Illegal downloading what happens if youre caught independent

From this we can deduce that, even though Star Trek was the most downloaded film, it had very little effect on the box office. Totally agree with no 5, The music industry has fleeced the music buying public for decades, in my view they have the same ethics as Bankers and MPs. Off course the BT boss dosn't want people banned from the internet, if there banned they no longer pay for the service and so BT dont make as much money.

There are many holes in what they propose to do, but what bugs me the most about this often re-hashed threat is the fact that they should not be able to tell what an individual is downloading. Both of these scenarios are morally wrong. Would it be acceptable for the authorities to monitor the phone conversations of a citizen without a warrant? Is internet communication any different? Are they allowed to intercept and read my email without a warrant? Surely they can't acquire warrants for the millions of households in the UK.

Another fundamental flaw is accuracy. A friend of mine received a letter from his ISP accusing him of downloading the latest album from a boy band.

He was at work at the time of the alleged offence, no one was home. I know his internet connection is secure against your average user because I set it up myself. How could such allegations get to court? Why are no lawyers in this fine land questioning these things on a national level? Come on budding lawyers, make a name for yourself with a test case. The authorities should target the uploaders, but this seems to be too much trouble for them, so they target the little man.

They don't arrest people who buy drugs, they arrest the dealers. Strange times we live in. The authorities seem to be more concerned with the internet activities of file sharers than some of the more dubious online content.

That's because they're losing money from it, but it's finally come around that they're getting ripped off, instead of the music buying public who were getting ripped off for years before file sharing began. I remember Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits highlighting the rip-off price of CD's in the 80's compared to the price of vinyl and cassettes. What goes round Since it's not possible to reliably identify a person using a particular IP address in spite of what some lawyers would have us believe this is a bill which is going to see lots of completely innocent people having problems.

It wasn't so long ago that one of these companies sent a letter to a printer demanding it stop downloading There's not a scrap of evidence suggesting the the people who download something would have otherwise bought it anyway.

This is nothing more than media companies panicking for the wrong reason If they produced what people wanted to buy, maybe they wouldn't be in this mess now. We've looked into the technology claimed to detect illegal sharing of copyright content for our own use, the problem is it's flawed. The different technical bits do work, but there is no way to tell for sure if a video or music is being illegaly or legitimately transfered, this is the big flaw. Cutting off or fines would be on a false basis because there would be no firm evidence that it was illegal, just suspicion that it could be, you can't cut off or fine people on that basis.

Owners are entitled to sell and thus transfer their copy of media or duplicate material that is free to copy that may contain some copyright material under licence. The Music part will show up as copyright material being transfered despite a licence existing.

This is just going to make money for the solicitors and the sellers of the technology and trouble for innocent users. Number 32, I was just about to post a similar point. It is funny how the movie and music industry are all crying poverty over illegal downloading yet they still release a huge amount of content. Films are receiving bigger and bigger budgets.

A recent release, Avatar, is the highest grossing film of all time by quite a long way. So basically, these industries are not adversely affected at all, they just want more. It is time they moved with the times and offered free content themselves with advertising attached. They would make a fortune. Who would download illegally when they could get the content from the source?

Before you condemn illegal file sharing remember the term is very broad, have you ever lent a CD to a friend? That's illegal. Have you ever recorded soemthing off the TV and kept it for more than a month? Have you ever sold an old video or DVD? This bill isn't just about shutting down the huge file sharing sites or those who download ten films a week it's also going to come down a teenager sending his mate a single song over MSN.

Governments would love to keep people off the net it's just another way to control us. The difference is that the record store has already paid for the CD's and they have to pay staff to serve you. Downloading means the track or cd has already been paid for probably and is being shared by the uploader. No staff are harmed in this transaction. Just make sure that if your IP is taking part in any scheme to report file sharers, that you switch providers tout suit.

You wouldn't buy a shirt without looking at it first and maybe trying it on or a car without taking if for a test drive, so the same can go for music. The only content I download is totally legal, be it Open Source, made available by the copyright owner or paid for. Because for me bandwidth is expensive i. I use a mobile connection I'm pretty selective about what I download, especially if it's large. The problem I have with the disconnection policy is that proof is on the owner of the connection.

It's far too easy for someone to use either someone else's connection from a badly configured wifi router that those who are blamed for illegal file sharing to be totally innocent this has happened. This effectively means that it becomes a case of Guilty until proven Innocent rather than the reverse. Who gave BT the right to regulate what you do on the internet?

How will they gather evidence? Will they bother? Or is this just about decreasing the amount of traffic on BT's internet service? It seems to me its about getting rid of those who use their service most and increasing profits by keeping those who least use the service they provide. I notice those most likely to be banned are the ones most likely to complain about the lack of "up to 8MB" speed broadband. Illegal file sharing has been around since recording tape hit the domestic market about 65 years ago.

