"When is ‘disconnection’ not disconnection? When it is ‘account suspension’, of course."

A day or two ago, the news that campaigners against the Digital Economy Bill (or at the very least, Clause 17) wanted to hear was announced. Or so it would seem. The Guardian technology pages led with somewhat optimistic headline: "Plans to cut off internet connections of illegal filesharers dumped"

Background

First, a little context may be useful. This is drawn on what has commonly been referred to as the "3 strikes" rule, whereby people accused of copyright infringement via the internet will be given three warnings before disconnection (like the unpopular HADOPI law in France, which seems like the inspiration for Clause 17 of the Digital Economy Bill). The role of peer-to-peer technology is central to this argument.

The Guardian story came off the back of a relatively small petition on the Number 1 website which highlighted the problems of the phrasing in the Bill, a point that will be picked up on again later in this post. The petition states:

The use of P2P is neither illegal nor exclusive to copyright theft. Many free software providers use this form of distribution, as does the BBC’s iPlayer. If citizens are innocent until proven guilty, ISP’s would be forced to monitor internet usage to ensure that no copyrighted material is being transferred. This flagrant disregard for privacy is comparable to forcing the Post Office to search through parcels for photocopied documents or mixtape cassettes. Such requirements would place enormous strain on ISP’s whilst failing to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material through hidden IP’s, http or ftp.”

Previous concerns have stated that the Internet is increasingly central to everyday life and that the act of identifying who was actually guilty of using peer-to-peer software to infringe copyright was difficult and ill-conceived, especially in shared households or on public 'cloud' based services. This is a point that is also addressed later in the same petition.

All of this is with the aim of cutting illegal peer-to-peer filesharing by 70% - something the Government, led by Lord Mandleson, is determined to do in order to appease the copyright industries. The Digital Economy Bill proposed a series of 'technical measures' including traffic shaping and disconnection for those the offending IP addresses the copyright industry identifies as being guilty of a crime. The major concern here is, of course, the lack of judicial process or the ability for the accused to defend themselves. The onus will be on the accused to prove they are innocent - people who may not have the technical knowledge or skills required to sift through router logs to be able to prove they were not responsible for the 'crime' they may be accused of.

What's changed (if anything)?

With the context established, let's consider the Number 10 response to the petition which got The Guardian and critics of the Bill excited (if somewhat momentarily):

[T]he Bill provides a reserve power obliging an ISP to apply ‘technical measures’ to a customer’s internet account to restrict or prevent illegal sharing. Technical measures might be a band width restriction, a daily downloading limit or, as a last resort, temporary account suspension. A proper independent appeal would be available against application of technical measures.

The key phrase here is 'temporary account suspension' as opposed to disconnection. It sounds much less punitive and more temporary than permanent. Jim Killock, the Executive Director of non-profit human rights group ORG, was quick to point out to several people via Twitter (myself included) that the phrasing was misleading 'government-speak'. To the Guardian's credit, they updated their news story with reference to Killock and the ORG's blog.

It's worth citing some of the blog post at length:

When is ‘disconnection’ not disconnection? When it is ‘account suspension’, of course.

The government therefore felt justified in a response to a petition on Friday in claiming that they were not intending to ‘disconnect’ families from the net after accusations of copyright infringement. If you think they mean that their internet cabling will still be plugged in at the wall, then that’s true.

If you think they mean that these families will be able to connect to the internet, well, no they won’t. Their connection will be switched off.

Please do not be confused by the government’s semantics. BIS and DCMS decided in the summer that they would not refer to ‘disconnecting’ users, because that sounds harsh and over the top. ‘Temporary account suspension’ sounds much more reasonable.

Language matters. What journalist is going to run a story on ‘temporary account suspension’ (yawn)? This is why the government has chosen these disingenuous terms: it‘s just more spin.

What we still don’t know is how long a family’s internet might be disconnected for.

A month? Three? A year? There is nothing in the Bill or any of the notes that we are aware of that might give us a clue.

‘Temporary account suspensions’ sound like the government would to suspend accounts for a few hours, or at most a day, to fit most people’s idea of ‘temporary’ and ‘suspension’. We doubt ‘suspensions’ would be so brief. We can assume what the government means to you and me is ‘disconnection’.

