Should ISPs pay to block pirate websites? Supreme Court to decide

Pass it on

> ISPs arguing that while they don't mind being ordered to block copyright-infringing content, someone else should be bearing the costs of doing so.

And someone else does: their customers. ISPs aren't some magic, infinitely deep well of money, gold and resources. Where all they have to do is dip in and pull out a wad. Any costs they incur gets passed on to their customers.

And if all ISPs are required to pay for a universal blocking service, it isn't as if they can find "efficiency savings" (aka making people redundant and requiring the poor gits who remain, work harder and longer hours).

So a universal cost increase will just be passed on to all the ISPs' users. They will all raise their prices by the cost of implementing this. Just as all energy companies raise their prices almost in lock-step when wholesale gas prices increase.

No damned way should ISPs be bare the cost of this. I have no love for large Corps that buy Laws to suit them but on the other hand they shouldn't bare the cost of blocking anything.

ISPs profiting?

I'm not too sure how ISPs actually 'profit' from subscribers connecting to a given site, whatever it is hosting.

The ISPs get their money from subscriptions for a service - a pipe. It doesn't matter which sites the subscriber views, they still get the same income.

Arguably, if these 'copyright infringing' sites encourage users to download large amounts of data in the form of video streams, that is actually reducing the profits of the ISP, as they need to provide additional capacity with no additional income.

well

Perhaps if the infringement is costing the likes of Cartier so much money, they should see paying to have it blocked as a good business decision, I don't suppose the court order / injunction came cheap, of course if they are just making a lot of noise and want to bully the ISP into paying ...

I recon...

A centralised scheme that companies opt into that is responsible for blocking sites. You're Nike and you want fake Nike trainers sites blocked you pay for access to the service for registration of sites blocked as the result of court orders and then ISPS check that service for free. Easy. That way anyone has fair access. Dammit governments if I can come up with these ideas, anyone can!

Tax implications ...

Surely the cost of doing something mandated by law can be offset against tax ?

Riiight, so Joe Punter sees a nice knock of Cartier watch online,.... buys it, and it's delivered to him via a postal service.

Cartier are going after the ISP. Not the postal service,.... not the person selling the knock off watch,... but the ISP. Do they mean to go after the web hosting provider of the infringing web site? Are they looking down the wrong end of the pipe here?

Lord Mance did not appear to be impressed by the full costs argument, in which Speck claimed that ISPs are "profiting"

I don't see how they profit from it. ISPs are going to make loads of money from dirt cheap hosting.

Not everybody in the UK goes on these sites so why should I have to pay an increased amount of money to access the internet while getting the same service. ISP would pass any charge to to us the customer.

Follow the money

While people have made some good points about the problems of censorship and so on, the issue at hand here is far simpler than that and comes down purely to money. The copyright* holders are being ripped off and don't want to have to pay to stop it happening, which is actually fair enough on their part and would be horribly open to abuse if independent individuals could be forced to pay for every violation of their work. The ISPs are an essentially unrelated third party who, as others have noted, are essentially just providing a pipe at a fixed cost with no responsibility (and ideally no knowledge at all) of what passes through it, so obviously they don't want to pay. The IP violators are often anonymous, and in any case almost always unreachable by reasonable means in any reasonable timeframe, so it's effectively impossible to make them pay.

So that's where the argument comes from. There are three parties involved; the one who should pay can't be forced to, so the other two are arguing about who is actually going to pay in practice when both have good arguments why they shouldn't. People have suggested that things like the postal service and others could also be included, but that doesn't really change things. The question always boils down to who bears the cost when the party at fault can't be caught?

* The article says copyright, but this case is actually about counterfeit physical goods.

It's copying and not theft, Cartier's problem in my book.

Does the kind of person who buys a knock-off Cartier look like the sort of person who can afford a real one ?

It's us broadband payers who can't afford a real Cartier having to pay to police their brand for the very wealthy if the costs are not redeemed.

I suspect it's not the cost of blocking that worries ISPs. Due to less traffic, that would probably be a net gain for them. The problem would be that it might make them less attractive to the potential customer, opening the market for ISPs with less stringent control.

Isn't this all a waste of time?

... as VPN is getting easier and easier.

At one point you needed to be a bit of a techi to do VPN, but these days you can just install a browser plugin, or install Opera, which has built in VPN now.

I tested the Opera one out the other day, tried TPB and failed (fresh install without VPN), turned VPN on in setting, and refreshed, straight through without issue, other than being slightly slower.

This without any technical knowledge.

Does blocking even make any difference to people buying from these counterfeit goods websites? I doubt it. As soon as the ISP block one domain name the scammers can have another one online in hours. Look at how effective blocking The Pirate Bay has been, I just typed 'The Pirate bay' into Google and the first link i clicked on took me straight there, even though it is supposed to be blocked.

Although i don't used my ISP's DNS servers so perhaps this is why i can get to it.

Charge Apple for it!

We should charge Apple for all 'lost revenue' from all this copyright infringement. After all, it's their computers that get used to watch it all.

In fact, we should also charge Intel, because without their chips, we wouldn't be infringing on copyright.

Why ISPs can ever be considered 'profiting from' copyright infringement, even after notification is beyond me.

WGAF

anyone pirating is using a vpn, as encouraged by piratebay, etc

bypasses the ISP so WGAF

more shit coming from moronic mouths

Look to the Down Under model

A similar situation (requiring ISPs to block on Court Order) has been running in Australia. This was primarily a result of the movie studios working with the owners of the Dallas Buyers Club copyright

There the Courts have come down partly in favour of the ISPs and ordered that Copyright holders have to pay ISPs $50 per domain blocked. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-12-15/federal-court-orders-pirate-bay-blocked-in-australia/8116912

This has led to the inevitable "unintended consequence" that the Copyright holders have to keep going back to the Court to seek further domain blocks which puts the identity of the naughty domains in the public arena giving wannabe pirates a new list of domains to trawl for their films :-)

There is a cost of compliance (even if small) on the ISPs and, as the issue is a Civil matter between companies (i.e. not a criminal prosecution), I think it right that the ISPs should be recompensed for their efforts. Where crime is involved then it's equally right that the ISPs act without payment.

There is a thread, on the very respected Whirlpool Forums site, covering the debate. (tip select "Return to Standard View" - top right hand to make navigation easier.)

https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2591386

Bitcoin

The ISP's could cover the costs by using hidden Bitcoin mining script injected into every government and politician websites.

Yes, there will be mistakes,

and overshoots on either side

this attitude exactly makes me think software is not perfect as it could be.

And they STILL don't understrand how the Internet works

The PTB are truly clueless about the Internet.

You can't stop the piracy, the dark web, porn, none of it. The ability to route around obstacles was built in from the beginning. Just like the entire purpose of the PC was freedom from the mainframe.

To badly paraphrase Sir Pratchett, " a mistake every corporation has been trying to fix ever since."