It's also illegal to record television and radio broadcast but that didn't stop the video-recorder salesmen. Make your mind up. There is fault on both sides. You didn't even have to pay Radiohead in Autumn and In Rainbows was still put on filesharing sites.

However the legal responses so far have been a sledgehammer to crack a nut. I also agree that if the law says you can't copy what you already own, well sorry but if I have paid for the films Heat and The Terminator on VHS and then they are shown on the BBC and I am legally forced to pay a licence fee to watch them again, I will record a modern copy from the TV showing and will not buy it again on DVD or Blu-Ray.

So there needs to be legal clarity when it looks a lot like one UK law is in conflict with another. With digital copy you're not "permanently depriving the owner or the person with rightful possession of that property or its use", so it's not theft. It's still a crime, but do you really feel it should be treated as severely?

If I take a high quality photo of a painting in a gallery to make my own print, should I be treated as though I'd stolen the original painting? Since file sharing is a right, albeit one being violated by governments at the behest of their corporate masters, they should be neither fined nor banned.

Piracy will never ever be stopped. Ubisoft had some draconian method for one of their games where your saves were on the internet and not on your HDD.

Ubisoft said it would stop piracy dead in it's tracks and no one would be able to play it illegaly The internet is one of the last bastions of free speech and governments are simply far too late in trying to intervene in something they do not understand. Too bad Mr. Mandelson looks like your gonna fail ha! And to be honest they only care once it hurts their wallets considerably, they argue that every song downloaded is a lost sale which is incorrect.

Do they really think people would otherwise buy songs? There is something deeper to this, I don't think this has too much to do with films and music. I think it is more about the first tiny steps to control the internet and its usage.

Draconian laws do not come in a great big lump, but in a drip-drip-drip. This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Something that has not happened since the days of tapes - To legally download a movie to own, costs the same as the DVD - The DVD's with "electronic copies" on them are of very poor quality.

There is so much wrong with their business models that to be honest I have little sympathy for the execs - I do have sympathy with the artists whose films and music are being pirated because of these stupid execs who think "don't upset my apple cart" - Fools. NethLyn wrote: There is fault on both sides. What you are saying is complete rubbish! At pm on 10 Mar , mike wrote: The only people with a problem is the people who are still downloading films, tv and video games.

Turn off the internet feature throttle it via the ISP so no-one can use it. How about fining ISPs for price-fixing and advertising connectivity rates they can never achieve? If I want to listen to almost any track I can find it on YouTube. With blatant examples like this being classed as "legal" it is extremely dificult to criticise a culture of illegal downloading. There is now a whole generation that has become used to copying and sharing files over the internet, on USB sticks, recordable CD's and so on and an industry that is getting used to being paid for just a small portion of the copies of their product that is in circulation.

In light of all of this BT's posturing seems rather feeble and naive. However I do symapthise with BT as they should not be liable for the illegal activities customers that are determined to break the law no matter what. As a professional musician and songwriter I'm appalled by the rationalizations being used to justify theft of intellectual property. The primary victims in illegal downloading are the writers and performers of the music.

The main result is a continuing downward spiral of quality. Due to the ignorance and delusion of "file sharers" a nice way of saying thieves the incentive and means to dedicate oneself to a life as a professional artist are greatly diminished.

I doubt most of those who support the theft of digital media have any real idea of it's true cost in terms of personal time and financial expenses incurred by the artists they enjoy. Don't understand how people can get banned from using the net. Surely they just get a different identity etc.

This government really, really is very, very ignorant. If I want to download tunes illegally, I can use my mobile phone, and latch onto an open wireless network. I have software on my phone to download torrent files, and also to access the Gnutella network. Also, what happens if as reported recently internet access becomes a human right? That will mean that this law currently being propsed will be yet another waste of time and money. Stupid people!

In order to know what a file is you need to open it and check its contents. In the age of Computers, if one action is taken to stop a piracy either by imposing a fine or doing of a disconnection to give some justice to the producer of the Product, an alternate action shall instantly be found in flick of an eye to get the same illegally.

This action cannot produce a result within a particular boundary but must be imposed that religiously everywhere all across the Globe. But for many countries it is a good source of income and hence impossible to impose such a ban so tightly. Therefore instead of imposing such strictures, if we allow the Music Lovers to access these Sites with a very minimal charge imposed, we can possibly make more collection of fund to convert the said desire into reality or else we shall see drainage of fund from within the Country to elsewhere.

I think ISP's should offer a downloader's sort of account, where you get more bandwidth and you are allowed to download anything you want, but a percentage of the price you pay goes to the music, movie and software companies. If a proper website with good speeds was made, everyone would download from this site, and the files with the most downloads would recieve the biggest percentage of the money you paid. I seriously think this is the best way forward.

