The proposal piggybacks onto the UK’s Digital Economy Act, which requires that the level of illicit file-sharing should be measured. The PRS believes this is a unique opportunity to use these statistics to charge ISPs accordingly, by putting a price tag on the traffic volume generated by illicit downloaders.

Not all parties are equally excited about the idea. UK ISP Talktalk has responded negatively to the proposal from PRS. “It would require monitoring of traffic and this has huge implications in respect of directives on privacy and data retention,” TalkTalk told Sky News.

“It’s profoundly unfair – it is like making a bus company responsible for shoplifters who use their buses to get to the shops,” TalkTalk said. “It is futile since people will switch to undetectable methods e.g. encrypted services, streaming.” TalkTalk further emphasizes that the music industry should focus on building sustainable business models though innovation and by listening to consumers instead.

Indeed, the PRS proposal is overly simplistic since measuring illicit traffic is extremely complex. With the increased adoption of anonymizing services it might even prove impossible to get an accurate estimate.

Despite the technical issues, the economic aspects are more complex than the PRS believes them to be. Foremost, there is still a debate as to whether piracy results in losses, and if so, to what extent. Even if this number would be known, one can question whether it’s fair that non-pirating customers will eventually have to deal with price increases caused by the suggested “pirate levy”.

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

When Simonsen Advokatfirma sent a letter to Norwegian ISPs via the MPAA’s lawyer Espen Tondel, it was probably expected that the ISPs would agree to their outrageous demands. Not so. Instead, IKT Norway – an interest group for ISPs – stood up for the ISPs stating:

“In a constitutional state, the police and the prosecuting authority have the job of investigating and indicting, not lawyers and communication engineers. Most of the big ISPs in Norway are members of IKT Norway and we will support the various ISPs as best we can against what we see as a preposterous demand from Simonsen”

Now, in a detailed letter, IKT Norway has responded in the strongest possible way:

Regarding demands to prevent alleged unauthorized publication.

We refer to the letter from Simonsen Advokatfirma DA on behalf of Norsk Videogramforening dated 4. March 2008, also other letters from Simonsen dated 19 march 2008 and sent to several internet service providers (ISPs)

1. Demands issued to the ISPs

In your letter you claim that the ISPs have an obligation to prevent alleged illegal activity. It’s further suggested that this should be carried out by the ISP by matching IP addresses with customer names and thereafter forward provided letters to the subscribers which (apparently) used the listed, dynamic IP addresses.

Principally we do not consider it an ISPs role to report on suspicions regarding breach of intellectual property rights without a court ruling, to contribute to legal decisions regarding our customers.

The ISPs will of course follow current laws and, if they receive a final ruling which demands action, they will follow it.

However the ISPs do not believe it to be their task to monitor or through their own evaluation and/or the subjective assessments of others, to censor or sanction [content] on the net. It’s important that the rule of law is upheld and that the protection of rights is correct in accordance with the constitution, i.e. the police investigate and the court of law makes the judgment.

2. Roles of the ISP and responsibility

We stress that the ISPs on their own do not breach the law. We believe that you are familiar with the national implementation of the European Info-Soc Directive and that it deviates from Denmark. Your reference to a Danish ruling is not relevant in this case.

(Comment from Norwegian translator: Norway parted from Denmark in 1814, that’s why we celebrate 17th May and they should know better!)

In your letter you refer to the law regarding e-trade and cease and desists. Such an instruction must be issued to the one who’s allegedly breaching your clients rights. A superficial trial to ascertain an copyright breach without the accused being a part of the case, and without letting the accused defend himself according to the normal principle of contradiction, is inexpedient.

The consequence of this will be of such a large magnitude for the individual Internet user that we believe a more though investigation and court involvement is needed. Further investigation [by the police] will show if it’s possible to identify the user which the copyright holder claim has beached their rights, and after this a justified ruling can be made by the court of law.

When it comes to your comment on responsibility and helping out to commit the crime if the ISP does not prevent the alleged illegal activity, we do not agree. An ISP has no responsibility for what the customer does on the net as you suggest in your letter.

Based on this we reject your accusation that the ISPs have a responsibility for the users use of network and devices. The ISPs will not follow your demand to block access/prevent alleged illegal activity.

3. Conclusion

IKT-Norway stresses that it’s important to protect intellectual property. Without a strong governance of intellectual property rights, the incentive to invent and create may suffer. We do not protect nor sympathize with breaches of intellectual property rights, or other actions which breach the law.

