IFPI: ISPs Should Block BitTorrent and The Pirate Bay
Written by Ernesto on December 26, 2007The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) is trying to convince European lawmakers that ISPs should take extreme measures to fight piracy. They suggest that ISPs should block access to websites such as The Pirate Bay, and block filesharing protocols, no matter what they’re being used for.
The IFPI - the anti-piracy organization that represents the recording industry worldwide - sees ISPs as one of their biggest enemies. “ISPs often advertise music as a benefit of signing up to their service, but facilitate the illegal swapping of copyright infringing music on a grand scale,” they said previously. In an attempt to restrict the Internet, the anti-pirates have sent a list of three absurd recommendations to the EU parliament.
Earlier this year the IFPI won a case against the Belgian ISP Scarlet. In this case the judge ruled that ISPs can be forced to either block or filter copyright infringing content on P2P networks. At the time, IFPI Chairman and CEO John Kennedy said: “This is a decision that we hope will set the mould for government policy and for courts in other countries in Europe and around the world.” That’s exactly what they are trying to do now.
None of the measures below are overly burdensome or expensive, or cause problems for regular services to customers, says the IFPI. Here’s what they recommend:
Content filtering
The IFPI suggests that ISPs should identify music files on their network and check them against a reference database of “audio fingerprints” to check whether the files are infringing copyright. This might work on Kazaa, but it is not clear what methods the ISP will have to implement to distinguish between copyright infringing and legal content on P2P networks, such as BitTorrent. That will be a tough job, if not, impossible.
Protocol Blocking
According to the IFPI, an easy but effective solution is to simply block all P2P protocols and forget about all the indie publishers that use it to share legal content, for free. If customers can’t use BitTorrent or any other filesharing protocol piracy will decline, and that’s basically all they care about.
Blocking access to infringing websites
What better way to censor the Internet than to block entire websites, especially The Pirate Bay. The IFPI tried to block websites before - last year they convinced a Swedish ISP (Perspectiv) that it was a good idea to block allofmp3. However, after The Pirate Bay decided to block all Perspectiv’s customers from its site, they backed down, re-enabled access to allofmp3 - and apologized.
These recommendations might seem absurd, but Heise.de reports that the IFPI has already convinced several European politicians to support these measures. Next month, The Committee on Culture and Education from the European parliament will discuss if these recommendations should be turned into European policy.
There is little doubt that it will cause quite a stir if they are.
(via P2P Blog)
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136 Responses
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I read this and can’t stop myself from laughing. Even if this was implemented there is no way the people stopping piracy can stand up to those of us continuing it. we the same amount of manpower, but we have something they don’t, freedom of implementation. They crack out anti-P2P bull crap and within weeks we counter it. While they are waiting for their checks to clear and lawmakers with their fingers in their asses to let them implement A-p2p version 2 us pirates are downloading the newest movies and music.
reason 2: If this passes, I give 1-3 years before pirate party members start getting elected. Now even if it’s only one pirate member that would show those two faced politicians across the world that change is on the winds and they better start cleaning up their act and give us internet neutrality like we deserve.
The new protocol’s and software are in development, its just time. and the anti corporations don’t seem to understand, we have lots more time for our developments than they do.
god do we love innovation.
This will never happen. Right now ISPs and hosting providers have immunity with this sort of things.
The reason for this is because we don’t scan your content. We only act based on complaints.
For example, if you download Halo 3 illegally and try to play it online, Bungie has your IP address. They then lookup your ISP and contact them and file a complaint. What happens after that is dependent upon your ISP and the infringement.
ISPs would never want to scan your shit for two reasons. It costs a lot of money and they lose immunity. If ISPs start scanning for this stuff and they miss something, they are punishable. Currently, they have no worries as long as they act on the take down notices which is a lot cheaper than the network infrastructure needed for this.
Stop trying to scare people for blog hits asshole.
Blocking specific sites will not solve the home-made problems of the entertainment industry.
I think they are better off by embracing the new media that could help them to market their stuff much better and faster than they do now !
Most of you people know absolutely nothing.
First, piracy simply isn’t for everyone. Only the elite. I don’t need every idiot on earth participating in order to get anything I want.
Second, the media companies don’t care if people download something for free. The high numbers of downloaders of free content is because of the demand curve. The quantity demanded for free is very high. The overwhelming majority of those people would never pay for what they download, so the media companies do not lose anything. Perhaps the demand curve shifts left in the presence of high piracy rates, though.
The true threat to the business model of large media corporations is that P2P removes the extraordinarily high barriers to entry. Their oligopoly is at stake. Their crooked politicians will do anything they say for the right price.
