Song, by Toad

The thought of the floodgates that they may have opened today are truly terrifying.

“No, the bit that really, really worries me is what amounts to the outsourcing of law enforcement to unaccountable bodies. ”

Likewise.

Just one more point. If you happen to be with one of the broadband suppliers who has signed up to this piece of nonsense, why not rip up your contract at the earliest opportunity and move elsewhere??

It’s inevitable that when you make the first step to do so that you’ll get a call asking you why and also all sorts of incentives and offers to stay…. the companies will soon take notice of consumer power….

(Oh and Matthew – sorry I haven’t been around visiting for a while – just too much to keep on top of over at TVV and a few other things on the go. I promise that I’ll sort out a purchase of your lovely product sometime over the weekend…..)

What lovely product?

the companies will soon take notice of consumer power

I have my doubts about this. On which side is their bread buttered, and where have they the most to lose? Do they lose more by a few angry consumers buggering off, or do they stand to lose far more by defying the government, and potentially the media lobby, on this one?

I honestly doubt they will budge in the slightest unless someone successfully tackles the whole snooping and due process question in court, and that would be a brave person. Mind you, Virgin Media are fucking useless anyway, so a move is already on the cards.

Hmm, now that is interesting. I’m not sure how things work in the UK, but in the States if the ISPs were to interfere with any “legitimate” sharing whatsoever there would immediately be ten-thousand lawsuits challenging such action as an infringement on the First Amendment, which generally requires such measures to be narrowly tailored so as to avoid chilling lawful communication. Then there will be the inevitable lawsuits seeking monetary damages against the ISPs for the economic harm caused to your hypothetical DIY filmmaker. Even if such lawsuits were to lack merit as a legal matter, moreover, the ISPs would bear their own legal expenses, meaning that they would often choose to settle out of court rather than seek to uphold restrictions that give them nothing but misery as a matter of PR and that prove less than cost-effective once legal fees are factored into the equation.

Well I am envisaging more of a vague approach being used. They are more likely to issue a couple of threats to anyone sharing a lot of stuff, without specifying what exact files are the problem, and that person – not the original film-maker or musician or whoever – is very likely to just pack in with the filesharing, rather than get picky about what is and isn’t legal and what is in the grey area (which is a lot these days), and in so doing risk being cut off altogether and probably blacklisted as well. This will dramatically reduce the number of seeds for legitimate stuff as well, which in general devalues the whole network.

I know these vague threats are not necessarily all that legally valid, but my guess will be that the vast majority of people will choose simply not to fight them. And with the big 5 ISPs sewn up, there aren’t a lot of alternatives available.

That’s precisely the issue.

There’s no fundamental human right to broadband access. The ISPs are basically providing a luxury.

The article refers to punishing ISPs who allow illegal file sharing to occur on their networks, so they’re unlikely to bother examining each individual instance of file sharing to determine its legal status. They’ll simply put automated systems in place where sharing a file in the first instance generates the standard warning letter and inserts a tag into your account profile, sharing a file when that tag exists on your account shuts down your service.

It will all be automated.

But in the EU are there any barriers to people in the UK just switching to ISPs from outside Britain? Perhaps when everyone in the UK starts using ISPs from abroad the ISPs in the UK will find it more costly to cooperate with this sort of thing.

Outsourcing = “by the people, TO the people”.

Remember the old Stanford prison experiment ?

I wouldn’t worry too much mate. The rules of the game change but the story is always the same. Determined people will continue to find a way to resist the shitness of humankind. Yourself included. It is art’s function in any society.

C&B, as Broadband can increasingly be provided via satellite that might be an option, but I would have no idea if we can use a non-UK ISP, although I could be wrong. Anyone providing a service in this country would presumably be obliged to abide by the laws of the land, I would assume.

The internet is like water, it will find a way around these fuckers sure as eggs is eggs.

For a start, technology is already undermining the existing ISPs which are nearly all “bundled” firms. Things like this http://www.compareandsave.com/news/dundee-to-get-super-fast-sewer-broadband/ have them shitting themselves.

There is one, count em, one cable company that can give you a landline in the UK and one credible (actually shite, BT are shite – don’t get me started) telephone company that controls the access to your landline. The other ISPs are just resellers operating on these networks using alleged “spare” capacity (which is just jam now versus jam later for the network controllers). So for 5 big ISPS, read two, satellite broadband through Sky being pish.

