Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Thursday 25 October 2007, 2:30 PM
Filesharing - your questions for FAST please!
Further to our story about Lord Triesman and his threat of legislation against ISPs if they don't crack down on filesharing of copyrighted material, we've been contacted by the Federation Against Software Theft (FAST).
FAST are offering a chat with their director general, John Lovelock, about Triesman's comments - perhaps unsurprisingly, he's a fan ("one giant step in the right direction..."). Anyway, we thought we'd throw this one over to you good folks.
Go on, what would you like to ask FAST? Any views to share on the concept of ISPs monitoring all their traffic to see if dodgy MP3s and programs are being disseminated? Anything else, while we're at it?
Questions below please, and we shall endeavour to put them to Mr Lovelock ASAP!
PreviousComments on this post
I have 2, it's too late in the afternoon for me, so feel free to re-word them :)
Some online games such as World of Warcraft, use P2P/torrent systems to update client machines with the most recent version of the game. With over 8 million players world wide downloading the latest patch from each other, this action could from an ISP perspective, be considered filesharing.
What steps are going to be put in place to ensure that users with valid uses for P2P aren't going to face legal action?
With current broadband speeds being impacted by ISP overcrowding and new bandwidth heavy online content. If additional checks are to be made by the ISP on content being transferred isn't the potential to inflict addition latency onto subscribers ADSL connections increased?
Don't you agree that this is technically impractical with most filesharing programs fragmenting downloads from different sources and the volumes of data are potentially huge.
There is also the problem of circumvention from Rot13, to transcoding to to full encryption of the transfers.
Isn't this a huge invasion of civil liberties, You should not have the right to engage in packet inspection which is potentially open to no end of abuse and expensive.
Why should we incur costs to protect an industry which has expanded and abused its privileges from payola to price fixing. Should we not tax the industry income for the costs it imposes on the public via ISP's the courts and via denied access to public goods. Copyright infringement is a civil offence (You should fund it).
Could you success in influencing Government produce a backlash that reminds that it is supposed to serve the public not private special pleading, leading to backlash.
In the event of people less well disposed to the industry gaining power could they not uses the excesses of the industry, to justify sweeping reforms of the enforcement of copyright.
Be careful what you wish for, as I for one will not be distressed at the passing of the copyright industry.
I shall be contacting my MP and expressing my dismay at the Governments current attitude and will refer them to Thomas Babington Macaulay on copyright.
I'd like to ask FAST to go away and do something worthwhile.
Many thanks to you keen questioners. If you haven't already seen it, the interview can be read here.
