Needless to say, for anybody reasonably knowledgeable about the downloading community, the notion that a sea change away from piracy had occurred earlier this year would seem highly implausible.  However, maybe Sweden was an isolated example, and the (likely) spread of such “graduated response” laws would ultimately lead to the first real downturn in file-trading since the heydays of Napster.  Sadly for the Economist and the entertainment industries, new evidence also came out on Friday that demonstrates just how misguided and premature any claims of victory over piracy really are. Enigmax at Torrentfreak cites a new report from Swedish Internet backbone Netnod, that shows there was indeed a very large dip in Internet usage overall in Sweden in April, as much as 30%.  Whether or not that decrease can be ascribed entirely to the change in law regarding downloading cannot be proven, but in any case, the latest figures show that the drop in Internet usage was wholly short-lived.  By the end of October, Swedish Internet traffic was completely back  to pre-April levels, and in fact, may well be even higher.  Has the initial scare over the harsher laws receded to the point that they are now being ignored?  On the other hand, seasonal effects have been noticed in file-sharing before, with decreases in summer months and increases in the fall corresponding with the return of young people to schools and universities, and that could be in play here as well.  In any case, if recording industry executives were about to start celebrating their long wished-for end to mass copyright infringement, they should put the champagne back on ice for the time being.

For our regular viewers, the headline may give you a sense of de-ja-vu. Well, it’s more than just a weird feeling because, yes, last year, Sony BMG was sued for software piracy and had a property raided by French police. At the time, many people suggested that the raid in France was karma related given that even earlier, there was the Sony Rootkit fiasco where music CDs were released by Sony that destabilized people’s computers.

If it was bad karma, apparently, the company is still in the bad books. According to a report on Daily Tech, Sony BMG had a property raided by Mexican police over an unauthorized CD release.

The story goes that a pop artist by the name of Alejandro Fernández’s had a seven album contract with Sony. The artist had recorded other songs that never made it onto those seven albums. The contract he signed ended in 2008 and the artist got a new contract with Universal. Apparently, Sony found those songs and created an eighth album. Unsurprisingly, Universal was not too happy. Sony defended the creation of the album, saying that the discs were, like, “totally authorized”. They also said that Mexican courts would confirm their rights over the music.

“What Sony did that was wrong and illegal was to assume that they could take those tracks that weren’t part of the previous albums and release them as an eighth album as if it were new material over which they had rights,” says Jose Luis Caballero, Fernández’s attorney in Mexico. “And it’s perfectly clear that the company’s contract is limited to seven albums.”

A Slashdot commenter commented on how one could look at the case and follow the precedent set in the US for music piracy. The user calculated that the damages could be $1,151,460,000 if using the Tenenbaum precedent or $4,094,080,000 using the Thomas precedent.

It’s interesting that both the cases were brought up – particularly when Sony BMG is behind the Tenenbaum lawsuit. Either way, this seems to be the second time Sony shows a hypocritical side to their business when it comes to piracy.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Prosecutors are calling it a landmark decision when they successfully sued two web hosting companies and the owner of the websites for trademark infringement. The web hosting companies that were sued are Akanoc Solutions Inc. and Managed Solutions Group Inc.

Apparently, the web hosting companies were contacted by trademark owners over the website owner – who just so happens to be the same owner of the hosting companies – selling the counterfeiting material. When the website owner, Steven Chen, received the demands to take down the website, he refused to take action. That’s what prompted the lawsuit against the companies and the website owner.

On the surface, the case seems to have been a big victory against people who sell infringing material – something that many would celebrate over. However, the case has sparked interesting debate, particularly on Slashdot, over whether or not this has a chilling effect on free speech as well because of the precedent set.

On the international stage, contributing to infringement has been one of the weapons the copyright industry has been using with sometimes surprising success. OiNK, a while back, had legal troubles when their domain name registrar was threatened with legal action if they didn’t discontinued support for the domain name. The Registrar folded and users quickly found their website seemingly offline (although connecting directly to the IP address would reveal that the site was still operational. This caused the website to be forced to move to a different domain. More recently, the “ISP of the ISP” was pressured into blocking ThePirateBay. That was a case where the owners remarked how the copyright industry was going after people who contribute to who contribute to who contribute to who contribute to copyright infringement – a case that brought ThePirateBay down for a mere couple of hours.

