The Podium
Blog posts tagged with 'Piracy'
Tuesday, November 03
By Bruce
Part of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s net neutrality proposal is the flexibility for Internet Service Providers to use “reasonable network management.” Just what counts as reasonable has yet to be decided, but the Motion Picture Association of America — which has long complained about the pirating of content over the Internet—believes policing for copyright infringement should absolutely fall under the definition. From PC Mag:
[F]reedom of flexibility, two MPAA executives wrote on Friday, should be interpreted to allow U.S. ISPs to take measures to prevent copyrighted data from being pirated and sent around the Internet. The letter was co-authored by Michael O’Leary, the MPAA’s executive vice president of government relations and chief counsel, and Frank Cavaliere, vice president and senior counsel for government relations and policy for the MPAA.
Not only would the anti-piracy measures help promote the U.S. film economy, the two wrote, but eliminating the spread of copyrighted video files would also reduce the amount of traffic being passed over the nation’s networks, reducing the overall load. Both O’Leary and Cavaliere also tried to make clear that they were not pushing for specific solutions, but the latitude to allow the industry to develop and deploy its own measures.
Tuesday, May 12
By Brad
After trying, and failing, to pass the so-called “Three Strikes Law”—which would cut the Internet connection of online pirates and copyright infringers—the French National Assembly has passed the controversial act. Disconnections are expected to start happening sometime in 2010.
Expect other countries to be following the law closely.
Thursday, April 16
By Brad
With European Internet providers embroiled in controversy over EU’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive—which allows courts to force ISPs to turn over user data in order to cut down on piracy, among other things—one Swedish ISP is taking a stand. As Ars Technica reports:
Jon Karlung, the head of ISP Bahnhof, says that his company won’t turn over any user data to authorities because it refuses to keep any log files. That decision is legal—for now.
Recently, Sweden’s Internet traffic dropped by an alarming 50% in a single day when the new piracy rules were applied.
Wednesday, April 15
By Brad
Recently, a French law that would sever the Internet connection of online pirates went down in defeat. Now, Ars Technica reports, South Korea has picked up the idea:
South Korea is crazy for baseball—it’s national team made it to recent finals of the World Baseball Classic, only to lose to Japan—so it seems especially appropriate that the country would be one of the first in the world to adopt an official “three strikes” policy toward copyright infringement on the Internet. While the government can order the disconnection of individual users, a key emphasis here appears to be on websites. Host some infringing content, and the government can shut you down at its discretion.
There’s a problem with focusing on individual websites, however:
An anonymous source summed up the problem for the paper: “It is virtually impossible for Web portals to totally filter illegal content when there are millions of postings coming up everyday. And I am talking about companies that spend massive amounts of money to monitor copyright violations and hire hundreds of monitoring personnel. I mean, how much does the government expect us to spend in developing and operating a simple Web service? No matter how hard we try, the culture minister will easily find his three strikes and could order us to shutdown a site at anytime, regardless of whether the copyright holder has a problem with us or not.”
It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
Thursday, April 09
By Brad
In an effort to curb piracy, the French Parliament passed a new law last week that required Internet service providers to yank the Internet access of copyright offenders. According to polls, the majority of the French public didn’t like the law, but it was nonetheless expected to sail through the Senate and National Assembly. Then, as TorrentFreak reports, the unexpected happened:
As expected the law was indeed ratified by the senate this morning, but to everyone’s surprise it didn’t make it through the National Assembly.
After a two hour discussion, the law was rejected by the National Assembly with 21 votes against and 15 votes in favor. According to early reports, the Socialist party changed their initial position and decided to vote against the law after witnessing the mass opposition from the French public.
Looks like it’s back to le drawing board.
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