The Register reports on what's going to become the fallout of the Digital Economy Act, with internet users being added to a blacklist if they're accused of copyright infringement, and then eventually cut off, or have money demanded from them with menaces, or both. This marks the beginning of the long march towards routine encryption of internet traffic.
It's unclear to me whether this only applies to music, movies and software, or whether it applies more broadly than that. For example, if I posted three or four images to this blog, or on my web site, that I didn't own the copyright on and were not under a creative commons license, would that mean that I could be disconnected from the internet? In a strict interpretation of copyright, with no room for fair use, that's what the DEA implies.
It seems highly likely to me that copyright violation will be used in future as an excuse to block whistle-blowing web sites like Wikileaks, or blogs which post information which causes embarrassment to government officials.
The only positive side to very strict and uncompromising forms of automatic policing is that the sort of low level sharing of proprietary software, literature or media between friends which has always occurred for as long as I can remember would become technically impossible without incurring fines or disconnection, so users would have no option but to move towards software under free and open source licenses, and creative commons media. This shift already seems to be underway, but the en masse issuing of letters and creation of blacklists could accelerate the trend.
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4 comments:
http://torrentfreak.com/how-file-sharers-will-bypass-uks-anti-piracy-act-100412/
Indeed. Even if they somehow managed to ban or block non-domicile VPNs it would be easy for Bob to ssh to Alice's computer and rsync whatever exists there with an encrypted connection. Once encryption comes into the equation then deep packet inspection is no longer useful. I don't expect many "file sharers" to be doing this now, but it would be relatively trivial for someone to write software which makes this process into a one click, or no-click operation and allows the user to configure which friends they want to connect to and how often.
It reminds me of the battle for strong cryptography. The government couldn't realistically expect to keep strong cryptography illegal. However, each day they blocked or hampered public efforts was a win for their security services.
Even if the encryption was quite weak this just translates into additional time and cost for anyone trying to intercept and decode the communication.
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