Once mobile broadband/WiFI Max/alternative fibre networks ruin the party, in theory the fastest, cheapest ISP wins (or the most popular, ie the one thats less of an asshole). As these get cheaper and more viable, who the fuck needs VM or BT? BT also try to reseall TV service now.

UNLESS, as they seem to believe, they manage to suck off enough antsy content providers to make sure that, by playing nicely and being nasty to subscribers, they get preferential deals from them for their shitty TV and “online offering” as they desperately try to pretend that they have a compeitive advantage or even a product.

Well a Pig in a dress is still a Pig. No-one wants your shitty cable anymore wrapped up with your fucking ISP service Virgin Media. Give me a fast connection from anyone whoevers offering over whatever medium and I’ll buy all the shit movies I want to watch on itunes or stream programs from BBC and Channel 4, if I want porn, the world is my oyster and if I want music, I will get it anywhere I wish.

Fuck you, you no-mark wholesaleing non fucking entity. You mean no more and add no more to anyone than a fucking pipe or a piece of wire bringing electricity or water into the house. My water company doesn’t tell me what the fuck to do and neither does the bastard offshoot product of some Beardie cocksucker who last had a good business idea in 1975 and has been humping the corporate whore ever since.

Wait until HBO realises it can make more money selling Entourage online than it can by negotiating with VM. wait till the music companies finally sort out their business models and can be profitable online.

There’s a reason it takes a long time to download shit on these piss poor networks and that they don’t want you to be able to circumvent their other businesses, why sign your own death warrant?

Outsourcing justice = “by the people, TO the people” , I meant to say.

That’s what I get for trying to be clever.

But, but, but…

You’re still paying someone for the luxury of pumping the data into your home, regardless whether it comes down BT’s shonky old phone lines or fibre optic cables or Star Trek communicators..

If your supplier get the faintest whiff of legal bother off you they’ll just cut you off.

Then you apply to an alternative provider and their first queston is “Why are you leaving your current provider?”

Think banks, again. May I use the word cartel without sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist?

because my current provider is a goat fisting bastard?

Yes, but if you’ve had a couple of warnings from your previous provider I can well imagine those black marks following you about, a bit like a dodgy credit history.

Exactly.

Are we expecting them not to create and share a register of these scallywags and miscreants?

When Max Mosley can get £60k for having his privacy infringed whilst engaging in legal and consensual activity, albeit dressing up as a prison guard of allegedly non specific nationality and being thrashed within an inch of his life by 5 hoors, you can’t tell me that someone wrongly defamed as an illegal file sharer and repeatedly denied access to the telecommunications network whilst engaged in legitimate practices couldn’t take their asses all the way to court and come out holding sweeties.

Besides, if they pass around that sort of info, its a breach of the data protection act. Though they could all take a train to Bognor Regis and leave laptops full of data on it I suppose.

“How did the plaintiff come to have this data in their possession?”
“We, er, found it on the tube in a plastic bag, with a slightly sticky copy of Nuts and a half empty bottle of lucozade, M’lud.”
“Ah yes, that sounds entirely feasible.”

(For the non-Scots, she hasn’t misspelled ‘whores’, it’s the Scottish pronunciation ‘hoo-ers’. She’s awfully coarse, my young lady – it saddens me a little actually.)

How is a credit record not a breach of data protection then? Presumably because the banks have the clout to gain an exemption, in their interests. Are the media companies not powerful enough? Is Murdoch incapable of having a loophole purposely inserted in order to benefit himself?

And this is assuming that people will bother to sue, instead of simply staying well away from all data transfers that do not come direct from the online retail portal of Sony BMG or Warner Brothers or Amazon or someone like that. And that is precisely what this sort of legislation is intended to achieve:
“Oh shit, our slice of the pie is starting to look increasingly anaemic, what shall we do, Smithers?”
“Well sir, we could always station menacing groups of thugs with big sticks outside every other establishment in town, as encouragement to partake of our own most excellent and thug-free services.”

The thugs don’t really have to do very much, apart from administer the odd high-profile beating to someone with just enough of a foot in the grey area as to be slightly ambiguous.

Carrier pigeons with USB sticks now!

Carrier pigeons? That sounds like Virgin fucking Media again.

Toad, I know you’re going to disagree with the following, but I am going to say it anyway. I have a little experience of one of the areas you take a pop at above & so would like to lend some weight to an opposite point of view to the one you deliver.

