BPI Crackdown Planned as BitTorrent Becomes ‘Too Easy’
Written by enigmax on March 28, 2008The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) is said to be planning a BitTorrent clampdown. The trade association, previously heavily involved in the shutdown of OiNK, says that BitTorrent has become “too easy” and is taking aim at what it refers to as ‘larger networks’.
Industry associations such as the RIAA and IFPI grab most of the anti-piracy headlines in the music world. The UK’s British Phonographic Industry (BPI) has a lower profile, but one which was significantly raised due to its involvement in the shutdown of the OiNK BitTorrent tracker.
Now, according to Silicon, the BPI is teaming up with the IFPI to develop systems to track down unauthorized music sharing on the Internet.
Jollyon Benn, an Internet investigator for the Anti Piracy Unit of the BPI, said that more people than ever are sharing their music collections online because BitTorrent clients are becoming so easy to use. He said: “The latest version of LimeWire includes a BitTorrent client in it and the user interface has got much more friendly. It is opening it up to a lot of people, it all comes down to how easy it is to do these things.”
I’m not sure that the LimeWire implementation of BitTorrent is any easier to use than that of say, uTorrent’s, but it’s certain that the BitTorrent community would only expand when an outfit such as LimeWire introduces its millions of users to the protocol. As more people get introduced to BitTorrent and move away from networks such as Gnutella, the mysterious anti-piracy ’systems’ being developed by the BPI and IFPI come into play, which in reality are likely to be regular file-sharing clients with enhanced logging abilities.
According to Jollyon Benn, the BPI isn’t deviating away from its earlier position of not going after petty file-sharers, setting an informal threshold of around 200 tracks before chasing the sharer. Instead, Benn says that the BPI will be concentrating on “networks sharing hundreds of thousands of tracks” which immediately throws up some questions. Most BitTorrent trackers are located outside the ‘jurisdiction’ of the BPI, i.e not in the UK. Granted, this didn’t stop them working with the IFPI to shut down OiNK in the Netherlands, but of course they managed to convince the British police that some criminal activity had been taking place on the site, in order to obtain the identity of the administrator, Alan Ellis.
Since the authorities still haven’t found anything to charge Alan with - many months after his initial arrest - one has to wonder if the BPI will be so lucky in getting home address details so quickly in the future.
There certainly aren’t many UK-hosted BitTorrent trackers and the number of British BitTorrent administrators running sites located outside of the UK is unclear, but it’s unlikely there are that many. So as everyone scratches their head thinking of who on earth the BPI are talking about taking down, the battle continues, physically and more often than not, psychologically.
Previously: Iceland’s Largest BitTorrent Tracker Wins in Court
Next: Norwegian ISPs Refuse MPAA’s Request to Disconnect Pirates
48 Responses
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Let’s just make sure they don’t lie about the facts this time.
Damn, was second to comment… at #1, how can they NOT like about facts? those pricks live on lies and false stats.
I don’t want Limewire losers on torrent networks. Big issue.
#5
Then just ask your favorite trackers to ban the client.
Blah, blah, blah. How on earth are they planning to “clamp down” on hundreds of thousands of people? File suits? Yeah, like there’s that many lawyers.
What next ? sue the whole world?you dumb sh!t’s…
World is changing you d!ck heads….
http://www.hack5.blogspot.com
Torrent is here to stay…no denial !
Who’s to say what I am downloading is illegal? I hope they catch me replacing a lost CD with a torrent download. I’ll let them take me to court, spend months in fighting me and then I’ll tell them I was only replacing what I had bought legally. If I own the CD, I have paid the copyright to own that information. How I replace it is up to me. If I had a backup on my computer it would be no different to a backup on a torrent. This means that as they cannot prove I am commiting a crime before going to my ISP to request my identity, they can’t get it. Good luck fuckers.
@#1 - of course they’re going to lie, they have to to get the police involved, to make out that what people they go after are doing is illegal, which in turn makes their lying look justified - compare the news coverage given to Oink going down to the news coverage of the guy having no charges placed against him. Perception is more important than fact to these people (just look at the “You wouldn’t steal” ads)
@ANON - elitish SOB aren’t you? I use uTorrent because of it’s features but if Shareaza came along and added better Torrent features to their client I’d switch in a heartbeat. What the fuck does it matter what client you’re using? so long as you’re not trying to cheat the trackers (which is why most private trackers restrict clients), then it doesn’t make any difference.
