BPI to launch UK sue ‘em all campaign
p2pnet view Music | P2P | Politics:- Britain’s Digital Economy Disconnect Act is finally on the books.
Hacks at Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music’s BPI wrote much of the text openly used by the British government, and the BPI now has an open door to revive a UK version of the failed sue ‘em all campaign originally launched by the Big 4′s RIAA in America in 2003.
BPI general factotum Geoffrey Taylor (right) revealed “exclusively” to Billboard that the BPI will “reluctantly return to suing individual file-sharers again in the period before technical measures potentially kick in around late 2011 or early 2012″.
Taylor says “potentially” because instant technical disconnect measures were abandoned by the government.
The BPI clearly believes, however, that its ongoing lobbying efforts will eventually bear fruit.
“The law was given Royal Assent on April 8, and copyright holders and Internet Service Providers will now draw up a code of practice to be overseen by telecoms regulator Ofcom”, says the story.
Taylor says the BPI feels it can now get ISPs to follow established corporate music policy of acting against customers.
“We took a very deliberate decision to move away from that [in 2006] and focus on account holder responsibility and to get ISPs to play a role because we feel that it is much better that an account holder should get information and education before there’s any possibility of legal action, and one of the merits of this bill is that it enables that”, he obfuscates, going on, “We would actually much prefer that the problem is tackled through technical measures than through litigation.
“Government disagreed with us, regrettably, and decided not to bring the technical measures into effect immediately and has said to us that it expects us to bring legal cases and that it will take that into account when it looks at whether or not to introduce technical measures.”
But it’s not the BPI’s fault, Taylor tells Billboard.
It “may well have to bring lawsuits at some level”, a move “apparently expected of us by government”.
He goes on >>>
I think the government believes that we ought to enforce our own rights. As I’ve said, we believe it would be better that there be letters followed by technical measures, and litigation only really reserved for people who have continued despite technical measures. And we weren’t able to persuade government that that was what should be done, so we are left with letters as the first response, the possibility of litigation accompanying them, but then the intro of technical measures if that first stage doesn’t result in a 70% reduction [in levels of file-sharing].
As I say this is not our favored approach, however government is saying to us that it does expect us to enforce our rights to some degree. I think government has accepted that litigation is not something that is scaleable or can be done on a massive scale. Our focus is very much on the education side of this and trying to steer people towards legal services.
“Were these previous actions by BPI quite rare?” – asks Billboard with a straight face. “We did it back in 2004, we didn’t bring a very large number of cases” says Taylor, adding:
“What that did do at the time was establish very clearly that file-sharing music without permission is illegal. That was an important marker to put down at that time and we believe it did have some effect on containing the growth of illegal file-sharing. But we quickly learned I think that it is not something that you can deploy on a scale that’s necessary to deter large numbers of people. We didn’t like the fact that we weren’t technically able to pick out repeat offenders, it was just not something we were able to see, and what this [Act] allows us to do at least is to target any litigation we might bring on people who have had multiple opportunities to avoid it.
“We just believe that education followed by technical measures is a better approach and that solving this at the level of the ISP’s account and the ISP’s relationship with the customer is a more proportionate and possibly more effective way of dealing with it.”
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
..… and identi.ca
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
wrote much of the text – Intriguing new BPI Three Strikes leak, March 13, 2010
Billboard – Digital Economy Act Q&A: BPI’s Geoff Taylor, April 16, 2010
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April 17th, 2010 at 1:54 pm
A couple of typos in the pic Jon.
April 17th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
So it’s one of two things (or both)
A) Because German digiproject is moving into the UK and teamed up with ACS:Law to sue people, they figure they may as well also since those two clowns will make a buck at extortion while BPI won’t. BPI plainly wants a piece of the extortion money.
B) They will hire digiproject and ACS:Law in order to get the extortion money directly while sharing X-amount to the two clowns who intimidate people and extort the money.
C) All of the above.
They just did an about-face to what they stated to the media here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8619407.stm
(Jon covered this in a recent story as well)
In it they state:
“The BPI, which represents the British music industry and lobbied hard to push the bill through parliament, has been keen to distance itself from the methods used by DigiProtect and ACS: Law.
