EU Approves Illegal File Sharing Policy Amendments

Well im not too sure what to make of this but i feel the internet is turning more into a dictatorship day by day. I saw it coming though to be honest.

"Lilian Edwards, a University of Southampton law professor, has confirmed that yesterdays vote on several controversial amendments to the EU's 'Telecoms Package', which could see illegal file-sharers (P2P) being disconnected from the Internet, has gone through. However, the package of changes will not be formally voted on until early September 2008, leaving time for further adjustments"

Original announcement here

We'll see the postie sat at the end of the street rifling through our mail before too long

John

That may well come to pass...

From what I've read about this they'll probably be hitting all the big enablers as soon as it becomes law because of changes in that area too. With no Pirates Bay and all the other torrent sites closed, Rapidshare, Megashare, and the other hosters offline, eDonkey servers shut down, and binary newsgroups a thing of the past about the only way to share stuff will be by posting DVDs. At least nobody need worry about being cut off from the internet because they simply won't be able to share stuff illegally online apart from by email.

And nobody will need to pay �20pm to an Entanet reseller . Nobody will need more than 15GB. Plusnet traffic shaping will not happen either.

15GB would cover a year of just reading email and surfing

the future painted out to us on that youtube clip posted on the entanet forum suddenly doesnt seem far fetched. The easiest way for isps to comply to this type of regulation is to only allow certian content rather then try blocking specific content. The internet I expect upset alot of people in the elite as it gave the population a lot more freedom then they had before. It would not surprise me at all that in future there is some kind of scanning mechanism to look for pirated media in the post. Ebay are also in trouble they recently got sued over allowing counterfeit goods to be sold on their website even tho they are effectively only carrying the ads not selling the goods themselves, google just lost a court ruling for youtube and were told to hand over all the details for every single registered user on the site millions of users.

Thats a major operation to terminate all those networks, but yes i can imagine that being done in the future. The internet as we currently know it will just be totally different, but i think if it comes to anything more serious in the future i hope there will be a revolt of protests against it. I understand why there doing it like, its just weird knowing sharing a peice of digital information made up of binary code can get you into so much bother

It's just a typical EU over-reaction to something that's gone on since the first ever song was committed to vinyl or the BBC first broadcast the top 20.

John.

you mean we're going to get 2003 style speeds and non-congestion ? Bring it on

The EU does not have that power.

Most of the major usenet providers are run by Giganews. Yes they have a server in Europe however I believe that is in Switzerland hence not "ruled" by the EU. Their other servers are in the US or other territories. ISPs cannot block access to them as they run on multiple ports and there is no point firewalling IPs as they can easily be changed.

Similarly other services either don't run in the EU or don't need to - the Internet is global after all.

This is going to prove to be totally unenforceable. Perhaps we need a campaign to make this abundantly clear though so I propose we all start seeding torrents containing lawful materials (either completely random output or copies of works in the public domain or otherwise lawfully distributable works) under names that automated systems will confuse with major media interests such as music, film, software, etc. So long as you are not claiming that the material is being offered by way of trade such that it would cause a trademark problem (and remember that trademark is limited to specific domain) there is nothing illegal about this as names cannot be protected by copyright.

Do this enough and let those who will have to vote on the EU proposals know about it.