The issue here is what Killock referred to as 'government speak'. The phrasing of the response by the Number 10 website seems to hint at a compromise when the Open Rights Group suggest this semantic distinction is a deliberate attempt to mislead the public. A classic case of New Labour spin.

What is more alarming is that the power to determine the length of the suspension will be granted to the Secretary of State, based on recommendations from Ofcom (something I blogged about late last year). This is highlighted in a subsequent story in the Guardian yesterday when a Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (DBIS) spokesperson was quoted as saying:

"If government decides to use technical measures the Secretary of State would be required to consider an independent report from Ofcom on whether they should be imposed, and on the most effective and proportionate measures."

Mandelson would then decide the upper limit for a "temporary" suspension – which the DBIS indicated would be at least a few days. Parliament needs to be consulted in order to establish the duration of any suspensions towards the upper limit of the punishment scale. The worrying issue here is laid bare in the article:

"an Order cannot be amended by parliament; it can only be accepted or rejected. Any government with a working majority will be able to get an order passed – and so would be able to implement a "temporary" suspension of indeterminate length without any legislative review."

The Government has all the balls in its court with this one, and on the current form, seem determined to push through their plans despite opposition. Only time will tell if they are able to do so before the General Election is called in May.

Take Action

The ORG are encouraging people concerned by this Bill to take action. If you are encouraged to resist this problematic Bill then write to your MP and write to your local newspaper demanding that they get your local MPs to reveal their support for these proposals. You can find convenient templates over on their wiki page here. Get involved

Virgin says "no" to disconnection

This story is taken from TorrentFreak who are reporting that there is very little chance that they will follow through with the threats to disconnect their customers suspected by the BPI of participating in illegal filesharing. The original source of the admission appears over on the BBC Newsbeat site who claim there is "absolutely no possibility" that Virgin Media will take legal action against their customers.

This comes on the back of stinging criticism against the ISP who have issued 800 letters to customers over the last month warning them not to use "unauthorised peer-to-peer networks" like BitTorrent or Limewire to swap copyright protected files. The BBC have footage of a customer, Will McGree of Cardiff, who has been issued with one of these letters but denies its accuracy (a point I mentioned here yesterday). It seems difficult to reconcile both positions when Virgin Media are clearly bowing to pressure from the BPI, despite a lack of sufficient evidence.

Virgin have claimed they will not hand details of their customers details over to the BPI but it remains to be seen if they can be trusted to keep their word on this matter, especially since their associated business include music interests. Combine this with the fact that many ISPs (Virgin included) have been overselling their subscription capacities (and maximum download speeds) and are desperate to curb excessive bandwidth users and the picture looks less clear.

Disputing claims as to who downloaded what and when will soon become harder to contest if new Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) become the norm in places other than just Sweden. Until recently, the processing power required to inspect data packets has made this prohibitive, especially if they were encrypted (torrent files), as it required computers with massive computational power. Again, TorrentFreak carry the story:

"The other, arguably more sinister usage of DPI, is the growing interest by advertising companies to use deep packet inspection to observe what Internet users are doing. Watching your browsing activity, you can gain all kinds of insights into the user behind the keyboard. Similar to spyware, but on your line not your system, it’s not a good thing, and impossible to remove. Worse, it may be able to tell who is behind the keyboard at the time, by identifying trends in connection behavior."

Irrespective of filesharers, this kind of privacy invasion should have us all worried, especially if it is prone to abuse. It seems like hiding traffic in SSH VPN tunnels is now no longer a feasible alternative. Even our YouTube activity is under threat. The EFF have more info about the move which gives Viacom a lot of data to play around with. If ever the digital rights of the planet were under threat then it's now.

BT joins Virgin Media in music sharing clampdown

It seems like the stakes have been raised in the cat and mouse game that is the music industry versus the pirates (aka the customers). BT have announced that they are about to go down a similar route to Virgin Media and start to issue warning letters to web users suspected of downloading music files without the permission of the copyright holder.