Let’s say this latest case does cause a chilling effect in US web hosting companies. That chilling effect that websites are taken down on a mere allegation of copyright infringement or trademark infringement or being threatened with legal action citing this particular case. All it’s really going to do is cause many website owners to simply pack up shop and take their business off American shores – whether they have legitimate reasons or not. This will be at the detriment to American businesses because many will fear that their website will be here today, gone tomorrow. Clearly, then, it would be a court decision that is bad for business.

In this case, it seems a little less likely that such a precedent has been set that the safe harbour provisions have effectively been rendered moot. This is because in this case, the owner of the website was also the owner of the hosting company. Why this is important is because the web hosting owner had full knowledge of the activities of that particular website. In most other cases, the web hosting company doesn’t know what is going on in every given website – only that they receive money at regular intervals in time.

So, it’s really a murky ruling over whether or not free speech and the safe harbour provision has been harmed or not. What it probably will depend on is what future court cases would bring as a result of this ruling.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Should an ISP block website because of a complaint by a corporation or an organization of corporations? This could be one question that could draw a line in the sand between the copyright industry and supporters of free speech in Europe.

Earlier this year, the European Union blocked the three strikes law by declaring internet access as a fundamental right. Since then, the copyright industry has been scrambling to find some sort of quick cheap fix to stop all forms of file-sharing on the internet by, among other things, implementing three strikes, censorship, throttling and anything else they can get other people to throw at file-sharing. Since the political way by implementing things like the three strikes law seemed to not be quick enough, the industry went after ISPs. Eircom in Ireland was one of those ISPs.

Starting September 1st, as a part of a settlement between the Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) and Eircom, the ISP has agreed to start blocking The Pirate Bay.

Just days afterwards, the Irish Pirate Party issued a statement saying that they are “deeply concerned by news that eircom is to block access from its subscribers to thepiratebay.org.”

“The Party,” the statement continued, “which is opposed to censorship and stands for the protection of individual privacy, finds this action wholly disturbing and believes it should not go ahead.”

“The Pirate Party believes that this block will set a precedent not only for further monitoring of Internet users, censorship and general debilitation of Internet services in Ireland, but also for similar action against other Irish companies providing Internet services, such as BT Ireland, Smart Telecom, Perlico and UPC (two of which have already been similarly threatened), severely damaging competition in this sector and curtailing efficient broadband rollout.”

It should be noted that as of the 20th, other Irish ISPs did vow to keep fighting IRMA which wants to force ISPs to implement three strikes and blocking internet websites such as The Pirate Bay. Given that the Telecoms package had the final say on disconnections by saying that internet access is a fundamental right, it’s not hard to conclude that Irish ISPs disconnecting users is not only bad publicity, but illegal by European law as well. From an observational standpoint, a lawsuit to force an ISP to break European law seems to be some sort of legal twilight zone – one can only imagine what is going on behind the scenes of these ISPs that are still fighting.

The Irish Pirate Party also noted that backup copies of The Pirate Bay have been distributed online as well and questions whether blocking the site would be even remotely effective in the first place.

In addition, the Irish Pirate Party quoted sections of Irish copyright laws IRMA used to go after ISPs and pointed out that “Neither the Pirate Bay, nor Eircom, store any copyrighted materials on any of their servers or within their service infrastructure. Also since the law specifically refers to singular works this section of the law cannot be used against an entire site or service.”

Unfortunately, as it has been proven in past cases, what local laws say hardly matters since the copyright industry tends to interpret copyright laws their way and enforces their interpretation of the laws as they see fit. In the past, this point was particularly prevalent when the copyright industry persuaded Swedish lawmakers to break local Swedish law when the websites server farms were raided by police back in 2006. The move by anti-piracy efforts backed by the US earned lawsuits from local businesses who were taken offline thanks to the server farm raid. Accusations of illegal activity by officials in 2006 during the raid ran fast and furious.

The kind of debate over whether or not ISPs are allowed to enforce their own three strikes policy or are allowed to arbitrarily block websites at the copyright industry bidding doesn’t appear to be exclusive to Ireland given that this kind of debate is already happening in the UK when a key political figure did a “u-turn” on the governments stance on three strikes after spending a short vacation with an American billionaire from the copyright industry and, by extension, in the Netherlands where MiniNova was ordered to remove all links to trackers containing allegedly copyright infringing material.