However, the work to protect intellectual property must be carried out in such way that it does not breach fundamental constitutional principles. Your private investigation carried out on the net has be further investigated by the police and/or the court of law.

Best regards,
IKT- Norway

Hallstein Bjercke,
Director of “governmental contact”

Thanks to Harald for the translation of the original letter and Happy Birthday!

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

BitTorrent throttling has been going on for a few years now, but it is getting more attention lately, because the number of people who use BitTorrent keeps growing. The traffic shaping methods used vary from ISP to ISP. Some only limit BitTorrent traffic during certain times of the day, or throttle in specific regions. Others take a more aggressive approach and prevent their customers from seeding, or even downloading .torrent files.

Some people might wonder why ISPs throttle their connection. The argument most often used is that all the BitTorrent traffic on their network slows down other customers’ connections. An argument that makes sense (if it is true), but the real problem is that ISPs tend to be secretive about their throttling efforts. If it really is that big of a problem, be open about it, and let your customers know what they can and cannot do.

Art Reisman, who is chief technical officer at APConnections – a company that happens to manufacture traffic shaping devices, lists some of the possible solutions ISPs can implement in order to cope with the “BitTorrent problem”, which he wanted to share here.

1.) Ask for voluntary cooperation.

One recourse would be to ask customers to scale back on torrents, or to use them at night or another time when network usage is low. There is plenty of precedent in the Green movement to recycle and to reduce carbon footprints. So why not a campaign to scale back BitTorrent usage ?

The downside: Can you imagine a service provider sending a letter to its customer base outlining the technical limitations of allowing unlimited BitTorrent applications, and then asking for some voluntary cooperation? Me neither. Perhaps someday, but for now providers are viewed as a profit-driven adversary by most customers.

The upside: Seems to have a warm, fuzzy, feel-good ring to it.

2.) Keep connections within the providers network.

This is the method currently practiced with help from a popular product provided by Sandvine. The basic idea is that on a large provider network there are enough BitTorrent hosts that a client need not leave the provider’s network to retrieve content.

The downside: Consumers are suspicious of providers looking at their data to make determinations on what type of traffic it is. The consumer may also not get good results if the bulk of the content were located outside their providers network; for example, if a user were to download a file that was popular in Europe, the number of servers hosting it on the Comcast network might be limited.

The upside: Consumers are still freely able to find most BitTorrent content. Providers greatly reduce connections and exchange costs with other providers.

3.) Usage based quotas.

With this method a service provider will charge much higher rates when a preset amount of data usage is exceeded over a calendar month.

The upside: This method is unobtrusive in that the provider need not look at a customer’s data, only their total usage. Experience with university residential networks has shown that once quotas are announced users voluntarily reduce their peer-to-peer or BitTorrent usage.

The downside: More complex billing detail and customer service to resolve disputes. Large providers will still compete by marketing their service as unlimited. Despite the rants about BitTorrent being a resource issue, it is still only a small percentage of total customers that use it.

4.) Limit the total connections allowed at one time per user.

The upside: It’s simple and fair to implement. Providers already set rate caps on Internet speeds, so this is just a rate cap on connections, very similar and easy to swallow for the consumer.

The downside: When users reach their allotted connection limit, all traffic on their link slows down.

5.) Build out networks to handle the increased load and pass the cost onto the consumer.

The upside: It works.

The downside: It’s most likely not economically sustainable. Without some other form of mitigation, the public’s appetite for content appears insatiable.

6.) Cancel the service of users who abuse their privileges. There have been reports of providers doing this already.

The upside: It moves an unprofitable customer off your network and onto a competitor.

The downside: Customers begin to despise you.

Here at TorrentFreak we have discussed some of these alternatives before, and in the long run there is really only one solution that is acceptable. The Internet is only a few years old, if the plan is to keep using it in the future, ISPs need to upgrade their networks. So, invest in more Internet gateway capacity, 10Gbps interconnect ports, and peering agreements. BitTorrent users are not the problem, they only signal that the ISPs need to upgrade their capacity, because customers will only get more demanding in the future. The Internet is not only about sending email, and browsing on text based websites anymore.

Art Reisman told TorrentFreak that that there are two solutions that make sense to him: “Raise rates per usage volume instead of flat rates, if it can be kept simple! Second is to limit customer connections as a resource.” Charging for bandwidth uses makes sense indeed, as long as the prices are reasonable. The second option of limiting the number of connections only looks like a temporary fix though.

What do you think?

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