In the interests of full disclosure, much of this post is comprised of material from 2 articles over at The Register which you can find here and here

An article over at The Register suggests there is an increasing consensus forming between ISPs and the music industry. Geoff Taylor, chief of UK record industry trade body the BPI claims,

"Everyone agrees on where we need to be, and we are working closely with our colleagues across the music community, the more progressive ISPs, and government to get us there."

So how is this processes panning out? In brief, an agent working on behalf of the BPI will search file-sharing networks for files labelled as music and harvest the ISP address of the computer hosting it. They will then time and date stamp the file and contact the ISP responsible for hosting the customer. The ISP will then issue a warning letter or two (one from the BPI and one from the ISP) warning the customer about the illicit nature of the behaviour. One of the letters may hint at a possible disconnection. It would seem that the ISP odes not relay customer details back to the BPI (for now).

TorrentFreak have a host of articles describing the rather dubious nature of the accusatory methodology employed to 'prove' that file-sharing activity is what it seems to be, with some IP addresses that were supposedly participating in piracy were actually attributed to network printers. Hardly fool-proof evidence.

The threat of disconnection is the preferred deterrent of record industry in its battle against the filesharing of music. It has pressed hard for "three strikes" process, and has the support of the UK government, who do not want to interfere directly, to come to a voluntary agreement with ISPs that satisfies both sides. There are similar plans afoot in other European countries (eg France, Netherlands, etc) to implement a "three-strikes" approach despite the MEP Guy Bono report on the Cultural Industries condemning this approach.

In order to make this activity attractive to ISPs, the BPI have been proposing that the music industry comes up with more innovative ways to make money from the sector, by offering better services, which may benefit the ISPs via increasing customer retention. The decision to threaten customers with disconnection seems counter to that ethos but there may be some new ventures ahead.

A recent press release from the BPI suggests that new business models are proving successful:

"record company revenues outside direct sales of music increased by 13.8% to £121.6 million in 2007, from £106.9m in 2006. These additional revenues now account for 11.4% of record companies’ domestic income."

Retail sales are the traditional avenue for income generation but this is clearly changing. Digital sales and licensing are helping the industry, but newer services are also proving attractive. These include generating income from:

• Synchronisation licence income - associated use of music in games, adverts and films
• Broadcast and Public Performance Licensing (PPL) - getting income from venues which play music publicly
  
• Multiple-rights deals ("360 degree deals") - deals which generate income from merchandising, touring, image rights, sponsorship and digital products like wallpapers for mobile phones

Such practises are believed to have resulted in a 16.2% increase in revenue generation in 2007. These service may soon be complemented by legal file-sharing services in the near future, once complications have been ironed out. It would seem these services could be very different to the types of subscription services ran by Napster in which artists would awarded on the basis of popularity. Music sales have long since been on the decline whilst the popularity of music has remained (see the slide courtesy of The Register).

When the industry introduced the CD format it allowed for the renegotiating of royalties, but with the death of the CD in the face of unlicensed filesharing, the industry is having to look to alternate methods of revenue generation, which may lie in the restructuring of licence deals in as similar vein to the model employed by Last.FM. However, the decision by Warner Bros to pull their content from the service in a dispute over royalties may highlight just how far this matter has yet to go before being resolved.

File-sharers eat too much cake?

An article in today's Guardian by Jack Schofield highlights the problems posed by too many committed peer-to-peer networkers squeezing the precious bandwidth of ISPs. He appears to take umbrage at the fact that these peer-to-peer networkers "think it's perfectly OK to grab three quarters of the communal internet bandwidth" and are "defiant" in their rights to do so as they are frequently paying for services offering them exactly that - unlimited connections, free from usage caps. This also has to be set against the reality that many ISPs do not offer equivalent upload speeds when compared to download speeds. My Virgin Media 20Mbit connection certainly doesn't:

There is a valid point in this argument, namely that bandwidth is limited, despite the advertised claims of numerous ISPs, and that network load brought about by constant peer-to-peer filesharing impinges on those users who do not participate in this type of activity. What kinds of solutions are there to this problem?

• prevent people from being able to share files by disconnection them?
• introduce a bandwidth 'capping' scheme?
• improve the network capacity by laying more cables?
• replace the exisiting cable network with fiber optic?