While it seems that the copyright industry is trying to find every back door they possibly can to try and find ways of defying the will of the European Union, this effort could ultimately backfire as it further legitimizes the stance of the Pirate Party in many European countries. It gives very real relevance to the concerns of the party for potential new voters who have already voted in one to two members of the party into the European Union. If the copyright industry doesn’t see it, surely policymakers should given that it’s their jobs on the line, not the industry’s.

Whether this particular issue between Eircom and IRMA becomes a key political point remains to be seen, but at the very least, it’s shaping up to be another controversial point in the European copyright debate.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

Already, one UK minister said that a so-called “three strikes” law is too draconian back in June, but more recently, a UK ISP tried to institute their own three strikes law. That case caused the Open Rights Group to describe the three strikes regime as ““Guilt by accusation, punishment without trial“.

This may really ultimately be the core problem of a so-called three strikes regime – how many civil or criminal cases can see someone punished based on an accusation and without the option of going to court? What a three strikes regime has had a history of is trying to dodge the whole court system and skip right to punishing people based on an accusation essentially.

That’s what makes the latest blog posting on the UK Pirate Party’s website all the more interesting. In it, Andy R. discusses legal aspects of file sharing.

Back in June of 2008, a leaked letter said that the government was setting a goal of reducing file-sharing by 80%. When the Digital Britain report was issued later that month, that target ended up being 70%. By then, many in the file-sharing community were up in arms over the governments plans. Fast forward a year later, the British government wanted more time to reach that goal.

This was brought up as a key point in the UK Pirate Party’s posting. Under the presumption that a fair trial were to be brought up to the accused for each case, Andy R. had this to say:

Justice for those accused of file sharing will naturally require the opportunity for those accused to have an opportunity to see the evidence against them and challenge it in a court of law. To reduce file sharing by 70%, assuming 7 million people sharing 100 files each means dealing with 70% of 700,000,000 files. That’s 490,000,000 fair trials, or if, as has been rumoured there are to be two different offences, one for uploading, another for downloading, nearly 1 billion fair trials.

Her Majesty’s Courts Service say in their annual report that they dealt with 150,000 criminal cases and 2 million civil claims last year. Can they realistically be expected to cope with an additional 1 billion next year, and has their budget of £1,766,222,000 been expanded 500-fold to do so? The answer, quite simply is no.

The inescapable conclusion is that the government are not intending to fund the expensive luxury of justice for those accused of file sharing. We can only afford to have a system without justice, where simply being denounced by a copyright-holder is sufficient for summary punishment to be dealt out, and that summary punishment will be dealt out to 70% of 7 million people.

This is an extremely strong argument using basic math. After all, in the US, ever since Napster was shut down, there has been a rigorous lawsuit campaign against file-sharers by rights holders with, unsurprisingly, an emphasis on deterrent punishments. Andy’s argument is a very good highlight on why the copyright industry simply cannot go after every file-sharer and why there was a strong hope that deterrents would work – which they didn’t. It’s the simple principle many file-sharers have been aware of for years – safety in numbers.

Since the industry cannot scare people back into the music stores, it’s not a surprise that there is the strong push for a three strikes regime these days – to skip the expensive justice system altogether so they don’t litigate themselves into bankruptcy.

The problem of enforcing a three strikes law is that it doesn’t jive with the whole concept of justice in the first place – guilt upon accusation, punishment without trial. In order to enforce such a regime, the industry has the next to impossible task of trying to convince the public that the court system is no longer needed in cases of copyright infringement to justify a three strikes law.

Suddenly, those court rooms with those evil lawyers, corrupt judges and a disgrace of a legal system now becomes the file-sharers safety net. Quite the reversal of thinking in light of the US government siding with the RIAA and urging the judge to ignore arguments that the Jammie Thomas damages of $1.92 million in fines for many file-sharers aware of the political wrangling’s of copyright.

Given that the copyright industry in the UK is pushing – and pushing hard – for a three strikes regime in the UK and that many are realizing that the sought after three strikes regime involves the accused not being able to dispute the accusations in court, it’s not hard to figure out why there is a rise in the Pirate Party’s popularity these days. A political party that many see as impervious to the back room lobbying of the copyright industry to push through draconian copyright laws. As the threats grow for many who might – whether warranted or not – have their culture of the internet cut off, those people discover the real threat of human progress being pulled back by close to 25 years and all the benefits that came with the internet revolution.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

There’s been the odd rumour here and there that Microsoft is colluding with copyright holders from time to time. One rumour suggested that Longhorn, now known as Vista, would not play unlicensed content. Of course, rumours like that eventually fell apart sometime during the release of the OS. This is what makes the notion that Windows 7 is designed for piracy.

