One of the more ridiculous claims, made by the music industry lately, is this idea that ISPs are somehow unfairly "profiting" from file sharing, and that's the reason why they should be forced to act as the entertainment industry's police. The argument makes no sense, but has become quite popular in certain circles. It was one of the many fallacious arguments made recently by U2's manager Paul McGuinness in his quite silly screed blaming everyone but the recording industry for the industry's problems. Thankfully, though, some people are speaking up. Both ZeroPaid and TorrentFreak point us to a blog post from ISP Entanet's head of marketing, pointing out that this claim is not at all accurate:

Considering Mr. McGuinness proudly informs us he has been debating on this issue for two years, he seems to totally misunderstand the reasons behind broadband customers' demand for better broadband speeds and equally doesn't understand the current facilities available on the Internet. He asks "Do people want more bandwidth to speed up their e-mails or to download music and films as rapidly as possible?" Well, if he took the time to make an informed comment through proper research he'd see that, in reality, most broadband customers want to be better able to take advantage of 'legal' technologies such as online gaming, YouTube, iPlayer, iTunes, VoIP and a vast array of business oriented services that are currently available. It is simply naive to suggest that customers' desire for faster broadband and more bandwidth is driven solely by a desire to cheat music rights holders out of their royalties through illegal file sharing. Furthermore, without legal services such as iTunes music sales would undeniably decrease. Does Mr. McGuinness want to close down this a distribution model that has proven to contribute positively to music sales? Talk about cutting your nose off to spite your face!

It's great to see people who actually understand this stuff debunking McGuinness' argument, though somehow I don't see McGuinness ever responding reasonably to this point.

Realistically speaking, this is yet another example of the industry's proclivity to overvalue the content and assume that any of the services or tools around the content are valueless. Similarly, it shows a very broadcast top-down view, assuming that the only reason people are using the internet is to download their content, rather than to communicate with one another. The internet is a communication platform much more than a broadcast medium, and the music industry still doesn't seem to grasp that simple fact.

This should hardly come as a surprise, but as the French "three strikes" agency Hadopi tries to push forward, it's facing some serious resistance from French ISPs, who might out-and-out ignore the law's requirements in a boycott against the plan. The main issue, of course, is that they feel that the law puts too big an expense on them, without adequate compensation for the work. Basically, the government is asking them to be under-paid police for the entertainment industry. The ISPs are asking for greater compensation to play that role, and if they don't get it, are apparently willing to fight the overall law in court. It seems that, after years of fighting to get the law passed, the French government still might not be over the final hurdle to kicking people off the internet for file sharing.

With US Copyright Group filing tens of thousands of lawsuits against people accused of sharing movies like Hurt Locker online, we've been disappointed that many ISPs don't seem willing to stand up for their subscribers' rights, and are willing to hand over names without a thought. Time Warner Cable fought the subpoenas, but its main concern was the volume, not the concept. However, a small ISP in South Dakota, Midcontinent Communications is also asking for the subpoenas to be quashed, noting that its privacy policies say that it cannot hand out customer information to third parties without a court order. It also questions how it can be covered by the jurisdiction of a Washington DC court.

Bravo to Midcontinent Communications for actually standing up for its users. But, the real story here is why other ISPs are not doing this? This should be how pretty much any ISP responds to questionable subpoenas of this nature.

So this is just bizarre. I saw a Wired report about a talk by a guy named Chet Uber, who claimed he helped connect Adrian Lamo to the feds in order to turn in Bradley Manning (the Army intelligence analyst accused of leaking content to Wikileaks), but Uber's little talk raised a number of other issues unrelated to Manning/Lamo. Specifically, towards the end of this Forbes piece about Uber and his organization, Project Vigilant comes a little shocker about how the firm spies on internet traffic for the US government:

According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant's manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users' Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can "develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address."

"We don't do anything illegal," says Uber. "If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don't, we can't."

And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just how it defines that information isn't clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for sensitive details.

Uh... what? Given the uproar and then Congressional smackdown to ISPs that tried to monitor such information for advertising purposes, that doesn't seem right at all. Sneaking a clause into an EULA saying that it's handing all your info over to a private party who will monitor it for the feds (maybe) and whoever else they want doesn't really seem aboveboard or legal despite the claims. It's also highly unlikely that it "never looks at personally identifying information." Nearly everyone who's ever claimed that has been proven wrong later.

The whole thing seems really sketchy, and as Glenn Greenwald notes, it appears to be an attempt to skirt the law:

There are serious obstacles that impede the Government's ability to create these electronic dossiers themselves. It requires both huge resources and expertise. Various statutes enacted in the mid-1970s -- such as the Privacy Act of 1974 -- impose transparency requirements and other forms of accountability on programs whereby the Government collects data on citizens. And the fact that much of the data about you ends up in the hands of private corporations can create further obstacles, because the tools which the Government has to compel private companies to turn over this information is limited (the fact that the FBI is sometimes unable to obtain your "transactional" Internet data without a court order -- i.e., whom you email, who emails you, what Google searches you enter, and what websites you visit --is what has caused the Obama administration to demand that Congress amend the Patriot Act to vest them with the power to obtain all of that with no judicial supervision).