In the interests of net neutrality I am oppossed to the first option on the grounds that it would involve a fitlering scheme that involves close monitering of what sites customers are visiting and what traffic passes through the network (already in place on some networks I suspect: Virgin Media, I'm looking at you). Whether or not this is done to provide targeted advertising (eg Phorm) or for monitoring the distribution of digital music (BPI & Virgin Media), the implications are far reaching, especially when MEPs voted against the disconnection of file-sharers recently. This raises the thorny question of 'should ISPs be responsible for policing the internet use of their customers?'

The second option has already been introduced by a number of ISPs (once again, Virgin Media, I'm looking at you). Traffic shaping seeks to cap the amount of data a user can upload and download within a given time of day. Once a threshold has been reached, the ISP essentially throttles the connection making larger downloads very slow. This is a distinctly unpleasant practice for families who own multiple computers in their homes and have large connections in order to cope with the demands of, say, a family in which one person may be downloading a game via the legitimate Steam service or others like Xbox Live and WiiWare. Combine this with the legitimate purchase of music, TV and film content from the iTunes store, as well as visiting video streaming sites like BBC iPlayer or the HD channels of YouTube and Vimeo, and you can easily push at the limits of the usage cap. I haven't even mentioned upgrades to operating systems like Vista and OS X (the latter is not known for small download sizes) yet. The idea of unlimited broadband is looking like a far off dream now...

It seems like networks are reluctant to spend more money on digging up roads and upgrading/replacing the existing infrastructure, especially when the business case for providing these expenses seem weak when compared to replacing dial-up with broadband. Will customers really want to pay high premiums for faster data transfer? It seems like the UK broadband infrastructure has been a victim of its own success in recent years. Penetration is high which is good for ISPs in a competitive market but broadband is less exclusive and taken from granted now. Customers expect a certain level of service, especially those customers who have paid for premium packages for many years.

Clearly, there are problems with all of these scenarios. In relation to the improving the network infrastructure Schofield make the analogy that "it's like building more roads to 'solve' the car problem". I'm not sure this is quite so simple especially given that the eco-impact of building more roads for CO2-producing cars doesn't play out so dramatically when alternate solutions for fiber laying exist (such as H2O's decision to use the sewer system to house 100Mbit/s cables). The problem seems to be that the growth of broadband penetration has not been matched by structural reform. 100Mbit/s connection are already de rigour in some nations (eg Sweden, France, South Korea, etc), and the UK may be lagging behind.

There is an argument which suggests that faster technology breeds innovation, which Schofield attributes to Google's Vint Cerf. When usage is restricted, businesses who offer excellent services like Vimeo's HD content or the BBC's iPlayer may find themselves unpopular, especially when customers may have to watch their data use.

It seems like the BitTorrent protocol is being targetted in particular. BitTorrent is a fantastic protocol which allows for the rapid dissemination of files across ring-fenced networks and the wider web more generally. It works so well because of its decentralized nature which males it more efficient than if every person wanting access to a file was to try and get it via FTP. Just look at the problems Mozilla had when attempting to break the official download record for Firefox 3 on June 17th. Demand was 'overwhelming', servers ground to a halt and crashed temporarily. BitTorrent distribution would have circumvented this problem.

There is an assumption that all peer-to-peer traffic is driven by illegal activity when this isn't always the case. Schofield goes so far as to label the protocol as 'poisonous'. There are grounds for criticism when "10% selfishly grab around 75% of the internet's bandwidth", but is it fair to blame the protocol for its ease of use and speed of distribution or those users who want to get the advertised connection speeds they are paying for?

I suspect that there is no easy answer to this question. I'm not even convinced that it (or Schofield) asks the right question. It may be that ISPs need to included a caveat or two in future proclamations, similar to stock market share prices - something along the lines of 'your broadband speed may go up or down in line with the user base of the network'. Can you imagine ISPs offering a sliding scale feature on their front pages showing the impact of having more customers on their network? Then they really would be victims of their own success...

Blogged with the Flock Browser

The BBC is losing some friends...

...but could it be gaining others?

Another day, another report of how the BBC is upsetting the apple cart in ISP land. The Register is carrying this report of how the ISP Tiscali is up in arms about the high bandwidth consumption being driven by the iPlayer (as I mentioned recently).

