
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Re: Re: I'm confused because...
Yeah, ok ... but the real question is do they have the responsibility of identifying the lawbreakers or "policing" the use of the service they provide?
I say no, not with something like connectivity. There is no easy (let alone accurate) way for them to do that... Let the police and the courts do their own freaking job! :-)
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Re: Re: I'm confused because...
ISPs have a responsibility to provide internet access to their customers. They are not responsible for babysitting you and making sure you don't misbehave. If you want to experience that kind of censorship, check out China.
"once they'd learned that you're a reckless, careless, thoughtless driver who's putting their property (and reputation) at risk, would yank your privileges, take the car back, and block you from additional rentals?"
Sure they would. But then again, this argument is flawed. The person in question has already broken the law, and the revocation of renting privileges comes after the fact. This would be the rough equivalent of some of the sentences that hackers have received, where their computer privileges have been revoked. The situation is completely different and has no basis for a comparison to ISP filtering.
Here's the problem: filters don't work. They have never worked properly, despite years of development, and they never will. They block things that shouldn't be, and leave things that they were intended to block accessible. Additionally, the question of what is infringing material is hardly black and white, which is why copyright issues are handled on a case-by-case basis. There is no hard and fast rule to determine what is and what is not infringement.
Finally, ISPs are protected from the actions of their users via the safe-harbor provisions. They will not be protected from the lawsuits that will emerge from filtering. It boils down to the fact that filtering is the exact same thing as censorship. By applying filters to the internet, the ISPs will by necessity violate the first amendment rights of some of its customers.
ISPs are not, nor should they be, the law enforcement branch of the internet.
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Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
OK, AC could you tell me where Dan mentioned anything about a slippery slope? All I see is an argument about how this is a dangerous and unworkable idea, that shouldn't be the mandate of ISPs to begin with.
What he said is true - there is absolutely no way to correctly filter internet access. If you try you'll end up blocking a lot of things that should be available, and never, ever block 100% of the things that shouldn't (China being an example).
If you have evidence to the contrary, please provide it.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
I fail to see the slippery slope fallacy in what I posted, unless you intentionally misread it. I did not say that we would turn in to China, I merely stated that China essentially babysits its population to ensure that material the government finds offensive is unavailable. I don't see how filtering the internet for potentially infringing material is all that different.
Everything else in my comment was simple cause and effect. At the very least I would expect a lawsuit raised by the EFF when something non-infringing is blocked by ineffective filters.
You are apparently the one that needs to look up the fallacy, since you seem to have a fairly limited idea of what it is. For one, a "slippery slope" is not always a fallacy, and for another, I have given reasons for the cause and effects I listed.
Please have a better understanding of what you are talking about before resorting to pathetic insults.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
According to your argument of forcing ISPs to censor the internet, we should also be be requiring that Craftsman not produce axes. For years people have been killing folks with axes! Craftsman and other such tool manufacturers have been getting away with profiteering on these senseless crimes! Oh, but wait, Craftsman just makes them, they don't sell them, so they're not who you mean.
Sears!
Sears and other unethical retail outlets have been offering them up to just buy and hack! And then cutting deals with Craftsman for the money off those killings. Surely they have a responsibility to stop selling these murderous devices! Wait, they just put them in the store and let people by them, we're talking about people actually getting to them, so thats not quite the same either.
Oh! The ROADS! We get to the store, to buy the axes, to go kill people! The roads provide access to where the axes are! And cars help us get there faster! Thats it! By your logic, car manufacturers and the government have an ethical responsibility to make sure their services don't allow people to get to the store to buy the axes made by Craftsman to kill people!
It all makes sense! We'll have a police officer at the entry to the parking lots waving people off saying "Nothing to see here" - that'll stop it!
Idiot.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I'm confused because...
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Re: I'm confused because...
In some places it's become a standard part of the rental agreement, buried deep in the legalese, that you pay hefty additional fees if you speed. This is applied every time you exceed the speeding threshold specified in the contract. I'd say this is some form of attempting to keep you from speeding.
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it's happening in the states too...
AT&T and others said they would be willing to filter individual connections so that pirated material would not be available on their network.
