Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Angry
The new CO proposals make no reference to judicial involvement prior to disconnection. If these were not drastic measures then TalkTalk would not be getting into such a twist over the possibility of them having to hand over user data and disconnect account holders without a court order. |
Talk talk are more interested in the cost of implementation rather than making any moral stand, their actions are purely from a business point of view and are two fold, one: by not having to disconnect those filesharing they don't incur added cost (which Mandelson wants split between the ISP and rights holder) and two: by making this stand they are getting a ton of free publicity.
They will not have to hand over user data, they will simply be told which customers are infringing (by the rights holders collecting IP addresses), and have to follow a set procedure, that being a series of warnings, then maybe eventual disconnection.
The proposal is that ISPs and rights holders work together to identify users that are downloading illegally, that can be done two ways, by the rights holders actively monitoring download sites and harvesting the IPs of those downloading their content, or by the ISPs monitoring traffic to detect downloads. Only the first one of those is actually being suggested, but both of these are not an issue if you're using SSL and a direct download. There is nothing in the proposals that will enable anyone to go to 3rd parties and request information on what people are downloading, the rights holders have to be able to identify exactly what you're downloading before they can start giving out warnings, your ISP will not act without being told that you're infringing, and even if they were actively monitoring their network just seeing that you're downloading a high volume of traffic over SSL from a newsgroup provider for instance would not be enough.
There's a huge amount of scare mongering going on about it, and there's no doubt that the proposals are bad news for p2p, but they really aren't for anything else. It'll stop a huge amount of casual infringement, but it's no silver bullet that's going to magically stop all file sharing, and they never will. But getting rid of the highly public mass of p2p sites will be more than enough for the rights holders.