It seems that Ashley Highfield's comments regarding ISPs have incurred more wrath as Simon Gunter, strategy chief at Tiscali, claiming it's

"bit rich that a publicly-funded organisation is telling a commercial body how to run its business".

The issue here seems to be that the BBC have delivered a simple service that people are wanting and are willing to use, yet this is having an adverse effect on ISPs working on slim margins.

The suggestion that the BBC be charged with a bandwidth tax for driving web content is a bit rich given that other sites like YouTube seem to be excluded from this rhetoric. Who knows where this will end up?

Meanwhile, just to add further flames to the fire, Anthony Rose announced that the BBC were bringing its popular iPlayer to the world's favourite console, the Nintendo Wii. IGN are reporting that the Wii is outselling the PS3 in Japan by a ratio of about 3.5-1 through March. The homepage of nexgenwars keeps a rough estimate of consoles sold to date (note that the Xbox 360 is 2 million sales behind the Wii despite being on the market a year longer).

The BBC announcement is a little misleading - it's not as if Wii owners are going to get a dedicated iPlayer channel on their Wii-desktop just yet. They will need to use the Opera-based Internet Channel that came free with the console at launch (but later at a cost of 500 Wii points, or approximately £3.50) and bookmark the iPlayer URL.

The major problem the BBC is facing here is the Wii's native use of an inferior quality video codec for playback as Rose spells out:

"Nintendo Wii supports only Flash 7, which uses the Sorenson Spark codec rather than the ON2 VP6 codec introduced with Flash 8. Unfortunately the Sorenson compression isn’t nearly as good as ON2 VP6 compression, which is why most video sites gave up encoding their content in Flash 7 compatible format."

This means that the BBC are having to transcode their programmes to fit the console. However, they figure that instead of people watching iPlayer content on laptop or desktop monitors, there are plenty of Wii's connected to flat panel televisions in the front rooms of the UK (approximatively 2.5 million) - ideal for those people who don't have Virgin Media's 'catch up on demand', Sky+ or another PVR option like Tivo.

The iPlayer normally streams at 500 Kbps and delivers excellent quality video (way better than YouTube which is most likely why they are not being dragged into the furore), but in order to make this work on the Wii, Rose points out that the BBC:

"had to increase the bitrate to 820Kbps because the Sorenson codec used by Wii simply needs more bits to achieve the same picture quality. So, for a smooth playback experience on Wii you’ll need an internet connection that can give you 1Mbps or better."

So what does this mean for the ISPs? You guessed it - more data being streamed adding to their woes. It shouldn't be too long before this kind of service gets integrated into Xbox Media Centre or the Playstation Network, further compounding the bandwidth situation. That is if Sony and Microsoft agree to open up their services. Is the BBC purposefully sticking its head above the parapet and deliberately antagonising ISPs? Is it hoping that if it gets enough people using its service it can justify itself and its license fee?

The BBC vs ISPs

It looks like the current bête noir of the web, at least in the UK, is not the pirates but the BBC. Charles Arthur over at The Guardian is running a piece on the extra traffic that the BBC's iPlayer is generating.

Recently, we have had rumour and denial regarding Virgin Media's decision to implement the three-strikes-and-your-out policy on customers using peer-to-peer software on their networks. Earlier this week, Charles Dunstone, head of the Carphone Warehouse and Talk Talk openly rejected demands from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) that the ISP should police it's networks on their behalf. It seems that the ISPs have bigger concerns than a minority of users sharing music and film -

Now, it might seem strange to hear that the BBC has a two part iPlayer: one which streams data much like the kind of streams we see on video sites like YouTube; the other which works like the current BitTorrent protocol via the BBC iPlayer Download Manager - data from files is distributed across users computers and shared in a decentralized way, thus making distribution more even and efficient. The video quality of the second option is far superior than the first option.

One can guess that the streaming bug is a no-brainer for web users accustomed to clicking the play button and expecting their good quality BBC footage streamed on demand. The peer-to-peer option is a little more complicated (but the BBC have done a good job of making it fairly simple). Indeed, a BBC press release from January points out that users stream video at a ratio of 8-1 over the more efficient peer-to-peer route.

