3 Strikes Rule?

[Mike]

Read this snippet today in the August edition of PCUser:

Back in February Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, revealed that he was considering a three strikes rule for P2P copyright offenders, following similar proposals in the UK.

Under the UK plan, a warning would first be issued to people found illegally copying files using P2P technology. The second strike would result in the internet access being suspended, and the third strike would result in the offender being cut off from internet access.

At the time of writing, neither the UK nor the Rudd government had yet made the three strikes rule into law and may never do so. In the UK at least, the law would run up against an April European Parliament directive that states that such bans violate civil liberties and human rights.

In Australia, Conroy was widely derided for the proposal and has since said nothing further on the subject, indicating that he may well have abandoned the idea altogether.

Mmm - it would be nice if this little gem was completely forgotten about.

Mike

[GlenR]

I always had two concerns about this:

1. If I download an avi file via P2P, how would they know if it was copyrighted? It may be I was just taking a copy of your holiday video which you edited and encoded as avi.

2. (And most important.) Under the telecommunications act no-one is permitted to monitor my phone conversations unless they get a court order allowing the phone tap. Why should my electronic data communications be treated differently from my electronic voice communications? Monitoring what I send/receive via phone, fax or internet (they all use basically the same infrastructure) should all be subject to the same privacy legislation.

[DDH]

GlenR I think you've hit the practical side of this right on the head.

I downloaded via uTorrent the other day a 750Mb avi file of my UK grandmothers most recent wedding to her 18 year old sweetheart. So to tell if this was a copyrighted work someone else had to download all the pieces and put them together then determine if the work was in fact subject to copyright (which it was because grandma is a wily old lady), so I as the downloader then would have to prove that I had permission, which was gained verbally when I last spoke to her on the phone. But hang on, the monitoring authority didn't have permission, so they both broke copyright and increased granny's uploads - do they get a strike? Wow - who is doing all this work to protect granny? And does granny get damages if it was found that she was ripped off, or is this proposal just punitive for the offender?

Perhaps the politicians should leave this thought in the "too hard basket" where it belongs right next to the "can of worms".

[Redwight]

I was interested to read the other day that four peole in the UK have been sucessfully prosecuted for sharing a game using P2P. Key interest getting points are that none attended the hearing, knowing why could be interesting; the law company involved sniffed out the suspects and then approached the copyright holder - translate these guys are your typical ambulance chasers; and the game the breach involved cost less than ten pounds.
A good lawyer may have found a breach of privacy or civil rights issues that got them off the hook but the case has set a precedent now.

[vlad]

I do not download illegal content via P2P
There are other ways, pre-Internet based, to do so - if you are into it.
US law seems to view TV series legal to download after they were broadcasted on free TV.
Do they (government??) actually know what they are talking about?

[arkay]

The Government consistently run 20 years behind current technology. Good luck to them in 20 years if they want to kick me for downloading a copy of underbelly today

Seriously though it isn't that hard to incorporate 128bit encryption into a torrent client. Good luck to them trying to decrypt it while the rest of us "in the know" get new encryption keys from some random site every 28 days.

DRM for the pirates!

Cheers,

Arkay.

[vlad]

I am trying to imagine KRudd to work with µTorrent
Harder than greenhouse crap, or Japanese whalers
Real issues seems too hard.