I have to take exception to your interweb media-driven gnashing at Blackwater & their like. Blackwater have some 10,000+ people on the ground in Iraq (BW liaise with the DoD on a frequent basis & is itself based in North Carolina, just below Virginia – home of the National Intelligence & defence network), & there have only ever been a handful of unfortunate incidents where some of their earlier employees (for that is what they are, ultimately, employees, not soldiers, or mercs) thought they were in a fucking Rambo movie & went all hoo-hah! on the natives’ ass. This was a result of poor vetting of an unrelated group of knucklecunts living out some fantasy wank off at the fatal expense of people who be wearin’ a turban, yee-haw.

The incidents described in the links provided were actually all dealt with in the full face of the US judicial system, far from not being subject to their Homeland’s laws (it’s hardly surprising most of the outcomes were never fully or accurately reported). & they weren’t only just ‘dealt’ with, they were delat with very harshly indeed. As a result Blackwater have seriously cleaned up their act from the slightly agog ineptness of the early Keystone Thugs days & have since done a lot to rescue their public image, so it’s rare to find such incidents reported anywhere but on their own website these days.

They’re not mercs, they’re private hire security. Now, as a Brit, you might (let’s be honest, will) balk at the idea that these guys wandering around armed to the teeth, at the behest of USA or UK or non-indigenous etc business interests, are ‘merely’ hired security. But you are applying your logical thought process to a situation you are viewing out of context. It’s entirely in context that security personnel (private or State-sponsored) carry weapons in America. They are entirely , legally entitled to. Whether this is right or wrong isn’t our argument until we become a citizen & can challenge the constitution. These security ops are perfectly legal in the US &, according to geography restrictions & job requirement, will tool up accordingly. Transfer this to a war zone, where weapon ownership restrictions are somewhat relaxed, where the personnel are being paid by a private concern to act as security detail to their personnel or heavy equipment or whatever, & it is entirely understandable (given the climate).

It’s not a justification for the lapse in clarity a small handful of these guys have experienced (ending in deaths, injuries, murder, etc.), but at the same time it isn’t fair to paint everyone under the company logo with the same shade. All the soldiers in Iraq aren’t all out photographing Iraqi’s with broom handles rammed up their arseholes, or in Jesus Christ poses, so it would be unfair to tar them all with the ridiculous doings of 15 dipshits.

Finally, & I know you’ll be ready to pounce with a ‘but why are they there in the first place, rather than get a proper job guarding a night club or a dock side lock up, the money-greedy child killers!?’, the reasons for them being there is opportunist. It’s greed. It’s purely financial. The risks are phenomenal, but the money makes it worth it. That, however, doesn’t make them mercenaries.

I know a lot of British ex-soldiers, spat out by the British military system, short-changed on their payments/pensions, who jump at the chance to make themselves semi-permanently financially secure with ‘one more tour’. So they sign up, swap camo for logo, & dodge IEDs & bullets for 6-12 months, depending on their nerve & the aim of the insurgents.

Most of them just a want a quiet, comfortable life & so, conversely, risk everything to attain it. Some risk & lose far more by acting out deranged little boyhood erection scenarios & squeeze off a few shots at the locals to remind them the difference between doung a deer & doing a man. Happily, these fuckwits are dealt with, through the proper procedures, with the full brunt of the law. They are the exception to a normally very strictly maintained rule.

Fuck Blackwater. DC, the Blackwater “employees” who have engaged in combat in Iraq are mercenary soldiers, plain and simple. This privatization of warmaking is really alarming to me, because it allows the Defense Department to place forces on foreign territory, acting in the name of the US, who are not constrained by the military chain of command or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Typically, a democratic republic that wants to fight a war overseas needs to rely on its volunteer forces, and if those forces are insufficient to complete the job the natural next step is conscription, the unpopularity of which is a very helpful contraint on the irresponsible exercise of executive power. Indeed, opposition to conscription among the general public in the US was instrumental in getting us out of Vietnam. Yet if the Prez can simply use taxpayer dollars to hire mercenaries to perform tasks that would otherwise have been performed by conscripts, this constraint on executive power vanishes.

That whole argument is basically just a re-hash of the “yes, but most soldiers aren’t thugs, they are genuine blokes who really do want to help and every once in a while go astray” position. Which I tend to agree with, actually. But that, as you say, doesn’t particularly excuse the aberrations, although looking at the actual statistical frequency of them might temper our views slightly.

What bothers me most about Blackwater is not just the lack of legal accountability, although this suggests that is in the process of being fixed, which is a good thing.

