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Comment by bananas | Hacker News Reader

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.

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This must be the mildest agreement ever, and you're in outrage? Considering the alternatives, this is amazing. The only information that rights holders get is the number of letters sent out. How is this not a win for the consumer?

Yes I because:

1. They actively monitor your connection to be able to determine whether or not you have "infringed". This has non legitimate utility.

2. They are building a mailing database which whilst is under a mild agreement may in the future be made available under different terms.

So this is not a win, it's a tragic first step towards what we don't want.

"Creeping normality" also known as "death by a thousand cuts" or in the context of the "boiling frog" story - the war of attrition, lobbyists generally excel at this.

Most of us are too busy to notice and/or are underestimating the negative impact of a large sum of little policies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog

"They actively monitor your connection": This isn't the case is it (for this purpose at least)? It's the rights holders that contact the ISPs with a list of IPs that they claim are infringing. All the ISPs are doing is mapping IP addresses to real addresses and sending letters? The ISPs don't actively monitor for copyright infringement...

That's how I read it - all it made me do was make a mental note to remind my teenage son to use a VPN if he downloads stuff (NB which I do not approve of, but I'm not going to monitor his internet access to the point where I could block such activity).

It sounds to me like this agreement changes that... that's what the £750k is for - to implement the monitoring and heuristics...

I think!

No, that's definitely not the case. Read the section titled "How the system will work". It specifically says that the rights holders will be doing this.

Which is something they are already doing anyway.

This amounts to less of a privacy invasion than performed by Facebook or Google, to my mind. In addition, anyone that is under the impression their activities online are currently anonymous is mistaken. It's straightforward for rights holders to track bittorrent users to an IP, which they can then use to identify the individual.

Most of my internet traffic doesn't flow through Google's or Facebook's infrastructure (at least not to my knowledge). All of it goes through my ISP's.

On the other hand, it's not so straightforward for MPAA to identify IPs of people downloading/streaming videos directly. ISPs can, of course. Also, without the cooperation of ISPs or a shady court system (which assumes that IP in a bittorrent swarm is enough of a proof that a crime happened), it's also not very simple to identify individuals from just an IP.

I don't know of any ISPs similar to A&A, particularly in terms of giving uncensored internet and no monitoring.

This in itself is cause for concern. Not from a competition point of view, but for redundancy.

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