UK Government's anti-piracy legislation floated; as flawed as their ID Card lunacy

I'm not normally one for a long title in a blog post, but this needs as much clarity as possible. From BBC News:

People in the UK who go online and illegally download music and films may have their internet access cut under plans the government is considering.

A draft consultation suggests internet service providers would be required to take action over users who access pirated material via their accounts.

[...]

The Times suggested that broadband firms which failed to enforce the rules could be prosecuted, and the details of customers suspected of making illegal downloads made available to the courts.

According to the Times, the draft paper states: "We will move to legislate to require internet service providers to take action on illegal file sharing."

This is nuts. How, exactly, are ISPs supposed to do this? Are they to sniff every data packet sent, and somehow compare the contents to a list of every copyrighted work on the planet? What if it's encrypted, or in an unusual format, or being transferred via a private protocol? What about the inevitable false-positives?

And who's going to pay for this over-seeing campaign? ISPs typically make modest margins reselling services from BT - so they'd have to push up prices to pay for technology that doesn't exist (or is critically flawed) so that their customers can be spied on for the good of whom, exactly? Well, it's the international media conglomerates, isn't it. It's not for the good of the nation, it's for the good of Warner Bros, Sony and the likes.

What happens when you're accused of something you haven't done because of the flawed, non-existent detection system? Or will they assume you're guilty until proven innocent if there's a load of traffic from your computer that they can't read for some reason? What about appeals arbitration? The proposals suggest a three-strikes-and-you're-out affair - out of what? That ISP? The entire internet? What about rehabilitation - if as a 19 year old someone is booted for a third strike, but ten years later he's a vicar, is he still internetless? And is it a household or an individual? What about when people move, or change their name in some way?

Yep, the whole thing has been thought up by people who don't know anything about the reality of technology, and are naive to the fact that the glittering solution being sold to them by the entertainment cartels is, in fact, a white elephant that has been designed for people who don't know anything about technology.

Nice soundbites from the BPI in the BBC article as well:

The BPI, the trade body that represents the UK record industry, said internet providers had "done little or nothing to address illegal downloading via their networks".

"This is the number one issue for the creative industries in the digital age, and the government's willingness to tackle it should be applauded," said BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor.

"Now is not the time for ISPs to hide behind bogus privacy arguments, or claim the problem is too complicated or difficult to tackle."

Number one issue for the creative industries. Not for the citizens of the UK, who're probably more interested in clean hospitals and being able to afford to buy food and heat their homes. The government are too busy fannying about with multi-billion pound industries boo-hooing about how the proletariats aren't buying as much of their "content" because of the big bogeyman, restricting the amount of cocaine they can trumpet out of their arseholes, to actually look after the people who elected them (or not, in the case of our mighty leader).

Claiming the problem is too complicated or difficult? Try impossible. It's absolutely impossible to filter the whole of the internet in the way the BPI would like. I think now is not the time for the BPI to say they can't give me a time machine disguised as a peanut because - boo-hoo - it's too compwicated.

If the government, god bless their cluelessness, decide to shove this into law, I call for them to make the playing field equal, and force any carrier of any form of data to be responsible for any form of copyright infringement policing in the same way. And then I'd use a VoIP telephony system to phone someone and sing Happy Birthday to them without the permission of rights holders Warner Bros (despite the fact it really ought to be public domain by now, wacky US laws mean that you have to pay two long-dead women royalties when you perform it - and Warner Bros own their souls). Who should prevent me doing it - my ISP, providing a conduit, the VoIP platform, providing a conduit, or the telephone company at the other end, providing a conduit? Then I'd make a flick book of stills from a Hollywood blockbuster, printed on an Epson printer on Staples paper, put it in a Niceday envelope, use the Royal Mail website via my ISP to buy postage before getting a friend to post it in the postbox inside Tesco, where it will get picked up and put into a van made by LDV before being loaded onto a plane and flown through the air. Who in this chain of events would the BPI - sorry, the government - have stand in my way and tell me not to do it two more times?

See the problem? It's impossible and stupid, frankly. Not that things like that have stood in the way of legislation in the past...