The report comes from Wired via CNN where the author put together 7 reasons to use Windows 7. One of the reasons to switch to Windows 7? Piracy will now be a breeze:

Yarr! We know there are plenty of you out there downloading pirated digital booty, especially in Windows land. But it’s never been convenient to be a pirate compared with being a paying customer. For example, if you’re a legitimate buyer purchasing movies off iTunes, you can easily stream your media to your legitimately purchased Apple TV. If you’re a pirate, you’d have to go through roundabout programs and hardware to re-create the experience.

Windows 7 is an OS practically made for pirates. Want to display your movies, photos or music on your TV? Bam! Windows Media Player will do that out of the box if you have a Wi-Fi enabled TV, or an Xbox. No extra programs to install: Windows Media Player seamlessly communicates with your Wi-Fi device to display your illegal content in all its glory on your fancy HD TV.

And sharing media is easy, too. Want to download all of your brother’s music? Bam! HomeGroup, an easy networking feature included in Windows 7, will make that super easy between computers running the OS. Immediately upon plugging in to your network with Ethernet or Wi-Fi, HomeGroup will ask if you wish to join the group on the network, allowing you to set up easy file sharing in minutes.

It’s more than likely that this reason is a little tongue and cheek, though it’s doubtful groups like the RIAA would be laughing. Still, some Windows supporters in the past have suggested that Microsoft continues to dominate in the OS market, in part, thanks to not actually proving the rumours that there would be a form of trusted computing that would quash all forms of unauthorized content.

It’s unclear how Microsoft would actually handle the label of Windows 7 as being a Piracy Operating System, but content being shared between computers isn’t an entirely new thing for Windows given the shared directory has been part of a Microsoft Operating System for quite some time now – not to mention the whole concept of networking computing.

Regardless, it’s hard not to see the humour in the idea that Windows is “made for pirates”. We can already see the sales being higher than expected already.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

It seems that the movement of the pirate party keeps sailing on. Less than a week ago, we reported on the Pirate Party becoming an officially registered party in the UK. Now, it seems that the Finnish Pirate Party has accomplished the same goal of becoming an officially recognized party.

According to the Finnish Pirate Party website, the Finnish Pirate Party managed to get the necessary 5000 signatures to become an official political party (Google translated)

More from the posting:

The party can now participate in the Finnish parliamentary and municipal as well as European parliamentary elections. Its current primary objective is to get representatives in the Finnish parliament in the 2011 election. Its current primary objective is to get representatives in the Finnish parliament in the 2011 election. Piraattipuolue is the 8th officially registered pirate party internationally. The Pirate Party is the 8th officially registered pirate party internationally.

The party seeks to strengthen the protection of privacy and freedom of speech, to reform the current copyright legislation by legalizing non-commercial file-sharing and drastically cutting the duration of copyright, and to abolish pharmaceutical and software patents. The party seeks to strengthen the protection of privacy and freedom of speech, to reform the current copyright legislation by legalizing non-commercial file-sharing and drastically cutting the duration of copyright, and to abolish pharmaceutical and software patents.

This is great news for the Pirate Party movement. With two more countries now having their own pirate party in less than a week, the momentum seems to be in party’s favour. The question is, how many more countries can the pirate party movement become officially registered?

Pirate Party Finland home page (Finnish)

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

The appeals process takes time. That’s why we haven’t heard much from the Jammie Thomas case in a few months now. Back then, many Americans saw the award of $1.92 million as shocking and another reason to see the copyright laws as a departure from reality. The verdict even made waves during the Canadian copyright consultation as major reason to not go down the lawsuit road while considering new copyright laws.

That’s what, for many, makes this latest development all the more shocking.

According to a legal brief filed by the Department of Justice, the Department of Justice is arguing, “If it is necessary to reach the constitutional question to resolve defendant’s motion, then defendant’s motion should be rejected because Conress’ carefully crafted statute satisfies the Due Process Claus.”