It told the BBC that legal action should be reserved for the worst offenders rather than “widely used as a first response”.”
File sharing IS NOT counterfeiting and selling on street corners. These would be the worst offenders. However they turn around in the face of extortion competition and want a piece of the extortion pie and extortion money.
THIS is what it amounts to.
April 17th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
@ “A couple of typos … ”
Oh rilly?
Cheers!
April 17th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
You spelled organization as *organisation*.
This insanity has to stop.
April 17th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
“IT’S NOT OUR FAULT” says the BPI, well whose fault is it, you bunch of uneducated, unsophisticated, unrepentant, uncouth, bunch of liars. File sharing is NOT illegal tho you dip sticks wish it were. I’m waiting for this bunch of moronic, self-important, prigs to sue the wrong person or persons in England and wind up having their asses handed to them in court. Digi-Protect, like Media Sentry uses made up stats and information to justify their extortion letters. Well, let’s see how that fairs when someone takes them to court for falsely accusing them of file sharing. What should be and has to be done is for the countries that are being screwed over with ACTA and this other horse shit that these crooks are ramming down the throats of governments everywhere on the globe, is to have them, the people, take this bunch to court in the Hague and have it decided there if it is OK for the Kartels and their bum boys and girls to attempt to influence and interfere in the internal politics of sovereign nations and if not and it is found to be illegal for them to do so, then the Kartels should be forced to stop their attempts to make the world march to their outdated drum. Their business models don’t work in today’s market place so instead of trying to fix that by coming up with ones that do work they are whining and crying and making up figures to justify their so called last ditch attempt to stop the demise of their industry which, according to them has cost over 1,000,000 jobs and over 3 Billion €, which is a load of horse shit and they know it.
April 17th, 2010 at 4:24 pm
“…according to them has cost over 1,000,000 jobs and over 3 Billion €, which is a load of horse shit and they know it.”
Hey! At least horseshit contains some useful substance!
April 17th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
I’ll just point out that more than half of the UK’s ISPs are utterly opposed to this bill. The DEP is law….but now the ‘technical measures’ have to be found and they presently don’t exist to do what the copyright holders are looking for in a scaleable, managed, or effective manner. Maybe there will be some kind of a massive technical revolution by content detection innovators, but Internet speeds are rising faster than computational power is increasing – you just can’t do inline analysis of data content in a rapid enough fashion to ‘catch’ infringing transfers of data. Offline inspection is possible, but that requires temporarily storing data content for analysis, and that has to be illegal under UK law.
We’re ‘fortunate’ in that quantum computing is a long, long way off so the likelihood of rapidly breaking the present PKI, when it’s properly implemented, isn’t all that high. This means that unless ISPs are put in a position that they are required to perform man-in-the-middle attacks against users exchanging encryption keys (and, thus, put themselves in a situation to inspect the encrypted data transfers going across their network for copyright purposes) encrypted and proxied approaches to exchanging data will both become more prominent and baked into data exchange software.
April 17th, 2010 at 7:22 pm
These fools are just motivating P2P innovators to further pursue fully anonymous and encrypted file sharing systems. Then who are they going to sue? How will they stop anyone? They will never win, and are just wasting time and money.
April 18th, 2010 at 9:53 am
“I think the government believes that we ought to enforce our own rights”
Really? What a concept! The gov actually wants you to waste your own money, defending your own “rights”?
Thats shocking! Now get a fucking clue and do just that you bunch of assclown bastards! And take the RIASS with you on that trip! While your getting that clue, go after the COUNTERFITERS that are SELLING your shit, they are actual criminals, not us fileshares.
April 18th, 2010 at 2:34 pm
I would like the BPI, RIAA, and MPAA to meet my pirate sword.
April 18th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
The entertainment industry is at war with it’s customers.
it is well known that the best defense is offense. In this regards I just want to remember the BPI and their vivendic masters that at the end of world war II they were not a wall taller than a human in the German capital.
Germany recovered. They will not.