There is also a massive issue of political and financial slipperiness that this inevitably entails. The abuse of private contractors has been one of the most luctrative opportunities for government officials and their cronies to fill their pockets, either through blatantly non-competitive bidding situations, or through a combination of spurious contracts and very slack auditing. Basically this amounts to no more than flagrant corruption on a massive scale, in much the same way that the energy companies and the like of Halliburton have been manoevered into a position to stuff sacks of gold into the coffers of the chiefs and their cronies by following the slash & burn of Western diplomacy into ruined countries and basically buying them up lock, stock and barrel. This applies to the IMF’s ruinous “liberalisation and reform” policies as much as it does to invasion in the guise of liberation.

It is also basically robbing the state of the countries that sponsor it, in much the same way that the Russians did when they broke up the Soviet Union, albeit with less arrogant contempt. But only just.

It also allows for a near-total lack of political accountability. A politician can say that ‘We are bringing our boys home’ and in a literal sense be speaking the truth, but actually it could be a complete lie. ‘Oh we only have X number of troops over there’ or ‘No we are not engaged in military activities in that nation’ or ‘Our troops are only engaged in peace-keeping roles’ are all statements that can now be superficially true and yet at the same time grossly dishonest.

Given Clinton’s dodging around what the term ’sexual relations’ was supposed to mean, I think we should be concerned. Ultimately it puts another layer, maybe even several, of obfuscation inbetween the people carrying out contentious actions and the people to whom they should be accountable. This is basically a government role, and should be carried out by the government so that we have at least a superficial hope of being able to make our voices heard on the matter. Adding a private company not only introduces several new strata of management to be richly compensated, it puts another half dozen mattresses in between our sound sleep and the pea that might, and fucking well should, disturb it.

The ‘it’s just a few bad eggs’ arguments is a bit hard to swallow when the bad egg is running the company, like yon Tim Spicer.

(In what was nearly a worrying coincidence I just read that Spicer had also set up an anti-piracy consultancy, but then realised it meant real, high seas type piracy, arrrr, not file sharing)

Back to the original point, it sounds to me like a fishing expedition. Send out enough letters and you will scare enough people into not downloading. But little chance of anyone actually being prosecuted. I think the TV Licensing folks do the same thing, and it really annoys me.

By the way, is that Calexico or The Arcade Fire? You’ve confused me.

Erm, Calexico. I was being an idiot.

I agree about the fishing entirely. But I also agree that it could easily become sinister, depending on the behaviour of the larger media companies. If they get really vindictive, as the RIAA proves they might, then I can’t see the ISPs doing anything but caving. I just depends, I guess, on the presence of viable alternatives.

One viable alternative that I’ve heard of here in the states is tiered billing for isp services. If you are a “heavy user” of internet services (you download loads of stuff, legal or illegal) you will soon, they say, pay premium usage fees on the grounds that what is offered now is unfair to the most common, casual user who doesn’t download much at all. It’s just another way of turning consumers against one another, of dividing and conquering us so that we fail to form alliances against the power elites and defend our rights to obtain services collectively and protect ourselves from corporate power.

As for the Blackwater argument, I can only echo what was said above by Matthew and C&B, private, for-profit forces have no role in an occupation, surely history has taught us that lesson, folks. Simply stating that the “market forces” have made it necessary for private industry to infiltrate our military efforts does not excuse the immorality of that situation. Let’s fix it the fucker instead of making excuses for it.

Basically, the big labels are trying to increase their sales by making file sharing an unfeasible alternative, right? So why not meet them halfway and stop sharing their music. But don’t spend money on it either. Just ignore them, as you would a drunken uncle or ex-girlfriend. Just buy music from your local small labels, and at gigs and such.

If a big-label band comes out with a new album, send them a nice email something along the lines of “Dear zoophiliac coprophages, I would have bought[album Y], but because of your intense fuckwittery, I’ve decided to spend the money on something local instead. [Local label X] appreciates your trade.” And if there is anything you really can’t do without, shoplifting is always an option. The record execs could lose even more hair as their sales figures keep plummeting through the floor, local music scenes would flourish, global warming would reverse itself, war would cease, the hungry would be fed, and there’d be rainbows and unicorns everyday.

This entire “war” has been fought for commercial profit, are we expecting a market of trade not to be present in the arena of battle?

Well this really is the point, isn’t it. They are bleating about being ignored and no-one buying their product, so they are doing their damnedest to stamp on the avenues by which people find the alternatives. This is, basically, anti-capitalism. Or the antithesis of the free market economy, whichever you prefer (I always thought the two were the same).