So what are people's views on this? in light of the recent arrests of 2 people, one in teeside http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/h.../england/tees/7059623.stm and the other in Cheltenham http://blogs.guardian.co....ut_down_for_linking_.html, should people be using it?

Can PN detect legitimate traffic from sources such as game patches and Linux ISOs and block the illegal stuff? would the end of P2P mean we might get more of a steadier service? could ELLACOYA be our special friend on this?

Discuss..

We can look at traffic types, but how can we tell what is legitimate content and what is not? Ellacoya can't do that.

We can look at the signature of encrypted traffic and know it's bittorrent for example (So we can shape the traffic), but how can we be sure that there is an illegitimate transfer going on behind the encryption? There is certainly legitimate content transferred via torrents, and in my view legislation to block it entirely isn't an effective answer. I can see some broadband suppliers going down this route though and maybe even using these developments as a smokescreen for doing it. I think that's especially going to be the case for the companies who must try hard to maintain good / exclusive relations with the big content distributors, Hollywood etc.

Of course we would have to co-operate fully with any UK legislation that comes into force, but you can be sure that we will involve ourselves wherever we can in protecting our customers and our product range. As an 'proper' ISP, we certainly have no desire to be the Internet police, quite aside from the arguments about who should pay for all of the extra resource required to do that.

From a personal perspective, I believe it is perfectly easy for the copywrite owners to find ways to counter the unchecked distribution of their material. I believe they should start with fairer pricing and serious consideration of alternative revenue models. For example, with the use of subscription services that allow downloads of all the music I want for a fixed fee, or by providing me extra value that I just can't get via bittorent. Additionally, there are huge back catalogues of great music which are out of print and not available on any legitimate download sites - that is just a wasted opportunity.

What the removal of P2P and Usenet would mean for the network is certainly more bandwidth to go round for other purposes, and with that we could probably provide higher usage allowances on some of our products for the same price. Whether that inherently would make the service more stable remains to be seen though...

Ian

Thankyou for the reply Ian, personally i'm all for getting rid of P2P , i admit that usenet is useful for text groups and in particular the PlusNet Text Groups

The allowances are acceptable and show of a more realistic and sounder model than other ISP's offer.

Would there ever be such a scope for a product that would exist to cater for p2p users specifically?

Pete

Why is this topic labelled "P2P Crackdown"?

The site in question - www.tv-links.co.uk advertised itself as a site which contained links to other sites containg material of interest to their subscribers.

AFAIK www.tv-links.co.uk did not host any material themselves.
The user follows the link and enters a standard server-client session - which might result in the transfer of illegal material.

Sounds a bit like one of many search engines.

If I do a web search and they give me a link to a website containing a scrap of video, whose responsibility is it for performing a full copyright check (assuming this is either necessary or desirable)?

i was not refereing to that site axis i was simply talking about the man from newcastle who was convicted for using p2p to get games films and music

the tv links site was another incident in cheltenham.

And i agree with your post 100% james, however they do dicusss of the signatures which could ID legit applications such as the ones you mention, over torrents and things like limewire

People should be allowed to make their own choices i agree, and i hope the one of a possible prison sentence is not one any sensible person would take.

Not only that if you wrote a ground breaking program and someone put it on the net and you lost out potentially millions wouldn't you be annoyed?

I also use P2p occasionally - the occasional torrent, but this is for some of our local unsigned bands and therefore there is no copyright infringement to answer to - inface the article states p2p is suitable for this purpose.

You could argue that BBYW Pro is perfectly suitable for P2P users is they are willing to pay for what they use.

but then surely any of the products is - the difference being no rate limits on pro -

There's the TV-Links thing - which I never saw myself but has been described just as links to YouTube etc. Then there's OiNK.cd - which was a torrent tracker with 180,000 members and LOTS of music and software. And the icing on the cake is Lord Triesman with his nonsense about data banks of music and changing the law to make ISPs liable if they don't crack down on filesharers
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7059881.stm
If people want music and video then I don't see why they shouldn't pay so long as the price is right - you can't complain about a crackdown if you know you're doing something wrong and get caught.  If that got p2p users off into their own bit of the network and made everything else better for the rest of the users then so much the better. But the point's well made that p2p is popping up everywhere - I think we have to look at what people want - video, music, linux distros or whatever and make sure that they can get them at a reasonable price - rather than shoving everything into the same service and hoping the users don't get in each others way.

As James said, there are plenty of legitimate uses of P2P, including distribution of game patches as well.

I don't understand the general consensus from some people, and the media in general that P2P is the sole method of obtaining illegal material. Maybe it's the most common, but that doesn't mean it has legitimate or illegitimate uses just like practically any other protocol: FTP, HTTP and Usenet.

Even before the internet was available, we had BBS's .. again which could be used for legal or illegal uses.

Reminds me of my first year at Uni, and my house mate was dialling into them using his 14.4k modem in a Windows DOS box. Oh how I feel old

A number of P2P clients already have in place the ability to encrypt packets, making it difficult for the ISP to tell what kind of data is in the torrents.

Any digital signing could either be ripped out at source (this is often done with the region code on DVD's) or bypassed/spoofed at the destination.
Security on these products has a history of being super-weak - but strong enough to cause problems for any user who tries to play strictly according to the rules with their mp3 downloads etc.