I think this is just ridiculous. There will always be a way to get around these types of things...it just costs everybody more money down in the long run, and it eventually gets trickled down to the consumers.
If they industries started focusing on giving us better content and better prices instead of focusing on pirated material we'd all be better off.
I'd be happy, and they would be even richer.
Stupid is as stupid does.
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Danish?
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Re: Danish?
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Lets's block everything!!!!
Who are the real terrorists I wonder ... who is right??? Guess it depends on where one lives and their point of view. "Ethical responsibility"??? It's only one view of what some people think is correct and "ethical". Their law applies and other views don't
As to the real issue ... let's block telephones while we are at it, they can also use a dial up modem to copy as well.
This is just pure b*llsh*t. An ISP is just a pipeline carrier.
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DoH
If not, then why are they being singled out?
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Blocking is Bad
The does blocking one site really help? I think not. This will not prevent people from getting the content, but it will block the freedom that we should have on the web. If we start with this when does it end?
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GET OVER IT
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Re: GET OVER IT
And clearly, you're not even remotely familiar with how business works. Businesses by definition are amoral entities, and the only thing they do is try to make more money (for public companies, it's called "increasing shareholder value"). Your completely misinformed statement "if a person or a company can help stop a crime or better yet improve the lives of others then of course they should try to do what they can" proves your lack of knowledge. That's not the business of businesses.
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Re: Re: GET OVER IT
Lets be realistic. Regardless of the potential of legitimate use, a service/product used in this way should be removed. If 95% of p2p software (limewire, emule) or torrents are of stolen material then these need to be shut down. This has nothing to do with the cost of music or software. Saying "I downloaded Photoshop because it expensive and therefore ok" is the same as saying "I stole this expensive Mercedes Benz". Its stealing plain and simple.
I am not self deluded. I am guilty doing these things. I also know the purpose of why people make software or music. Its a business. Is no different then opening a store in your town. You do it to sell product and make money. You would not approve of someone not paying for your merchandise because its too expensive. Or perhaps you would, "You can't afford my products? Please take all you can carry. I will just buy more for you take next time you come in."
SonOfDot, your missive oozes so much ignorance, its amazing. Most of the other posts here try to hide support of theft behind a moral or ethical defense. Yours is an entirely unsupported and unfounded rant.
If anyone arguing in favor of p2p or torrents is downloading "non-free" items, then admit you are a thief. Don't hide behind arguments of "there are some 1-2 legitimate uses" or "its not the ISPs responsibility to stop illegal use of their services". Step up and proudly say "I am steal!".
Personally, I don't drive a Mercedes. Not because there aren't any around. I believe that they are too expensive for me. Or maybe I should steal one. Then I could test drive it. If I like it, then I can justify buying one of my own. Thats fair, right? This needs some further pondering.....
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Re: Re: Re: GET OVER IT
89.53% of statistics are made up on the spot. That said, what if only 90% of the service is used for "illegal" purposes? 75%? What's the magic cutoff where it suddenly becomes ok, and who gets to decide that? And by whose laws? In some places the law doesn't prohibit copyright infringement (or at least not in the same ways we do in the US)
If I owned a benz and someone came up, made a second one magically appear right beside it, and drove off in the copy, I'd be happy for them. PHYSICAL PROPERTY IS NOT THE SAME AS DIGITAL PROPERTY! Saying it is just perpetuates ignorance and misunderstanding of the real issues. If you steal my car, you are depriving me of said car. If you copy my car, I've lost nothing, so I don't really care. The manufacturer probably does care because they want to be paid for each car made, but now that their car is infinitely and freely copyable it might be wiser for them to find a non-litigious way to make money off the copies (service, perhaps?). Also, 9 million+ people use torrents quite regularly for a perfectly legitimate use. This is a provable fact insofar as one trusts the subscriber numbers put forth.
Again, physical and digital property are very different and we'll never solve the very real issues regarding infringement if people keep pretending otherwise.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: GET OVER IT
These are tangibly different but their purpose is the same. If I sell physical widgets, I am trying to make money. If I (legally) sell songs or software, I am trying to make money. If someone steals my widgets or my songs and gives them away, then I have a diminished capacity to make money.
