UK file-sharers to be “cut-off” — Proof
As I recounted in the last post, conclusively detecting illicit file-sharing is actually quite tricky. If you don’t need accuracy, and are just concerned with “network management”, you can—for the moment—get away with treating anything which looks like file-sharing as though it is (and in this context, you don’t need to distinguish between legal and illegal use). Perhaps rightly, even this has been coming under fire for being a bad way to solve the problem of bandwidth management when capacity has been oversold.
When you’re talking about accusations of law-breaking and associated sanctions, then you can’t be so indiscriminate: if speed cameras resulted in tickets being sent to a significant proportion of people who not only weren’t speeding, but weren’t even driving at the time, there’d be uproar (this happens, from time to time, but is comparatively rare and easily-contested).
Assuming you can with any degree of certainty detect illicit peer-to-peer traffic, you subsequently need to establish proof. Just as speed cameras take photographs which can be used in court as evidence, proof of illicit file-sharing also needs evidence. Unfortunately—on a number of levels—this is even harder to come by than being certain of guilt in the first place. This is unfortunate for rights-holders, and it’s unfortunate for everybody else.
Why unfortunate? Well, because rights-holder lobby groups have put pressure on the Government to abandon normal legal processes where illicit file-sharing is concerned. Rather than saying “well, it’s unfortunate, but there’s nothing we can do without putting aside the basic principles of our legal system”, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills is instead saying “well, it’s unfortunate, so we’ll put aside the basic principles of our legal system”.
An article on the IT news site The Register included the following choice quote from UK Music:
UK Music, which represents British labels, publishers and managers welcomed the news. “Throughout this debate, UK Music has voiced concerns that the original time frame of proposed legislation, and particularly the trigger mechanisms that would grant Ofcom reserve powers to implement technical measures, would have failed to meet these ambitions,” it said.
“More than that, these trigger mechanisms would have required our members to take legal action against individuals - a move the UK music industry has consistently resisted.”
In other words, “we’re not prepared to go to the trouble of establishing in court that people are guilty.”.
While it would be easy to write all of this off as something which only affects the guilty (a parallel to the “you’ve got nothing to hide” mentality), it’s a bigger issue than that. Peter Mandelson, writing in The Times stated:
The process is driven by rights holders reporting activity on public file-sharing websites rather than service providers monitoring individuals’ internet traffic.
There are two things you need to know about this:
- He’s correct about the process. It doesn’t really get any more complex than that without resorting to spyware.
- It’s horrendously easy to spoof (again, see the previous article).
What does this mean to Joe Public? Two things:
- Lots of people will be accused who haven’t done anything wrong
- Lots of people who are sharing infringing content won’t hear a peep
Essentially, nobody will be any better off. In contrast, lots of people—notably, the general public who will eventually shoulder the costs of implementing the system (initially dealt with by some split between the ISPs and the rights-holder groups).
I have it, off the record, but on excellent authority, that ISPs already treat the notification letters sent to them by rights-holder groups with a fair degree of derision. Not specifically because they believe all of their customers are angels, or because they desperately don’t wish to lose them, but because they’re aware of the technical problems in reliably detecting illicit file-sharing and simply can’t trust the accuracy of the information. That’s an issue which exists already.
