p2pnet news view P2P | Mobiles:- Bitain’s fixed-line ISPs have already told the government the Three Strikes scheme touted by Peter ‘Mandy’ Mandelson on behalf of the corporate entertainment industry isn’t going to work.

Now mobile operators have joined in.

Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, NBC Universal and Sony Pictures, have escalated their anti-consumer, anti-P2P, anti-competition sue ‘em all campaign into a worldwide project under which they’re demanding governments introduce legislation which would turn them into copyright collection agencies, funded by local taxpayers, and ISPs into enforcers, turning in their own customers.

ISPs are naturally reluctant to follow in the footsteps of Hollywood and Big Music by alienating the very people who keep them alive. Moreover, unlike compliant governments, with Britain and France to the fore, they don’t see why they should have to foot the bill.

Mobile Broadband Group chief Hamish MacLeod says although UK government plans to force ISPs to hand over customer data to rights holders and “potentially disconnect persistent infringers would apply to mobile operators,” the latter have a “problem with identification [of unlawful downloaders] to the telephone”, says ZDNet UK.

Fixed-line ISPs map one IP address to each subscriber, but “in the mobile space that IP address belongs to the mobile operator”, it has MacLeod stating, emphasising operators aren’t “allocating one IP address per customer. They can’t backtrack, as things stand, to identify the customer. They would be required to build the databases that would be able to do that mapping, and that would be very costly.”

Moreover, “mobile operators do not expect to have to hand over customer data or disconnect users at all, because not many people file-share copyrighted material over mobile broadband connections due to their relatively low speeds”, says the story.

According to the Hollywood Big 4 bill, “ISPs will only be forced to comply with the government’s copyright crackdown if a certain — as yet undefined — threshold of unlawful file-sharing is identified on their networks”, says ZDNet, continuing it’s asked all major UK operators for their reactions, but only Vodafone responded.

“If Vodafone comes into scope then anonymised customer data will have to be passed on,” said a spokesperson.

But, “The absence of an infrastructure for identifying people who unlawfully download copyrighted content over mobile networks is not the only problem facing the crackdown,”  states telecoms analyst Dean Bubley, of Disruptive Analysis, quoted by ZDNet.

“You’ve got anonymous prepay as well,” Bubley said, pointing out 3 and other operators that sell “shrinkwrapped” 3G dongles and SIM cards with data capabilities largely “serve the very people whom the government is trying to get online”.

Not only but aso, Bubley underlined issues “arising from new bandwidth-sharing smartphone applications such as JoikuBoost, which lets users combine their 3G connections — irrespective of which operators the individual users subscribe to — over Wi-Fi,” the story adds.

Stay tuned.

Follow p2pnet on Twitter.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi

isn’t going to work – More protests over UK 3 strikes plan, November 23, 2009
ZDNet UK – Mobile industry ‘cannot identify pirates’, November 24, 2009

---

Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It`s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php

---

Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for details.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 26th, 2009 at 9:21 am and is filed under Mobiles, P2P. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

HOME

Viewed 9714 times