They further argue, “The current damages range provides compensation for copyright owners because, inter alia, there exist situations in which actual damages are hard to quantify. Accordingly, the statutory range specified by Congress for a copyright infringement satisfies due process.”

In other words, they argue that because there is little to no evidence that points to actual harm, the damages should be this high in the first place and, therefor, not unconstitutional to fine a young woman $1.92 million for sharing non-commercial copies of 24 songs.

In short, philosophically speaking, the Department of Justice’s argument is this: Actual damages is hard to show. Congress made a copyright law with a given range of damages. Therefor Thomas cannot claim damages are unconstitutional.

There’s probably hundreds of ways to point out why this argument fails. Saying that actual damages are hard to claim is irrelevant to how constitutional the award is. So premise one doesn’t work. Congress have passed copyright laws, but laws can be overruled by the constitution. If congress passed a law that dictated that no more elections shall be had and the current party must stay permanently in power, the constitution would overrule it. Since the constitution has power over lawmaking, premise two is false. Therefor, the DoJ argument fails miserably here.

The bigger concern here is that this is a plain example of a government backing a few particular corporations. Why is the government trying to interfere in this particular case – especially helping the RIAA gang up on someone who has little to no hope in paying off the $1.92 million award in the first place. One wonders why the RIAA needs the whole government backing their case in the first place? Was it getting difficult to fight in the first place and has to resort to the whole government with their unlimited resources to help win the case?

In any event, the government backing the RIAA in a lawsuit may be more disturbing than the fact that the defendant was fined $1.92 million for sharing 24 songs non-commercially.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

If one were to say that internet privacy and concerns for file-sharers rarely, if ever, cross paths, this latest development would only further disprove this myth. While the Australian government says that the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment Bill 2009 – Network Protection is merely about network maintenance, the Electronic Frontier Australia paints a very different and far grimmer picture on what is going on.

EFA’s submission addresses our key concern that the proposed legislation provides a very broad exception to the prohibition on interception of network communications for the purposes of ensuring that a network is ‘appropriately used’. This is a very broad category that means that all network operators in Australia will be able to monitor the substance of communications that pass over their network for compliance with their Acceptable Use Policies – the terms of which could include nearly anything. The AGD suggests that this is necessary to increase security, but have not shown any convincing justification why the contents of communications need to be examined nor why the scheme should extend beyond corporate networks to all Australian networks – including consumer ISPs.

This proposed changed threatens to radically alter the ability of network operators to intercept, store, and disclose information passing over their networks. There are no safeguards to prevent disclosure to law enforcement agencies or third parties. It is entirely possible for these new provisions to be used to examine P2P filesharing data for copyright violations, for example, and to disclose any captured information to copyright owners.

In other words, these amendments could be used to get ISPs to do all the dirty work for the copyright industry.

In a submission during the very short consultation period, the EFA submitted their comments with regards to the proposed amendments, saying that the consultation was far too short for more critical analysis. They further comment with the following:

Section 5(1) effectively provides that ‘network protection duties’ includes monitoring the content of communications in order to ascertain whether the network is being ‘appropriately used’. Because of the broad undefined nature of the term ‘appropriately used’ and the fact that many AUPs may contain restrictions not on protocols or services that internet uses may use but upon the purpose for which those communications are being made, this provision opens the bulk of network communications to potential interception and continuing surveillance.

A common example can be found in AUPs that prohibit the use of peer-to-peer filesharing networks for the purposes of copyright infringement. In order to determine whether “the network is appropriately used”, a network operator would be required to intercept all peer-to-peer traffic and attempt a determination of whether any given traffic streams are being used to communicate copyright material without the licence of the copyright owner. Not only is such a task difficult or impossible due to the inherent complexity of copyright law and need to analyse the scope of any potential licences or fair dealing defences, it seriously imposes on the privacy of network users who are using legitimate file-sharing protocols for non-infringing activity.

EFA opposes the construction of ‘appropriately used’ in s 6AAA of the exposure draft. We submit that the definition in s 6AAA ought to be amended to reflect that operators are only entitled to intercept and monitor communications where those communications pose a threat to the security of the network itself. EFA notes that there are already laws in place which deal with the disclose of sensitive information, and that there are already civil and criminal procedures available to determine the origins and contents of communications that appear to contravene such laws. The proposed amendments have the dangerous effect of reversing the burden of proof for such monitoring, allowing network operators to monitor for compliance, rather than to seek disclosure once a prima facie case or reasonable suspicion of unlawful
activity exists. To the extent that operators of networks require the ability to monitor the activities of their users, there is no justification for allowing substantive examination of the contents of communication as opposed to the envelope information – numbers and types of packets and their destinations.