@ 54 Dec 27, 2007 at 00:55 by Nikita Kondraskov
They are doing exactly that. This whole business to to prevent other people from doing the same thing. The Pirate Bay and Mininova are already stepping on the IFPI’s toes by promoting indie artists.
@ 46 Dec 27, 2007 at 00:06 by Jeff
They are not fighting piracy. They are fighting competition.
@ 47 Dec 27, 2007 at 00:10 by James.
Hillary Clinton received $854,462 from the health care industry. Why do you think they would pay that kind of money? Public policy is bought and paid for.
Retards, perfect example of companies taking over governing bodies.
Help the project below develop into what it needs to be.
http://www.securep2p.net/
$854,462 ?? Wow, I want to get into politics.
Can anyone get me in, I want to be bought too.
LOL..
In one breath europe criticises china for it’s censorship and in the other moves itself towards the same measures of control. capitalism makes another step to facism.
also there’s lots of ‘legal’ content on sites such as then pirate bay, like porn and freeware
Regarding comment #9
You are an absolute fool. Capitalism involves a separation of business and state. Europe is a unified socialist breeding ground these days.
The onus is on business to prevent business from being screwed, not the government. Damn socialism.
Capitalism where industries get “protection” from the government is just bizarro socialism under a different name.
Let’s get some real capitalism — you know, where companies can only stay in business by selling a product customers want. Maybe we should start drafting some memos on how to get there. First step, abolish the “intellectual property” extortion racket…
Content filtering can be broken with a simple XOR mechanism. A key passed between clients would be unique for that session and generate something that matches no fingerprint database.
To deal with protocol blocking, the mechanics of bittorrent can fairly easily be moved over to the http protocol. Clients need to deal with http anyway to connect to a tracker, so it’s not a major step to build a very simple http server on the listening port.
Running over http, it wouldn’t be easy for an ISP to shut it down. Throw in unique URLs and variable names between clients and it’ll be impossible to detect with the current tech.
For site blocking, just increase the number of sites available. I myself am working on something that will run on any half decent free webspace provider, tbdev can be made to work on free space for small sites. Instead of huge sites with big servers and big costs tied to the admin, torrenting should move to smaller sites with no costs and complete anonymity for the admins, which will encourage a lot more people to start a site.
IFPI need to lay of the drugs and commit corperate suicide by licking a toad..
[quote comment="248541"]There’s only one solution:
Ban the internet![/quote]
I don’t think they are that clever to use your solution ;)
This is probly going to happen and there is nothing we can do about it as usual.
No way. Anyone who advocates interfering with the way the internet works is a certified moron. Ever heard of freedom of the press? That’s what the internet is. If you block one site/protocol, others will follow.
So IFPI, go live on Mars and take the rest of our idiotic politicians with you. and we don’t want ISP-added advertisements either.
Wow… if we’re banning all file-sharing protocols, we might as well ban HTML and http://FTP. They’re used for file sharing. Why stop there though? Let’s ban phone lines and radio too. In fact, why don’t we ban blank CDs?
lol we should ban ifpi.com If I was an artist I would want my music heard not my fans be fined
We should ban email to, because you could always just email music to someone. And web servers should require licensing as well, because you could set-up torrent trackers…
/Sarcasm, by the way
BT needs more active support from independent artist and label-owned artist who like to see their ‘talent’ rewarded by getting more money into their pockets rather than making the record labels richer.
Option 2 is a blatant move by the companies to corner the market for themselves and limiting the choices consumers can make. A previous article on Torrent Freak shows that more CDs are bought by users who DL music, but it doesn’t say whether the CDs they buy are label-owned or independent. This is what they are afraid of. They don’t care if BT users buy more CDs if they’re not buying what garbage they spew out.
Those recording companies should get an anti-trust lawsuit shoved up their asses for forcing their independent competition to stay out of reach from the consumers.
And where will it stop? They’ll tell you what you can and can’t look at just because.. well just because someone paid them to say so.
What’s next? Filtering based on religion or political views?
And as #69 says, why stop with torrents? I can download illegally via http, ftp, nntp, irc, pop3… well you get the idea.
When is someone going to hit the MPAA/RIAA with some racketeering charges?
Block torrents and pirate bay? Yeah right, idiot IFPI bureaucrats. People aren’t going to pay for your monopolistic, overpriced products where you rip off artists and consumers alike. Instead blocking this would promote Darknets which would prevent government from tracking terror activities completely. IFPI bureaucrats like Ion Stamboulis are a threat to national security.
one day, almost everything will be free. Food, entertainment. Food and entertainment used to be free when man first walked the earth. It seems the cycle is coming full circle once again. Power to the people.
./,m ju;’vccvmd>:”? cx’l; cx
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