IFPI Prepares IPRED Complaints Against File-Sharers
Written by enigmax on September 08, 2009A new law designed to make it easier for copyright holders to go after file-sharers came into force in Sweden on April 1st. The feared IPRED legislation resulted in a major drop in Internet traffic but 6 months after its introduction, not a single complaint has been issued against music sharers. But IFPI says this is the calm before the storm.
The controversial Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) has gathered opposition from various sides, notably from much of the Swedish public. The law gives rights holders the authority to request the personal details of alleged copyright infringers so that they may be pursued through the legal system.
On April 1st the new law became active and immediately there was a dramatic drop in Internet traffic, which many observers put down to file-sharers retreating based on a fear of becoming identified.
Indeed, Henrik Pontén from Antipiratbyrån – the Swedish anti-piracy office – said he was convinced. “The majority of all Internet traffic is file-sharing. Because of that, there’s no other explanation for the decrease in traffic than the IPRED law,” he stated.
Then at the end of April, two ISPs – Bahnhof and Tele2 – both announced they would stop logging Internet activity which would seriously hamper the effects of IPRED on their customers.
But despite the massive opposition to the legislation, despite the fear, the huge drop in Internet traffic, the action of ISPs to limit its effects (and The Pirate Bay team releasing iPredator to neutralize it), so far in the battle against music file-sharers, IPRED is a sleeping beast.
Although the music industry promised to use IPRED to go after pirates, it has been a full 6 months since the legislation was introduced and so far, not a single complaint has been made against a file-sharer.
So does this mean that the feared music industry onslaught against P2P users will amount to nothing? Unfortunately, almost certainly not – they are sitting patiently for the wheels to turn in another case.
Previously five book publishers handed a request to a local court demanding information about the owner of an FTP-server where audio books were stored. Although it was a private FTP and the books couldn’t have been made available to the public, the court ordered the ISP Ephone to hand over the personal details of the individual behind the IP-address. Ephone refused, with their CEO describing the evidence submitted as insufficient. The case is under appeal.
Yesterday IFPI chief executive Lars Gustafsson told DN.se that they are simply biding their time to see the outcome of this earlier IPRED action by the publishing industry before going after music sharers, and offered assurances that IFPI cases will come in the fall.
Although there will probably not be the one hundred case promised earlier, Gustafsson still refused to be pinned down on the exact number, instead promising that the complaints will be issued “on a broad front.”
Previously: Pirated Artist Orders Police Raid on Sony Music Office
Next: Canadians Caught as Copyright Consultation Nears Conclusion
45 Responses
Bring it on!
The answer is for ISPs to stop logging who is assigned which dynamic IPs.
The other side will then make laws forcing the ISP to log IP assignments, so then it will be time to use either an anonymous p2p system of some sort, or use TOR, or other proxy systems.
By then we’d have technology that’s not p2p anymore =D
we’re hangin, workin on new techniques ;)
http://btguard.com/
http://www.itshidden.com/
http://openvpn.net/
get ready for a actual riot is all im gonna say
ifpi needs to get it that the fact is YOU cannot fight the youth cause they are your future
as such YOU have lost its only a matter of time making us all criminals now only makes us all brothers and sisters of the future where ifpi will be outlawed.
It’s actually what CERN is trying to find out. What happens when White Hats and Black Hats collide
lol
Not exactly a secret
http://tinyurl.com/llfrvk
we are swarm we are legion. True or false?
Please keep the responses on topic. If you want to address something not related to the article you can do it at the forums http://www.p2pfreak.com/forum/ or contact us.
‘two ISPs – Bahnhof and Tele2 – both announced they would stop logging Internet activity’
check http://www.integrity.st for all who joined.
I’m in Stockholm Sweden, its kind of become a habit for me now:
after putting on the computer, 3 clicks, then behind a VPN then use the net without any thought of the silly measures that morons are trying to come up with.
Peace of mind for 50kr a month, since i pay 320kr a month for my connection, just 50 more is a small price to pay for peace of mind.
In response to United Hackers associations post:
“get ready for a actual riot is all im gonna say
ifpi needs to get it that the fact is YOU cannot fight the youth cause they are your future
as such YOU have lost its only a matter of time making us all criminals now only makes us all brothers and sisters of the future where ifpi will be outlawed.”
You’re an idiot.
At the end of the day file sharing is illegal, if you do it you have to be aware that you run the risk of getting caught.
Just do your best to avoid it, but don’t complain when you have a massive fine hanging over your head.
keep the piratebay alive so sign up at http://www.theghostbay.org
Again – if the idiots prefer we give out money to VPNs instead of a “culture” / all content flatrate, then they cannot be helped.
I would gladly pay 10 EUR a month, every month, if I knew that _ALL_ my internet activity, regardless of content, were tolerated that way.
@12
File sharing isn’t illegal in itself, it all depends what you’re sharing.
Damn greedy corporates…wonder how much they will sue their first victim…
Sorry, but I reckon it’s complete bollocks that IPRED caused that apparent traffic drop. Are there any other graphs, from ISPs for instance, that indicate the same?
Oh, it’s all about music? Well, seeing as I have Spotify I guess I’m of the radar then? ^_^
@17: It’s not bollocks. My ISP have a page showing monthly statistics, and there was a huge drop in traffic. It’s back up now though.
Bunch of hypocrites.
Spamming is also illegal in the european union. I receive dozens of spam messages in German daily.
Does any government care? It’s a commercial activity unlike piracy. Does any ISP want to disconnect zombie computers sending spam from the Internet? No.
Obviously, interests of bourgeois record labels are more important than all Internet users receiving spam.
@15 “it all depends what you’re sharing”
When all that it should matter would be if what you’re asking in return is money or nothing.
