Deal to combat piracy in UK with 'alerts' is imminent

From the final paragraphs of the article this seems like a compromise agreement for both sides. The ISPs have pushed against becoming the rights holders' enforcers, much like ISPs in Australia and other jurisdictions that have been through this. While the rights holders obviously see this as a stepping stone to lobbying for greater powers - 'In the agreement, it states that an ineffective system would lead rights holders to call for "rapid implementation" of stronger measures as outlined in the Digital Economy Act.'

I don't think any of these ISPs are working in the interest of their customers though. There is nothing here that discusses the rights of the account holders to dispute these warnings or any talk of consulting with customers before implementation. And while it says that rights holders cannot use the system to prosecute individuals, surely if the ISPs are maintaining this information to send warnings a rights holder will use the courts to try to access the actual IPs eventually?

£3 million plus to send out a bunch of letters to, assuming 20 million UK households, what could end up being more than one in 10 of us?

Imagine they'd collaboratively invested that cash into British startups tasked with finding new revenue streams for the entertainment industry, and then worked with them to provide legal access to films / music / whatever.

They could be in a completely different place in three years. This feels like spitting into the wind.

The same thing was implemented in France several years ago with the HADOPI (another government body created for the occasion, probably to put relatives and friends of politicians - easy money), and the alert system had no tangible results... except that there was a massive move to VPN subscriptions after its implementation.

Looks like the UK did not learn anything from its neighbor.

Given the background to this, and how bad this could have gone I could not have been more happy. This is years late and completely lacking in teeth.

I protested in the streets of London when the digital economy act came through, and I am so glad that despite it passing, this is as far as it got.

The closest thing I can relate this to in the UK is the way they handle TV licensing. That's another government sponsored organization seemingly designed to find and harass false-positives with threatening letters. Yes, I own a screen. Yes, there theoretically exists a mechanism to hook it up so that it would receive broadcast television were you to broadcast any television in my area. But no, I'm not going to pay you for a TV License regardless of how many times you threaten to send somebody over to my house.

Similarly, I pay Lovefilm, Orange.fr and the NFL directly for access to paid content. I streamed a Game of Thrones episode to my TV here in France last night, possibly making me the first person in history to watch the show legally.

But when I head back to our house in England in a few months, I might want to watch the next episode so I'll download it. I have paid for access to it, but BT has no way of knowing this so they'll add me to their list of "Bad People".

There's simply no way they can correctly track who paid for what, so it leaves us in a situation where, regardless of whether you have a right to the content you watch, you're still labeled a criminal.

Kinda makes you wonder why bother paying at all if the end result is the same.

Seedbox hosts are going to be happy with this.

Old media will never win this battle. Perhaps they should focus on making their content available reasonably - having to pay a yearly TV tax plus a subscription to Sky or Virgin just to watch what might well be a single programme is ridiculous. Netflix is far better, and I use it, but its catalogue is still tiny and often released an extremely long time after a programme was aired on TV.

By far the single most effective solution to dramatically slow down piracy is to make all content available globally for reasonable prices, for a digital "watch at home" copy", that has none of the costs of something like a cinema ticket, and benefits from large economies of scale (especially if the content is distributed P2P, and not many central servers are needed, other than keeping a seed on all content at all time).

This education thing won't do much to turn people away from piracy. If threat of prison or bankruptcy-inducing fines didn't, then neither will this, especially when there's little to educate them about when the content people want isn't actually available in their countries and soon after coming out.

Hollywood is its own biggest problem.

I'm terminating my Sky account over this today. At no point is this in my interest as a customer. They took £750000 to voluntarily violate my privacy.

They obviously will have to develop a heuristic for suspicion and store suspects somewhere. If that list becomes available by accident or court order then it puts people at litigation risk. Unfortunately despite guarantees supposedly mandated by law, if you're confronted with a case then you're screwed either with respect to costs or defense.

I would suggest people start moving to Andrews and Arnold or a similar smaller ISP immediately.

I Wonder how many people are actually 'for' this. It seems those against it should far outweigh those in favour.

Please don't do this

I'm warning you

Now I'm really annoyed

I'm really upset with you

.....