At best, this law should be a frightening prospect to all internet users, not just file-sharers as this is a huge infringement of personal privacy. While Canada is currently in the midst of mulling lawful access once again, at least the scope was far narrower than this. Even the US, home of the much despised DMCA didn’t go this far. Even the French three strikes law required some action from rights holders. To date, this appears to be the worst ISP law proposal we’ve ever seen followed closely by Austrian newspapers wanting to use data retention to enforce copyright.

Clearly, to the best of our knowledge, Australia is mulling the concept of boldly going where no other country has gone before in terms of mass communication interception. One wonders if the government has any idea what kind of task it would be to force ISPs to patrol their own networks on a packet-by-packet basis. Searching through headers on an entire major ISP is probably full time work for a team of internet specialists. That doesn’t even touch encrypted traffic. ISPs would probably have to pay money to a whole task force to people just to comply with this law which could have been spent on critical infrastructure upgrades, so Australian ISPs have a lot to lose, let alone Australian ISP customers who would have to worry about an ISP specialist covertly spying on every message or packet they send and receive online.

The law proposal will be debated in the Australian parliament in December, so there is still time to oppose this law.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.

The news comes from IT News Australia where they cite an Exetel company posting which explains the plan.

“We will simply ban P2P traffic in the 12 midnight to 2 am period if the user elects to make that an ‘off peak’ period.” John Linton explains, “The penalty for selecting that period as ‘free’ and then using it for P2P downloads will be the removal of the free period completely for that customer or termination of the service.”

“Unlike every one of our competitors (or at least I assume this is the case) we have never been concerned about making as much money as possible from providing our services – we have always been driven by the objective of providing the best possible value. One way of doing this is to make use of the ‘dead’ bandwidth that exists on virtually very commercial network (though I have known of at least two exceptions) in the early hours of the morning.” Linton also said, explaining why the company is mulling this. He continued, “Typically on an efficiently utilised network such as Exetel’s this costs us (at our current size) well over $A150,000 a month and the bandwidth is completely wasted. Simple solution offer it to your user base at no cost to them – how, over a five year period could you fail to make that work?…..giving away $A150,000 a month worth of services…..not a problem in the world. We couldn’t do it – rather than using the virtually unused 3 am to 7 am period to set a schedule of downloads our user base insisted on starting them at one second past midnight EVERY night and, for over 90% of those users their downloads were completed by 12.30 am EVERY morning. Could they be persuaded to start their downloads after 2 am?……nothing we could do for five plus years could make that happen.”

Perhaps the sad part of all of this is the fact that there was frustration over customers actually using what they paid for. If a company offers a popular service, then suddenly stops it altogether, no doubt there’ll be anger within the customer base.

Many Australian file-sharers make use of schedulers that either download during certain times of the day or certain times of the month to try and maximize their allotted bandwidth caps. In fact, sometimes users resort to an alternative form of file-sharing, blanks and postage, to help bypass the caps while still getting what they want. One wonders, if bandwidth problems haven’t been solved by now, exactly how much investment is being made in the underlying infrastructure in the first place in Australia? In addition, what happened to caching traffic to help save bandwidth for the ISPs anyway?

Linton seems to think that there is only a tiny fraction of p2p users actually using that bandwidth in the first place. He concluded, “One of the unprovable ‘business school myths’ (similar to the “every unhappy customer etc” nonsense) is that EVERY service provider would be better off without 1% – 2% (depending how unlucky they are) of their customers.”

So it seems that they think there’s no problem cutting people off if they try using p2p. Given more businesses use p2p solutions, this could only serve to hurt the overall Australian economy. If a small business such as a vidcaster uses BitTorrent to distribute their shows, sorry, but some ISPs don’t allow it. It doesn’t matter if you are selling the content, making money off of ad revenue, or even if you are legitimate at all. The ISP will have non of it.

It’s unclear if banning p2p traffic on peak hours will actually be implemented, but Exetel has already expressed interest in carrying through with it.

Have a tip? Want to contact the author? You can do so by sending a PM via the forums or via e-mail at drew@zeropaid.com.