ISPs, Throttling, Torrenting, and Pirates

April 9th, 2008 | Published in Movies, Music, Tech, Torrents

Tell me we’re not heading down a dangerous road: an article in today’s Guardian reports on how ISPs worldwide have turned into the police of the web, throttling, shifting, and killing packets left and right. In the U.S., Comcast has been in the news for their throttling of heavy BitTorrent users, but they are by no means the only ISP participating in this type of activity, and, if anything, the U.S. has the least problems in this area.

In Japan, for example, the four largest ISPs recently announced they would terminate the accounts of anyone that the "entertainment industry" claims is a repeat copyright offender. How do they know this info? The ISPs hand it over: IP address and all.

In Canada, the national telco, Bell Canda, is dropping BitTorrent packets left and right - and not just those from their customers, either. They’re dropping the packets generated by other ISPs, too.

In the UK, regulators are considering a "3 strikes, you’re out" rule for copyright infringers.

And the EU is pushing through legislation whose penalties would include permanent bans on doing business, seizure of assets, criminal records, and fines of up to €100,000.

Now, somebody tell me since when was it the responsibility of ISPs to enforce the legality of the bits that pass through their pipes? Should they then, oh, say filter out illegal content of other sorts, too? Oh, no that would be censorship. Like China. That would be bad.

And why does the entertainment industry, in whatever country in the world, get to push their nose down into our tubes because they failed to come up with a sustainable business model for the digital age? It was not the fact that torrenting is easy (go ask your mom to try it) that has led to widespread pirating of music, movies, games, and other items, it was the lack of decent alternatives to finding this content in the digital form people wanted. The market auto-corrected.

Even now, pirating continues since every song isn’t available as a DRM-free file that can go from iPod to Zune to Rio to cell phone to PC to stereo and back again. But a torrent search reveals a ripped mp3 that does.

And all those people torrenting the latest Hollywood blockbuster? Trust me, when the movie is that good, they’ll be in theaters. Not everyone who torrented say, "Enchanted," would have paid full price to view it, you know. They were probably just insanely bored on a Saturday. If it wasn’t there to torrent, they would have found something else to do that day. They would have simply never watched the movie. And they would have never gone out to buy the DVD for their niece’s birthday later that year because they remembered that it wasn’t that bad after all.

Besides, why should we believe the MPAA about the pains of piracy when they intentionally lied to us? Back in ‘05 they claimed 44% of their "losses" were due to college pirating activities, which they later recanted, saying it was only 15%. Then they go and report record box office revenue. Oh, cry me a river.

And there is the issue of pirating vs. torrenting. Pirating may mean using BitTorrent, but it could also mean old-fashioned ways of making unauthorized copies. Burning a bunch of CDs, for example. But torrenting does NOT equal pirating. Linux distros are put out as torrents. Pando and NBC are teaming up to release TV shows via torrents on NBC Direct. Miro uses torrents.

So, I’d never thought I would say this, but thank god for Verizon. They’re actually introducing a new P2P protocol, P4P, to reduce backbone traffic and lower network operation costs just so they can continue operating without having to throttle traffic.

(Oh and, Verizon? Thanks for the the FIOS, it’s pretty sweet.)