@19 “M”
Maybe it’s true then, though I find it hard to believe so many people would switch off like that at the rate they did. It’s entirely possible I underestimated the effect the law was to have.
If it is true, then with a dose of new law here and there around the world I guess you really could see a big drop in file sharing, at least until something more secure comes along, or until people move away from BitTorrent (which is old vulnerable crap nowadays anyway) and onto other (safer) services (that already exist).
Actually lots of people I know have stopped torrenting almost entirely since the new law, especially those who are less computer literate and use only public trackers like TPB. Other friends who mostly use private trackers or other networks have not changed their behaviour. So I guess the biggest drop in filesharing was among the less computer literate.
They are forcing p2p underground, but it will all return once people get used to VPN clients and/or when file sharing can be sufficiently anonymized.
Lol. Looks like @23 just called all you public tracker nubs computer illiterate.
enjoi
possibly at the end of the day file sharing will be illegal, but its not night yet. and i agree with the above comment that it depends on what is being shared. ill spare the analogies of what could be shared for free without infringing copyrights if you spare the demonization of emerging (emerged?) technologies
::middle finger::
@article:
You missed a comma between “activity” and “which” in the paragraph about Bahnhof and Tele2. The way I’m reading it right now, I’m getting a message that it’s the Internet activity that seriously hampers IPRED. (Yeah, a stupid comma can change an entire sentence… grammar is a bitch.)
ifpi needs to get it that the fact is YOU cannot fight the youth cause they are your future
as such YOU have lost its only a matter of time making us all criminals now only makes us all brothers and sisters of the future where ifpi will be outlawed.
How come drugs ain’t legal now then?
@38 (Anonymous):
Because piracy isn’t bad for your health. (Well, not directly, anyway.)
Umm… I meant 28.
Its kinda cute, they think that there really making a difference in a noble cause… Awww…
@19 M, ‘@17: It’s not bollocks. My ISP have a page showing monthly statistics, and there was a huge drop in traffic. It’s back up now though.’
Yes it was complete _bullocks_!
They only used the statistics from one feeble owner of a few routers. Not directly a major owner of backbone routers.
Easter week holidays for everyone in educations started that week, this year. It’s the Swedes version of spring break. Every school choose a week in and around easter, and not everyone at once, so as not to clog neither the skiing “paradises” in sweden nor the limited mediterranean hot spots for sun and fun.
Parents tends to take the week off. Not too shabby having five to seven weeks paid vacation after all.
About six to eight month prior to first of april a few more hundred of thousands got actual broadband, that would be 2mbits full duplex up and down, and most of the rest got a chance to get higher download rates, from ten to 100, from 24 to 48, from eight to ten or to 50, et cetera.
Of course there most likely was a psychological april-fools effect. But, even going from that little router owner, traffic only fell down to what it was before all those people got actual broadband or higher download rates, even though it was the spring break time of year in sweden.
i deeply regret inventing dynamite and unleashing explosives on the world. but there is an upside! for every person killed in wars where explosives have been used there is more food remaining for everyone :-D
us Swedes know what we are doing. trust me
#20 foo42: You do realize that spamming is also a wonderful hidden channel for distributing copyrighted files, right?
I wouldn’t wonder if the current spam bots could also be used to piggy back more useful files (chunks) than silly ads.
Wouldn’t that be wonderfully subversive? Imagine opening up your mail server to suck up 70% spam (and destroy it with SpamAssassin), and getting 30% music, movies etc. as a reward? ;)
#34 mail isn’t really meant for sharing large files and some postmasters ban messages larger than few megabytes.
Also note that email doesn’t handle binaries inside the body, 8bit characters have to be encoded using base64 or quoted-printable which increases the size a bit.
And since spam is sent using computers of regular Joes, it takes the bandwidth off of their seeding.
I Am cleaning my guns right now.
@12 P/Simplemind/Guys
“You’re an idiot.
At the end of the day file sharing is illegal, if you do it you have to be aware that you run the risk of getting caught.”
Since you are there warn your masters that they are fool because they run the risk of being shot.
It doesn’t matter what “Authorities” who are not longer reconized as such by the people say to be legal or illegal.
The law is dead and there is no law.
The corporation of parasites you are working for just killed the law.
You can not deal with that and I don’t think this was worth it.
Why pay for vpn servers when a) there is a chance they have to log everything sooner or later like the isps and b) anonymous networks like TOR and I2P already exist? Sure, their performance might not be that great but that will only get better when it matures and more people use it.
Authorities are those who have bigger guns. The sole modus operandi of the police is the use of violence or the threat of violence. Without it this abusive organization couldn’t exist.
@38
TF needs to run some stories about I2P. It’s pretty stable right nao and way faster than TOR.
I mean, running some I2P stories could drastically increase the amount of users of I2P instead of relying upon inferior solutions like VPNs.
@35 Sep 09, 2009 at 09:39 by foo42:
Please take a look at GmailFS and see if that changes your mind about using email as a form of storage :)
@ Alfred Bernhard Nobel
“i deeply regret inventing dynamite and unleashing explosives on the world. but there is an upside! for every person killed in wars where explosives have been used there is more food remaining for everyone :-D
us Swedes know what we are doing. trust me”
Thats why Nobel said us norwegians should hand out the peace price ;)
“iPredator”
Lol, dude they didn’t “steal” apple’s “i”! It’s called “IPREDator”.
But anyway, nice story.
since when are comments moderated ?
f**** them ? better now ?
sry, but this is rather funny..
P2P is not piracy, it’s marketing. In fact, if your music or movie is NOT being downloaded, you should be WORRIED !
If you can’t even give it away for free, how do you expect to sell it, stupid ?
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