Warner blackmails Dutch ISPs
p2pnet.net News:- During a seminar on “online piracy” in the Netherlands last week, a representative of Warner Home Entertainment made it clear that Internet Service Providers won’t get movie content licensed, unless they provide the indentifying information of their customers on demand.
In a concluding panel discussion at the seminar, a representative of one of the Dutch ISPs said they declined to hand over the IDs of its file-sharing customers to anti-piracy organisation BREIN to protect their privacy.
Warner Home Video’s Ruud Lamers responded that as long as the providers stick to this opinion they needn’y expect content from any of the major players. That is, Warner doesn’t want to be confronted with “anonymous” IP addresses in case of copyright enforcement, and puts the delivery of identifying information as a condition for licensing deals!
This threat came a week before BREIN took five ISPs to court to obtain the identities behind the IP addresses of 42 file-sharers.
The ISPs requested a procedure on the merits instead of today’s normal summary proceeding.
Whatever will be decided, the final outcome is still unclear, especially since the ISPs have counter-sued BREIN.
In the meantime apparently no movie content for them till they stop to protect their customers’ privacy.
Rik Lambers – CoCo
[Lambers is a former researcher at the Institute for Information Law, Amsterdam, who's now in transition to a new full time job in the field of IP/Internet law. He's also an associate member of the European INDICARE project, which researches consumer issues related to DRM.
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June 17th, 2005 at 3:22 pm
This is a good way to discourage legal downloading. The message these thugs are giving is, “Because your ISP is protecting your privacy, we will not allow you to download our content.” I guess that leaves the customers of privacy-protecting ISP’s one other option for obtaining content – they can get it at no cost to them via peer to peer. The cartel once again steers people to filesharing. If I were a musician or movie make, this would be the last organization I would want to belong to, one that drives away my customers!
June 17th, 2005 at 4:02 pm
rightfully so …
June 17th, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Does the media megacorps think this will stop people from watching movies? Apparently they see the idea that if they don’t supply the movies on line that it will dry up the market. Geeze.
I suspect that the megacorps are looking at the aspect of sueing for infringement as a second income. One only has to look at what the RIAA has set up to see that they expect it to be big business. The RIAA has setup a collection center. No one would do that unless they expected large volumes.
It seems to me that they are more concerned with the income being removed from the credit roles than they are in the actual protection of the product.
Hats off to a country that recognises that privacy is important and a factor in these attempts at gobbling up yet more revenue while making the average Joe the victim. Since the megacorps have no respect for privacy, none should be granted them either.
We would do well in the US to follow the lead of the Dutch. I seriously doubt that the megacorporations could actually stand to remove such a large market from their business.
June 17th, 2005 at 9:13 pm
Wait a second. So they’re worried about losing money, right? Well doesn’t this make them lose more money? In fact, wouldn’t this push even more people to P2P networks? C’mon, even my girlfriend doesn’t make such irrational decisions!