John Linton ..."We're talking money and money talks louder than loony/leftie conceptual idiocies of so called "rights"..or so the sub-text seems to read as pronounced by U.S. District Judge Louis L. Stanton:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/web/youtube-told-to-hand-over-viewing-logs/2008/07/04/1214950993356.html
You may have also read about the recent French legislation concerning the 'responsibilities' of network owners in the 'transport' of data over their networks?
I suppose another way of looking at it is that pretty shortly, both in the USA and the EU court cases will be heard that will establish new legal precedents (or not) concerning just what "rights" to "privacy" any individual or entity has to information that relates to his/their theft of another person's/entity's property.
I read these sorts of articles with a great deal of interest as I have real money invested in Exetel's business and I have significant responsibilities to 40 employees and nearing 80,000 customers. I am neither 13 years old (and the current bunch of 13 year olds seem to have the same regard for property rights as Attila the Hun did) nor their parents (who, far too often, seem to have the same attitude to parental control and the responsibility for ensuring their offspring understand the basic concepts of the place of law in viable human societies as a basking shark mother).
Of course the same attitudes to property rights are taken by adults, of both genders, and all are based on the 'apparent' anonymity of the use of technology to steal other people's property.
What the current UTube case is all about is, obviously, not known to some Australian reader of a brief news report. However what I understand from it is that copyright owners are moving to change their 'point of attack' from the users of various P2P and other protocols to steal copyright material to the network owners who allow the data involved to move through their networks.
Exetel, probably, has stricter views on property theft than any other Australian ISP. We do, as a matter of course, pass on all allegations of copyright infringement notices to the end user noted in the infringement and we do block the user's internet access until they use the facilites we provide to them to assure us that:
a) they deny the allegation
b) they have contacted the writer of the infringement notice
c) they, in error, allowed some copy right material to be down loaded but have now removed it.
That process is fully automated, both from Exetel's side and also from the customer's side and has been in place for several years (I forget exactly when we competed the full automation of this process). As far as I know, NO other ISP conforms as strictly to what is required under Australian law and ethical business practices as Exetel and its owners do.
So far so good - we have made a 'virtue' out of the commercial necessity of protecting our own financial investments and the fact that, as a small company, we don't have the financial and legal resources to deal with some expensive law suit mounted by an entity that does have much larger financial and legal resources - such as Telstra or Optus or any other huge company such as in the current US case - Yahoo/UTube. (though come to think of it Telstra and concern for other people's rights......)
What the US case seeks to do is to make Google (the owner of the network) responsible for the content of the network which is very similar to the ComCen and PeopleTelecom cases in Australia (where those companies 'knowingly' hosted facilities for distributing copyright material illegally). Fair enough - if that's what is happening but, obviously it isn't as understood by Google and UTube. Time will tell.
Of more concern to small companies such as Exetel is a similar change of 'tactics' by the senders of copyright infringement notices to Austraian ISPs. As well as the specific "on this date/time IP xxxxx downloaded/uploaded title xyz" notification there now appears generalised accusations of "knowingly colluding" by "taking no overall action" when "you know this is happening" type accusations - these have not been seen, at least as far as I'm aware, before.
Now, I may well be over tired and mentally and physically run down at the end of a very demanding year - and desperately in need of a holiday, but it appears to me that the ''days of blatant copyright theft" by every kid and adult of dubious morals via the anonymity of P2P is coming to an end. Sure, these individuals will continue to steal other people's property using technology. However, ISPs, around the world, will become more, rather than less, involved in removing their abilities to do that.
If the copyright owners can succeed in establishing the legal precedent that "knowing that certain signature taffic (i.e. BitTorrent) is more likely than not to be used to steal copyright material then the current P2P 'scenario' will change dramatically. The danger in this scenario to small, yet not tiny, ISPs like Exetel is that we are very vulnerable in this situation and are far more threatened by it than larger ISPs.
I didn't want something like this to worry about right at this moment.