Thus far, these attempts haven’t been particularly successful. ISPs worldwide are refusing to cooperate, mainly because they feel such actions violate the privacy of their customers. In addition, last week the Belgian ISP Scarlet – previously ordered to stop illegal file-sharing on its network – told the court that it is simply impossible for it to do so.

Nevertheless, Sony’s John McMahon said in his keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum, that he would like ISPs and copyright owners to cooperate in order to reduce piracy. According to McMahon, the entertainment industry is losing more than two billion dollars a year because of piracy, but he believes this number can be reduced significantly with the help of ISPs.

Interestingly, McMahon also said that customer frustration with DRM is one of the main reasons why people turn to file-sharing networks, instead of legal alternatives. Sony recognizes, but at the same time ignores these signals from their customers, as they are not planning to get rid of DRM. Instead, they are investing in a new and improved DRM, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE).

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

So far, the IFPI has had little success with their lobby, that’s probably why they decided to put legal pressure on the ISPs. “We believe that ISPs have a special part to play in this and must help us. The discussions we’ve tried to have with the ISPs haven’t led anywhere,” IFPI’s Managing Director in Sweden, Lars Gustafsson, said in response to their recent announcement.

The IFPI claims to have studied several ISPs practices, but according to Lars Gustaffson they intend to focus on one particular company which they claim facilitates filesharing on the Internet. One of the services they hope to stop is their nemesis, The Pirate Bay.

Gustafsson was advised by his legal team not to disclose the name of the ISP yet, but many people think the ISP Bahnhof will be the most likely target, since they are recommended by the pirate community because of their high stance on integrity.

“The ISPs don’t believe they have any responsibility to help when it comes to hindering filesharing,” says Lars Gustafsson. IFPI already sent out letters to several service providers, urging them to start monitoring their customers and filtering websites.

Most ISPs refuse to cooperate with the IFPI though. Last month, Telia Sonera, a large Swedish ISP responded to the IFPI’s request by stating that such actions are illegal under EU law. Norwegian ISPs later responded with similar arguments.

On the other hand, the IFPI claims that restricting access to filesharing sites might actually benefit ISPs. “Illegal P2P file-sharing may have helped drive broadband subscriptions in the past, yet today these activities, particularly in respect of movies, are hogging bandwidth,” they state.

Thus far, the IFPI has won in Denmark. In February, a Danish court ordered the ISP ‘Tele2′ to block its customers from accessing The Pirate Bay. The decision is currently under appeal, and the Pirate Bay recently announced that they will demand compensation for the block.

To be continued…

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Here’s what Rogers wrote in a letter to their customers: “With households doing more online every day – from downloading music and streaming videos to joining online communities – it’s important to have an Internet provider that evolves to meet your online needs. At Rogers, we remain committed to always providing you with the best Internet experience possible.”

Don’t get me wrong, a contentious pricing scheme makes sense. The more people consume, the more they pay, fair enough. What bothers most Rogers users is that, even with this new pricing scheme, their BitTorrent traffic is still being throttled.

Rogers was one of the early adopters of BitTorrent traffic shaping. The first reports date back to 2005, and last year Rogers even decided to block all encrypted traffic, just to make sure that BitTorrent protocol encryption didn’t work.

Nevertheless, Rogers plays nice to its customers, and says it is “committed to providing the best Internet experience as possible”, but how can this be true if their customers can hardly use BitTorrent?

In the letter they sent to their customers they mention that, with a monthly bandwidth limit of 95GB, users can download a whopping 24,320 songs a month. However, if Rogers continues to throttle BitTorrent traffic, it can take up to 67.6 months before their customers actually reach their quota.

In a response to the new pricing scheme, a Rogers subscriber told TorrentFreak: “Pretty funny actually, as with the throttling they are doing, I could downgrade my service considerably.”

Not to worry though, there are several tip and tricks to get around the traffic shaping devices rogers uses. For some, BitTorrent encryption is sufficient to circumvent Rogers’ throttling, others need to adjust a few extra settings to enjoy their torrents in full-speed.

Happy torrenting…

Rogers’ new pricing scheme

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Now, under huge pressure from the movie, music and software industries, the four major ISP organizations in Japan are at it again, and have agreed to take drastic action against online pirates.

According to the report in Yomiuri Shimbun, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software” and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. ISPs would first send out emailed warnings to those traced, then interrupt the Internet connection if action to cease the activity isn’t taken. For persistent breaches, the ISP would ultimately terminate the accounts of its subscribers.

These four major ISP organizations – which include Telecom Service Association and the Telecommunications Carriers Association – are made up of around 1,000 other ISPs, a large portion of the Japanese market. In collaboration with the copyright holders, the ISPs will set up a panel in April to decide exactly how the system should operate.

Right now, there is a lot discussion surrounding the suggestion that persistent file-sharers could be banned from the internet. So far there have been proposals in France, the UK and Australia.

During December last year we reported that the number of internet users file-sharing in Japan had increased by a 180% in a single year.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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)

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

According to Hong Kong Cable TV the ISP’s have three weeks to comply. The movie companies demanded the user info belonging to 49 IP addresses, but it’s likely that more will follow. The Hong Kong BitTorrent “pirates” have to watch their backs. Hong Kong already had the honor to put the first BitTorrent pirate behind bars last year.

All “offenders” were using BitTorrent to download copyrighted content, including Jet Li’s newest hit Fearless. How ironic.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.