It really is this simple. There is a lot of discussion about statistics who's responsibility lies where.
*All* responsibility lies in the hands of the one doing the theft and no one else. its not rocket science, only denial or acceptance of how your actions are helping or hurting others.
It really is that simple....
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GET OVER IT
If you have 100 of Widget A and someone steals 1, you can now only sell 99 of Widget A. If you have 1 copy of song B and someone makes a copy of it, you still have your 1 copy, so what have you lost and how many copies can you still sell?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: GET OVER IT
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Re: Re: Re: GET OVER IT
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Re: Re: Re: Re: GET OVER IT
Do a quick search on Google, time after time courts have imposed the same copyright laws on digital content as they have on other media (hard copy, analog, etc...)
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Re: Re: Re: GET OVER IT
"Don't hide behind arguments of 'there are some 1-2 legitimate uses' or 'its not the ISPs responsibility to stop illegal use of their services'."
Maybe I'm misreading your statements here, but it sounds like you're trying to equate the opposition to ISP filtering with supporting theft. As stated before, saying the same thing over and over does not make it true. Please stop it.
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Re: GET OVER IT
You don't actually bother to read the comments, do you? Every time someone criticizes patents or copyrights, someone always feels the need to pull out the "you just want to steal stuff" argument. It doesn't hold any water and is not supported by the comments posted here. Yet people that are unable to come up with valid points to support their claims keep repeating this over and over, as if that will make it true. Grow up.
"When it involved little difficulty to oneself (person or company), then of course people should try and make things better."
Little difficulty? In that case, will you please provide an absolute definition of what is and what is not infringing material, and a foolproof method for testing against it?
"Of course ISPs should help stop child abuse, piracy, or other things the local society asks of any of its citizens."
Local society isn't asking for it. The RIAA and the MPAA are lobbying for it.
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Many people think that shutting down sites like the Pirate Bay and services like Gnuetella and Napster will have a dramatic effect on software and music piracy. The truth is that it has almost no affect at all! The past few years have taught us that the illegal content distribution community will find another way to share content illegally. This is one of the three reasons I'm against the idea of asking a site or a service provider to filter content. DanC nailed my first objection right on the head!
My third objection is this. Many up-and-coming artists are now distributing their own copyrighted materials over file sharing networks like BitTorrent. I’ve even downloaded a hand full of open source applications using BitTorrent clients. Without these avenues to freely distribute their materials, new artists and open source developers would find it more difficult to get their products in front of people that may actually pay for their works in the future.
If you want to stop illegal file sharing you need to target the people sharing the files, not a site or service that can provide a legitimate service to its users.
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Re: HurricaneRick's Third Objection
Not that I want to sound like a conspiracy theorist/nut, but perhaps this is what the RIAA and record and entertainment industries want to happen: remove alternative routes for independant artists to distribute their work, and they will come back to the RIAA/record/entertainment fold when they are desperate. IIRC, I'm sure that it irked the RIAA no end when Trent Reznor released single tracks from his Year Zero album on PirateBay without bending over for RIAA's permission first, even though he had the ok from his record company. Now that TR is completely independant, he doesn't have to get permission from anyone to distribute his music the way he wants to. TR, and other artists like him are going to figure out a way to profit from new methods of distribution that don't include record companies and RIAA bs, and RIAA and Co. can hear the Cheney/Stokes death-rattle not too far behind them. So, of course they want to get ISPs on board to prop up their failing business model.
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RE: sonofdot
I chuckle when folks try and seperate business from humanity. Different people act differently - don't try and blame a "company" for behavior in others you don't like - address them as people so we can move on.
Compassion - fight the good fight.
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Re: RE: sonofdot
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As for slippery slopes, you can see examples of this in action all over the place.
TV - In the 1970s, an hour of TV contained about 50 minutes of program and about 10 minutes of commercials. There were no logos, or banner ads and each program had full credits and ending music. Today, an hour of TV contains at most 40 minutes of programming and 20 minutes of commercials. Station logos are visible in the corner of the screen all the time (except during commercials), there are animated banners that pop up across the bottom of the image to advertise other things, shows no longer have ending music and the credits are squashed so small you usually can't read them. Did this happen all at once? Nope, it started with little things here and there and just picked up speed. Is it likely to stop where it is now? Not a chance!
