PARIS (Reuters) - Internet users in
The three-way pact between Internet service providers, the government and owners of film and music rights is a boon to the music industry, which has been calling for such measures to stop illicit downloads eating into its sales.
Under the agreement -- drawn up by a commission headed by the chief executive of FNAC, one of
If users ignore those messages, their accounts could be suspended or closed altogether.
Full story: http://uk.reuters.com/article/internetNews/idUKL2346825720071123
I can't see how this can possibly be workable: how are they going to distinguish between an encrypted torrent of free or legal software and an encrypted torrent of copyright content.
What are they gonna do, ban encrypted traffic?
...as a commenter on theregister.com points out;
"Hello encryption!
Even if they try to get a bit dodgy and scan encrypted traffic to TRY and work out its payload then it's a simple as setting up a VPN to a 3rd party. (Swedish ones are excellent!!)" *1
What are the French thinking of using anyway? deep packet inspection (DPI)?
“The "deep" in deep packet inspection refers to the fact that these boxes don't simply look at the header information as packets pass through them. Rather, they move beyond the IP and TCP header information to look at the payload of the packet. The goal is to identify the applications being used on the network, but some of these devices can go much further; those from a company like Narus, for instance, can look inside all traffic from a specific IP address, pick out the HTTP traffic, then drill even further down to capture only traffic headed to and from Gmail, and can even reassemble e-mails as they are typed out by the user.” *2
But many file sharers are already using encryption.
“While DPI is able to identify and manage encrypted file-sharing packets, it is unable to look inside those packets for copyright infringement.” *3
The BBC ran a similar, somewhat confused, story last month. *4
I especially like the picture byline …
“The government cannot tolerate stealing, said Lord Triesman”
In fact his comments, and the news story itself seem rather confused; on one hand the Beeb reported;
“While he said that the government had no interest in "hounding 14-year-olds who shared music", it was intent on tracking down those who made multiple copies for profit.“
but then the next few sentences seem to contradict this;
"Where people have registered music as an intellectual property I believe we will be able to match data banks of that music to music going out and being exchanged on the net," he said.
"We have some simple choices to make. If creative artists can't earn a living as a result of the work they produce, then we will kill off creative artists and that would be a tragedy."
Later in the story the BBC have a more accurate description of copyright infringement;
”Some people are using peer-to-peer applications to copy or distribute files including copyrighted material such as music, films and software without paying royalties.
People who do this may be infringing the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.”
Also I wondered about the ISPA spokesman’s statement in that story;
"ISPA does not support abuses of copyright and intellectual property theft," said an ISPA spokesman.
He said: "However, ISPs cannot monitor or record the type of information passed over their network. ISPs are no more able to inspect and filter every single packet passing across their network than the Post Office is able to open every envelope."
"ISPs deal with many more packets of data each day than postal services and data protection legislation actually prevents ISPs from looking at the content of the packets sent," he added."
Isn’t deep packet inspection “looking at the contents of the packets sent“?
Don’t (at least some) UK ISPs do this already?
Confusion…
The Reg managed to get a slightly more comprehensible quote;
“Neil Armstrong, products director at BT-owned ISP PlusNet, said: "It isn't possible for us to tell if a customer is downloading a copyright file or not unless we specifically 'snoop' every packet on the customer's line.
"We would obviously only do this where we have a proper request from the relevant legal authority to do so, and even then it is unlikely we would be able to see inside encrypted payloads." 3* again
The same news the Beeb covered was also covered at the time
(with a little more intelligence IMO) on the Reg *5
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/23/france_isps_record/comments/
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/Deep-packet-inspection-meets-net-neutrality.ars
3.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/08/bittorrent_encryption_explosion/
4.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7059881.stm
5.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/10/25/triesman_isps_music/
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