UK ISP Boss: 'The Pirates Will Always Win'

from the so-now-what? dept

Last year, when the recording industry in the UK was pushing for ISPs to act as copyright cops, Charles Dunstone, the head of Carphone Warehouse and its TalkTalk ISP, stood up and bashed the recording industry for even daring to suggest that the ISP should be responsible for the recording industry's own inability to adapt. As he said at the time of the recording industry:

"They're not just shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted -- the horse has left town, got married, and started a family."

As numerous people are submitting, Dunstone is back at it, stating the obvious to a recording industry that needs to hear it. He's trying to explain to them that, no matter how hard it tries, it can't stop unauthorized file sharing, noting that "the pirates will always win" and any attempt to stop them is simply "naive":

If you try speed humps or disconnections for peer-to-peer, people will simply either disguise their traffic or share the content another way. It is a game of Tom and Jerry and you will never catch the mouse. The mouse always wins in this battle and we need to be careful that politicians do not get talked into putting legislation in place that, in the end, ends up looking stupid....

If people want to share content they will find another way to do it.... It is more about education and allowing people to get content easily and cheaply that will make a difference. This idea that it is all peer to peer and somehow the ISPs can just stop it is very naive.

Of course, this is what plenty of people have been saying for years. There have been plenty of opportunities for the recording industry to embrace opportunities, and they've failed almost every single time. Instead, as always, they want to complain about the "pirates" and the "thieves" while other companies build the new music industry around them.

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UK ISPs Move Down The Slippery Slope Of Becoming Copyright Cops

from the slippery-slopes dept

Some UK politicians have been pushing to get ISPs to play the role of copyright cops for an unclear reason. It appears they've bought into the misleading and incorrect claim by the music industry that somehow ISPs are responsible for the record labels own failure to adapt its business model. So despite claims from some ISPs that wouldn't sign up for such a plan, and wouldn't kick users off the internet, a bunch of those UK ISPs are now promising to play the role of copyright cops anyway -- and this even includes the ISPs who insisted they wouldn't go down this road.

It's unclear why exactly they are agreeing to voluntarily waste their time acting on behalf of an obsolete industry's business model, but the misguided threats from UK politicians probably helped move things along. Either way, this starts things down the incredibly slippery slope of making ISPs responsible for policing the actions of users. For years, most governments have realized what a bad idea this is, but suddenly in many countries that concept is falling away, and the end results will not be positive for the internet -- as plenty of perfectly legitimate activities are about to get blocked in an overzealous effort to prop up a few obsolete business models.

Already there are rumors spreading that there is behind-the-scenes maneuvering for the next big step to occur: making all internet users pay an annual "music tax" fee. The original article on this agreement has someone from BPI denying that such a tax is under discussion, but some UK politicians seem ready to introduce it anyway -- and folks like Billy Bragg's manager, Peter Jenner, are claiming victory. And even a music person industry admits that this is a slippery slope (though, he thinks it's in the right direction), saying that this is: "a first step, and a very big step, in what we all acknowledge is going to be quite a long process."

The BPI representative backs this up by noting that his goal isn't to take steps towards ending file sharing, but to end it altogether: "There is not an acceptable level of file-sharing. Musicians need to be paid like everyone else." As for the artists who benefit from unauthorized file sharing? That doesn't seem to occur to the BPI. And, if musicians really need to "be paid like everyone else," how come the rest of us don't get paid for the work we did 50 years ago? How come if everyone else picks a business model that the market rejects, we don't get all the other companies in the value chain and the government to artificially prop up that business model for us? You know, we work pretty hard here at Techdirt to make a living, but apparently "everyone else" just complains that their business model isn't working and has ISPs take care of it for them. Can we now get UK ISPs to send "warning" letters to everyone who reads Techdirt to start telling them they should send us money? That would be a much easier business model.

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UK ISPs To Start Tracking Your Surfing To Serve You Ads

from the pirvacy-please dept

For years now, ISPs have been searching for alternative revenue streams to avoid just being "dumb pipes." A few years ago, they picked up on the fact that they have a tremendous amount of data about what you (yes, you!) do online. A bunch of ISPs then started selling your clickstream data to companies that could do something useful with it (though, those ISPs probably neglected to tell you they were doing this). Late last year, we heard about a company that was trying to work with ISPs to make use of that data themselves to insert their own ads based on your surfing history -- and now we've got the first report of some big ISPs moving into this realm. Over in the UK three big ISPs, BT, Carphone Warehouse and Virgin Media have announced plans to use your clickstream data to insert relevant ads as you surf through a new startup called Phorm.

While Phorm claims that it keeps your data private "by tracking individual users with an assigned number only," that's hardly assuring. After all, remember that both AOL and Netflix have released similar anonymized data where identifying info was replaced with an assigned number... and it didn't take long for both sets of data to be de-anonymized. While it's no surprise that ISPs would want to get into the advertising business, and to think that they could better target ads thanks to their knowledge of your entire surfing history, it's going to freak some people out (and potentially cause some serious privacy problems). All the more reason to figure out how encrypt your traffic and hide your activities from your ISP.

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