DRM - Prior to the 1980s, there was really no DRM on music or movies (records, tapes, film). Then came video cassettes and Macrovision. Then encrypted DVDs with region codes. Now you have HD equipment that enforces DRM every step of the way, driving up the cost of compliant equipment, preventing you from using older equipment and generally preventing honest consumers from using legally bought content while doing nothing to prevent organized piracy. Will it end here? Hardly, they're already working on the next level of DRM...
Technology - In the past, electronics manufacturers created great new devices meant to benefit the consumer. The content industry has opposed virtually every new device capable of making audio or video copies. Since they didn't have any luck getting things like the VCR banned, they campaigned for laws like the DMCA, which make it illegal to bypass any form of copy protection. Then they locked down all the content, making some legal uses impossible without violating the law. Today, the electronics companies have to get permission from the content industry before creating anything new. Of course the content industry sees that any new devices are suitably locked down and crippled. "Broadcast Flags" will eventually do in practice what Hollywood failed to do by law; Ban the VCR. Will that be the end of it?
Copyright infringement - In the past, copyright infringement was seen as a company's problem. Now, according to them, it's the most important issue facing the world today. Think I'm joking? NBC's Rick Cotton actually said that the DOJ spends too much time investigating things like bank robbery and indentity fraud when it should be going after copyright infringement. Filming a movie in a theater was already illegal, but the MPAA pushed for tougher laws. The result? Regal Cinemas pressured the authorities to make an example out of Jhannet Sejas for recording *20* seconds of the movie Transformers on her camera phone to show her little brother! Right now there are laws before Congress that would make copyright infringement a criminal offense, meaning that the government would use YOUR tax money to file charges against non-violent file sharers. Let's not forget the provision where cases of copyright infringement would qualify for asset seizure and forfeiture, which has never required a conviction before the authorities can take your computer, or even your home. Nope, nothing slippery there...
Without clear limits on things, the people in control will go as far as they are able to.
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Yikes - take a nap
Compassion - not everyone gets content from pirate sites they don't own - sometimes just a handy download site, but that doesn't mean we still shouldn't have a cop watching the bank vault for the bad guy who is looking to steal so still some merit there.
EH - Nice One!!!
ummmm ------ danish --------- ummmmm
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Re: Yikes - take a nap
That would be an example of a personal attack from someone who has established that they don't know what they're talking about.
As for the rest, my day is going just fine. I just find it funny that some people choose to support ISP filtering based on faulty logic and a misplaced sense of righteousness.
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Semantics
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Re: Semantics
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If someone steals your widgets, you have lost a tangible object. If someone steals a copy of your music or software, you have lost nothing tangible, you have only lost potential sales. Either way, it constitutes theft, and is wrong. Just to be clear, I am NOT justifying theft.
However, with the above example, you have no way of quantifying the damage, if any, done to your sales of music or software. You can compare actual sales to expected, track a downward or upward trend in sales, but you cannot definitively state a number that would indicate how much was lost to piracy. Perhaps some of the pirates would never have purchased it. Perhaps they pirated it, liked it, and bought it (I have done this before). And I'm sure some loss can be directly attributed to lost sales. But there is no way of telling what the percentages are.
Where this becomes an issue is when dealing with organizations such as the RIAA and the MPAA, because they use fabricated numbers to convince lawmakers that there is a global piracy epidemic. It's already been discussed how they themselves have admitted that some *cough* of their numbers are complete fabrications.
Using their bogus numbers, they are attempting to influence governments worldwide to institute filtering technology that has no hope of succeeding, and will invariable infringe on the fair use rights of consumers. I will say that the RIAA currently does not want to mandate filters (although it does advocate them). The president of the RIAA has actually presented an even worse idea: copyright filtering on users' pcs.
"*All* responsibility lies in the hands of the one doing the theft and no one else."
Exactly right. Since the responsibility is in the hands of the individual, there is no reason why the ISPs should be implementing filters. It isn't their responsibility to allow or deny what you do with their service.
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