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purplecthulhu at 03:00pm on 24/07/2008
purplecthulhu at 03:00pm on 24/07/2008he news today is full of the 'deal' between the UK music industry and the largest 6 ISPs to try to reduce the amount of copyright infringing filesharing going on. Pangloss has interesting coverage of some of the legal aspects behind this - well worth reading.
However, all the legalese assumes that ISPs et al. can identify what is a copyright file and can identify who is downloading it. I'm not convinced that this will remain the case, and I'm not even convinced that it is the case at the moment. Encrypted P2P is coming, or might already be here, so nobody will be able to tell what you're downloading, and TOR has been around for a while so nobody will actually be able to tell who's downloading what.
Can the ISPs and BPAA keep up with this? And what about the government when they see all these technological scofflaws making enforcement impossible?
Rules and regulations are fine, but if they're rendered technologically impossible to enforce, what happens? Will whole technologies, such as encryption, be rendered illegal? As Pangloss says, we're into sledgehammer and nut territory here and i see no evidence that those posing the new regulations understand that there'll be a technological response to the new agreement.
However, all the legalese assumes that ISPs et al. can identify what is a copyright file and can identify who is downloading it. I'm not convinced that this will remain the case, and I'm not even convinced that it is the case at the moment. Encrypted P2P is coming, or might already be here, so nobody will be able to tell what you're downloading, and TOR has been around for a while so nobody will actually be able to tell who's downloading what.
Can the ISPs and BPAA keep up with this? And what about the government when they see all these technological scofflaws making enforcement impossible?
Rules and regulations are fine, but if they're rendered technologically impossible to enforce, what happens? Will whole technologies, such as encryption, be rendered illegal? As Pangloss says, we're into sledgehammer and nut territory here and i see no evidence that those posing the new regulations understand that there'll be a technological response to the new agreement.
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