If you don't download a lot, then you wouldn't need the high bandwidth and you would only have to pay for the cheaper accounts. Lots of people seem to be saying that it's ok as they can just "latch onto an open wireless network". Part of this Bill makes it practically impossible to run an open wifi network in the UK. The wifi owner is the one liable for any crimes, so all those public wifi spots will dry up. This country will drop back 5 years in terms of internet provision overnight.

This Bill is horrible and ill-conceived. Downloading a copy is just that, a copy. The original owner is unaffected you have not stolen anything from them. The main issue here though is that video games, music and video make money grossly out of proportion to the value to humanity they provide. And no mattet how much they whine they make lots and lots of money. So personally i couldn't care less. Also for people such as myself such legislation is irrelevant. I get evrything i want for free off the net and have never used a peer to peer network ie: torrents in my life.

Suppose I want to watch or listen to something that is not available commercially, but is available as an unauthorised download, what should the law say about that? I might be interested in something that nobody currently publishes. Am I defrauding anyone if I download it or copy it from elsewhere?

Any serious downloader already encrypts their traffic so anything that is sniffed at packet level by the ISP must firstly be de-crypted, an almost impossible task considering how much traffic must pass through their networks and, I am sure this would break several privacy laws in many countries in the process too.

Once they have broken the encryption and determined that what is being downloaded is an MP3 file, who's to say that "music. They'd have to compare the actual audio to a "master" list of legal or illegal to download, what's to say that the source isn't legit?

How do they know it's not a recording of their child's first words or a song they wrote etc themselves and therefore free from copyright? While I am posting here, I'd also like to "recommend" comment number " At pm on 10 Mar , DisgustedOfMitcham2 wrote: So, the boss of BT, who make squillions from charging people for internet access, doesn't want people to be denied internet access.

Likewise, who exactly do you propose is fined in this case? What have I done? I'm not happy with file sharers being banned from the internet or fined, unless the movie companies want to pay Mr Berners-Lee a cut, seeing as he's the one who made downloading possible. The internet is clearly going to be the basis of how we get our entertainment in the future. Far better that the entertainment companies liaise with the internet providers and come up with a better system. It's important that these firms don't rile the consumer unnecessarily.

I'd be happy if there was a two-tier system of internet access: you pay a certain amount if you want limited access to simply look up things on a selection of search engines and sites, you pay a greater subscription if you wish to have download facilities but then you're free to watch what you like. The number of download hits on any site would be paid for by the internet provider. Site founder Kim Dotcom faces criminal copyright charges related to the site and is currently in New Zealand, awaiting an extradition hearing.

One of the other individuals to be prosecuted is Joel Tenenbaum, who was left with a huge damages 30 songs he downloaded illegally after his appeal was denied in August. Recording Industry Association of America has largely adjusted its anti-piracy strategy to stop suing individual downloaders. Eventually, the internet service providers could cut people from internet access who did not stop downloading "I think that strategy is also fraught with peril," said Sprigman, explaining that it would likely irritate customers who felt like they were being spied on by their cable providers.

Reuse this content. Now when you download a show or music file, it's actually been assembled from many smaller pieces distributed across a network of thousands of users across the globe. Technology news site TorrentFreak says BitTorrent has become "a mainstream file-sharing mechanism which is fast, efficient and difficult to stop. The underlying technology makes it easy, from an operational standpoint, to create mirror sites if the main site is shut down, which has happened repeatedly with Pirate Bay, including this week.

Pirate Bay bills itself as "the galaxy's most resilient BitTorrent site. These significant challenges have not deterred the entertainment industry from trying to recoup lost revenues. But de Beer says copyright holders have largely pulled back from prosecuting individual downloaders, a tactic that has given the film and music industries a reputation as bullies.

In the long run, "trying to portray the huge numbers of people who use these websites as criminals, and to morally shame them into complying with copyright laws is unlikely to succeed," says de Beer. Ariel Katz, a law professor and Innovation Chair of Electronic Commerce at the University of Toronto, believes that humans will always engage in "illicit activity.

He says that one possible way to curb illegal downloading is to reframe the conversation around it. Rather than seeing illegal downloading as the problem, maybe it's a "symptom" of a larger problem, which could be that entertainment producers are charging too much for their content, he says. One way to solve that is for entertainment companies to make their content available cheaply and legally, which is the case with burgeoning streaming services such as Netflix and Shomi.

In , Netflix surpassed BitTorrent in terms of bandwidth use, prompting Wired magazine to write that "for perhaps the first time in the internet's history, the largest percentage of the net's traffic is content that is paid for.

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