But the emergence of a private market that sells this data to the Government (or, in the case of Project Vigilance, is funded in order to hand it over voluntarily) has eliminated those obstacles. As a result, the Government is able to circumvent the legal and logistical restrictions on maintaining vast dossiers on citizens, and is doing exactly that. While advertisers really only care about your online profile (IP address) in order to assess what you do and who you are, the Government wants your online activities linked to your actual name and other identifying information.

So, since Uber and Project Vigilant won't say who these 12 ISPs are, can anyone help us out? What are the 12 ISPs out there who, via sneaky language in their EULAs are simply handing over your private data to some company to sell to the US government?

As you may recall, a bunch of movie studios sued popular ISP iiNet for failing to somehow wave a magic wand and stop file sharing. Thankfully, the Australian court quickly realized this was ridiculous and issued a thorough and convincing ruling that it made no sense to consider iiNet liable for copyright infringement done by its users. The judge pointed out that there's no evidence that iiNet "approved infringement." The judge also made it clear why it's nonsensical to think that ISPs should serve as copyright cops, since a determination on whether or not something is infringing takes place in a court, not by random ISP employees.

Not surprisingly, the movie studios and AFACT (the "anti-piracy" organization representing them) appealed the ruling, claiming that somehow the lack of stopping copyright infringement was effectively "authorizing" copyright infringement. That seems like a huge stretch, but the appeal has begun and AFACT is now trying to make the case that not blocking users or kicking them off is the equivalent of authorization. Hopefully the appeals court recognizes the wisdom of the lower court ruling.

As the Australian government pushes forward with plans to have ISPs spy on users as part of its effort to control and censor the internet, some have made a freedom of information request to see the details of the plan... and the government provided the documents with 90% of the content blacked out. Yes, the government is censoring its plans about censorship. Even better is the "reasoning" for this. Government officials defended the move by saying it:

"may lead to premature unnecessary debate and could potentially prejudice and impede government decision making".

Yes, how dare the people make their views known in a way that lets the government know they don't approve. That would be a representative government, and apparently Australia doesn't believe in such things.

As a bunch of you have been submitting, The Pirate Party, who recently took on hosting The Pirate Bay, has now announced plans to offer a "Pirate ISP" service in Sweden, with the idea being to offer ISP service that maximizes privacy rights. The whole thing is a bit of a publicity stunt, of course, but it does seem to highlight the key point: which is that consumers do value these kinds of things, and for every attempt of certain industries to force ISPs to reveal info, there will always be incentives for others to set up ways for more privacy. I tend to cringe at the whole "pirate ISP" name, because it will almost certainly be misunderstood and demonized, but The Pirate Party long ago decided to embrace that name, so I guess it's no surprise.

A year after an initial ruling saying that all Dutch users must be blocked from reaching The Pirate Bay, another court has upheld the ruling, saying not only that The Pirate Bay must block Dutch users from accessing the site, but that three of the site's founders have to pay 50,000 euros per day if they fail to do so. Given how those three have responded to previous rulings, I imagine they won't pay much attention to this ruling either.

Of course, the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has been fighting this campaign on both fronts. Not only was it trying to force The Pirate Bay to block access to Dutch surfers, but it was also trying to force ISPs to block access back to The Pirate Bay as well. The good news is that the courts have actually rejected that attempt, saying that "there is no evidence that the majority of the customers are using The Pirate Bay to infringe copyright" and that if BREIN wants to target users, it should target them individually.

Up in Canada, it seems that there's a constant push to expand copyright levies (the "you must be a criminal tax") to nearly everything from iPods to ISPs, despite the fact that many people recognize what a joke the levies have become. After failing to get it expanded to cover iPods, supporters of the levy pushed for ISPs to have to pay the levy, because people using their internet connection might possibly access content. Thankfully, a Canadian appeals court pointed out that access to broadcasts of content is not the same thing as broadcasting it and rejected adding the "you must be a criminal" tax to internet access.

Of course, there is one rather interesting part of the ruling, which is that the court notes that one of the reasons for this ruling is that ISPs are effectively "content neutral." If they were to stop that (i.e., and break net neutrality concepts), they could open themselves up to having this tax come back:

In providing access to "broadcasting", ISPs do not transmit programs. As such, they are not "broadcasting" and therefore they do not come within the definition of "broadcasting undertaking". In so holding, I wish to reiterate as was done in CAIP that this conclusion is based on the content-neutral role of ISPs and would have to be reassessed if this role should change

This is notable because, as in the US, there has been talk among ISPs of breaking basic net neutrality concepts. Perhaps this ruling will get them to think twice.

BT and TalkTalk, two UK ISPs who had been critics of the Digital Economy Act all along, are now going to court to find out if it's legal, before they go through the hassle of implementing any of the provisions. They're apparently claiming that the law was passed with "insufficient scrutiny," and that the implementation rules coming out of Ofcom put them at a disadvantage competitively. While both of those things are true, it's not clear that this makes the law invalid. It would certainly be nice if the courts ruled it invalid, but it also seems like a long shot.