YouTube itself is already testing higher quality streamed video as reported by Lifehacker. This looks set to add further misery upon the already strained ISPs as the data load increases.

But let's get back to the iPlayer traffic. Arthur is reporting that all the extra streaming people are doing is adding to the costs of ISPs who tend to pay BT per gigabyte of data used due to the relaince on the latter's IPStream technology. The cost of streaming has almost trebled for some ISPs in the first month alone. These IPStream pipes ted to come in at 155-megabits. Arthur estimates that this means when 300 people are streaming BBC content at 500 kilobits per second, the pipe is choked.

ISPs have suggested the BBC contributes to the situation, perhaps by installing hardware within the UK Broadband network (The Telegraph leaked this last year, dubbed Project Cheetah), although the BBC's head of future media and technology, Ashley Highfield, used a BBC blog to claim that ISPs need to get their house in order and actually deliver on what they advertises to customers. Unlimited broadband should mean just that.

The BBC may be setting itself up for a fall if it is not careful. With the future of television looking increasingly to the internet they do not want to upset those companies best placed to provide the content - it's not as if the BBC own the pipes that connect the houses of the UK. Yet.

ISPs may want to exert some pressure back on the BBC and close down the iPlayer streaming service if it costs them too much. After all, it is carried on port 1935 and we have seen ports blocked before. China does it very well. It would not be too surprising if the BBC was forced to curtail the streaming service in favour of the peer-to-peer model...

Blogged with the Flock Browser

3 strikes and your out ISP policy continues across Europe

TorrentFreak is hosting a couple of noteworthy stories regarding the attempts to police the sharing of copyright material across European internet connections. Following closely on the often misreported story in the UK that the Government is planning a "three strikes and your out" disconnection policy against repeat offenders, it would seem that Norway and Iceland have upset the interests of copyright holders

Japan has already agreed in principle to honour this type of system, on the back of a huge up swell in the use of file-sharing services. Pressure is mounting on ISPs in other countries: on March 10th 2008 the IFPI launched proceedings against Ireland's largest ISP, Eircom, in an attemtp to make the ISP accept responsibility for what its customers do on the network.

The decision in Iceland hinged on the claim that Torrent.is, the largest torrent tracker in the country, was accused of providing easy access to copyright material. However, the ability to search for files which contain meta-data that point to copyright material rather than the actual copyright material itself is not illegal. The case was dismissed (the link to the verdict is here in it's native Icelandic).

The Norwegian case has some similarities. MPAA lawyer Espen Tøndel is demanding that Norwegian ISPs disconnect file-sharers from the internet. However, ISPs are refusing to act as the investigators and judges in cases against their own customers - something which can be costly and labour intensive to pursue. Instead, IKT Norway ( a group acting on behalf of Norwegian service providers) is looking into the legality of private detection firms attempting to connect personal data to the said firms.

The Norwegian and Iceland examples may seem like good news for pirates but it would seem that pressure is still being applied to ISPs and their users, with a number of interested parties intent on lobbying for change. TorrentFreak points to a report by Nick Heath on Silicon which suggests that BPUI and the IFPI are looking to create robotic networks which will detect illegal file-sharing activity. Supposedly, file-sharing using BitTorrent clients has become too easy.

The details of how the detection between illegal and legal file-sharing will be made is still unclear. Even the BBC uses a variant of the BitTorrent protocol for distributing content as part of its dual pronged iPlayer service. Attempts in the US by ISP Comcast to interrupt the BitTorrent protocol with the Sandvine software has been deeply unpopular with customers, with an FCC hearing even claiming that the process was tantamount to the use of 'hacker techniques'. This has been a PR disaster for both Comcast and the company behind Sandvine (who saw their share value plummet by 42% in a single day).

Elsewhere, The Pirate Bay's intentions are loud and clear, especially in their taunting of Hollywood. Matt Mason's blog suggests that major labels and there related interest groups can learn from the pirates and need to adjust their own business practices to best compete. A video of a recent lecture he gave on the issue can be found below


The Register is carrying a story which seeks to impose a 'covenant not to sue' on US college students and alumni caught sharing copyright material. It would seem that the game of cat and mouse is not over yet, but national laws are looking harder to co-opt for the major labels.