What a bunch of fucktards. The gnutella network has been around way longer than bittorrent, and the two share some of the same userbase. Just becuase limewire introduced torrent file hadnling to its client (quite some time ago too), does not mean that every user on the gnutella network is going to migrate to bittorrent, nor are the two protocols interchangable. You cant download something from gnuttela via a normal torrent client. And just to add, gnutella and the edonkey network are still prolific for music sharing, always have been, probably always will be due to the ease of search. You might be able to shut down central sites like oink, but shutting down an entire network of decentralised users is impossible you fucking retards. It didnt work when you sued Bearshare out of the game, it hasnt worked by stealing the Shareaza name, give up already and get a proper fucking job.
BitTorrent owns Gnutella. Gnutella is for the 14 year old girls who wants to download the latest Tokio Hotel-song.
[quote comment="321228"]Blah, blah, blah. How on earth are they planning to “clamp down” on hundreds of thousands of people? File suits? Yeah, like there’s that many lawyers.[/quote]
The Copyright Cartel lives in a fantasy land where it’s somehow possible to acheive victory in their unwinnable war, and they have an extremely low comprehension of P2P filesharing.
That’s why they think they can “clamp down” on hundreds of thousands of people. Their pea-size brains are hopelessly outweighed by their planet-sized greed.
Also, I’ll say it again if only because it bears repeating: it’s a stupid idea to paginate the God damn comments. Go back to displaying them all at once, or you might as well just limit the number of user comments to 24, because everything that spills over into the ensuing pages will be read so seldomly it might as well be invisible… Which it already damn near is.
BRING IT ON!!
BPI hype themselves so much its rediculous. I only ever hear about them when they sue 13 year olds for a rediculous sum of money that doesn’t get paid but it gets them in the guardian.
FUCK THE BPI, RIAA, MPAA, IFPI, and all those God Damned, ANTI-FREE SPEECH ASS HOLES
“Their pea-size brains are hopelessly outweighed by their planet-sized greed.”
Is it not the way the dynosaurs where built?
Computers networking is an asteroid with the names of BPI RIAA, IFPI, CRIA, MPAA, Vivendique Universale, Sony/BMG, EMI,Time Warner writen on it.
Good!
QUOTE: “Jollyon Benn, an Internet investigator for the Anti Piracy Unit of the BPI, said that more people than ever are sharing their music collections online because BitTorrent clients are becoming so easy to use.”
Which is why the music companies should be embracing the technology! It’s already been proven that people are prepared to pay for files distributed via torrent sites, so why can’t the BPI get its head out of its arse and create its own client/network that will earn it some money lost due to “vanishing CD sales”?
Chasing the current users of torrent clients or the sites that host trackers will just make more enemies in the huge potential market for legal (and paid) torrents.
The horse has already bolted, Mr BPI. You’ve got some catching up to do.
P.S. What sort of a name is “Jollyon”?
[quote comment="321291"]BitTorrent owns Gnutella. Gnutella is for the 14 year old girls who wants to download the latest Tokio Hotel-song.[/quote]
Aint that the truth fella ;-)
Well if the fuckers did not make you pay like 15 GBP for a DVD and put it to a price that the working famlys can afford then ther would not be all the P2P ther is now.
Thay can suck my fucking balls. Look at it like this. By the time thay have closed one torrent tracker ther is 1000s more opend.
“more people than ever are sharing their music collections online because BitTorrent clients are becoming so easy to use”
But according to the RIAA the lawsuits against the customers are working! So are the lawsuits working? if this is not working why are they doing it?
To rob the people even further?
Why the governement is not doing anything?
Are they waiting for someone to do the job for them the Hugly way?
Can Anyone tell me something ?
Isnt it supposed to be against the law to violate the privacy of users and check what they are doing ?
I know a very big torrent site in UK (not many torrent, but lots of users) and the Bunch-of Pricks Inside-anuses Association went after it, they would look incredibly stupid
@7
Actually, if you replace a lost cd with a torrent, it would be copyright infringement because when you download the files, you are also uploading them to others.
@20
It depends on where you live.
> … informal threshold of around 200 tracks before chasing the sharer.
So, he basically says I’ve got 200 free downloads. When I do more, it probably starts paying off to bully me to pay for so called economic losses.
Let’s start to pack together the stuff into 1TB junks. That will be enough for 65 years of continuous entertainment, given uncompressed music albums or 700MB movies that run for about 2 hours. That should be acceptable for the average filesharer who starts at age 10 and goes deaf at age 75.
> echo “200*10^6/700/365/12″ | bc
I’m confident the onslaught will be devastating.
The funny thing is that the SHIT that BPI artists shit out is not even worth downloading never mind paying money for. Disposable worthless crud. Not even worth 5 minutes of time to download or waste 100 meg of bandwidth on. Go bankrupt and find some other way to make your cocaine money BPI bitches.
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