Latest Entry
Jan 28, 2010 Copyright, Featured, File Sharing, Privacy
In one of our early opinion articles back in September 2008, we highlighted the practices of a law firm (Davenport Lyons) who were sending out a number of threatening letters to alleged illegal file sharers demanding a settlement fee of over £300 or threatening court action. The law firms antics were picked up by the consumer group Which? who responded by reporting the firm to the SRA (Solicitors Regulatory Authority).
Neil Watson, Head of Operations
Yesterday’s news reports suggest Which? has identified another law firm operating this practice. In November 2009 a ruling by the Royal Courts of Justice granted ACS the ability to demand the personal details of thousands of customers from ISPs. These customers are once again accused of illegal file sharing and once again Which? has come to their rescue. The accused customers are receiving letters demanding between £300 and £500 or face the threat of court action. Which? argues that many of those targeted have been wrongly accused (again) and as we stated in our original article (Are YOU on the list?) this could well be the case as the law firm and copyright holders are identifying the illegal file sharers using IP addresses which can be easily hijacked and spoofed.
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Recent Entries
Jan 26, 2010 Privacy, Social Networking
Back in December Facebook infuriated many of its users and a number of privacy organisations when it revealed changes to its existing privacy settings which encouraged users to make as much information as possible available to the entire web and even removed the ability to make your name, gender, city and friends list private. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has now taken this privacy argument a step further claiming prophet status as he apparently foresaw a new social norm where we apparently care less for our privacy and are not concerned by the world and its dog seeing our personal information.
Firstly, I don’t know about you but I still care about my privacy and I am less than happy about sharing my personal information with the entire Internet. So his foreseen privacy-liberal world is not exactly the reality he is claiming, at least not just yet.
Zuckerberg states in his interview with TechCrunch “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’
And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Jan 13, 2010 Business, Net Neutrality, Regulation, Security
Is it the end of the road for Google.cn?
Yesterday on the official Google Blog, David Drummond, Google’s Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer announced that following a cyber attack in December Google is now considering withdrawing its operations from the Chinese market. Clearly there’s more to this though and we think market leaders should make a stand against the restriction that Chinese government censorship applies to Chinese web users.
Neil Watson, Head of Operations
Through a thorough investigation since mid December Google allegedly has evidence to suggest that the attack originated in China and its aim was to access the Gmail accounts of several US, European and Chinese based human rights advocates. The company also has evidence to suggest that the attacks did not only affect Google, advising that an additional 20 large corporations in various industries including the Internet, media, finance and chemical sectors were also affected.
The Register reports that one of these additional companies was possibly Adobe, although the company has not confirmed whether or not the two incidents were related. Adobe also announced news of its attack via its corporate blog advising that they had become aware of “a computer security incident involving a sophisticated, coordinated attack against corporate network systems managed by Adobe and other companies.”
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Jan 11, 2010 Business, Net Neutrality, Polls, Privacy, Regulation, Security
The UK’s mobile operators have recently united against the government’s planned IMP (Improvement and Modernisation Programme) which will require all ISPs and operators to collect and store all IP communications.
We would like to know what you think about the government’s plans and have created a poll to capture your thoughts.
Loading ...
Jan 5, 2010 Copyright, File Sharing, Net Neutrality
In a recent opinion article of his own within the New York Times, U2 front man Bono warned all creative types to beware of the evils of the Internet, especially us greedy ISP types.
He states “The only thing protecting the movie and TV industries from the fate that has befallen music and indeed the newspaper business is the size of the files. The immutable laws of bandwidth tell us we’re just a few years away from being able to download an entire season of “24” in 24 seconds. Many will expect to get it free.” A tad over dramatic but he’s probably right on that one.
However he continues “A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.”
This statement just goes to show why multi-millionaire Bono should stick to singing and campaigning for poorer nations and leave the economics of Internet service provision to the professionals. Those of us within this supposedly swollen, profit rich Internet industry are more than aware of the reality. Consumer demand for the cheapest, fastest broadband continues to increase resulting in even lower profit margins for us “greedy” ISPs.
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Dec 15, 2009 Polls
Its fair to say that 2009 has been a challenging year for many and as Christmas approaches we’re wondering what you are looking forward to in 2010.
We’ve added a poll asking that very question – cast your vote and let us know what you are most looking forward to in 2010.
Loading ...
Dec 9, 2009 Business, Copyright, Digital Divide, Featured, File Sharing, Marketing, Net Neutrality, Privacy, Regulation
As we approach the end of an eventful year I thought it would be apt to take a look back over the main industry talking points of 2009 to evaluate what happened, why we were discussing it and where we are currently at. When we have completed that let’s take a stab at predicting what we will be discussing in 2010.
Elsa Chen, General Manager
The ‘hottest’ topic of 2009 was undoubtedly illegal file sharing
We first covered this subject back in April with an article discussing the Pirate Bay case. The four founders of the website ‘The Pirate Bay’ were found guilty in a Swedish court for assisting the illegal downloading of copyrighted material. They were each sentenced to 1 year in jail and ordered to pay £2.4million in damages to the entertainment industry. This was the catalyst that started the raging debate between the entertainment industry, the government and ISPs which continues to this date. The entertainment industry and a number of high profile MPs, in particular Peter Mandelson, are calling for a three strikes and you’re cut-off policy. However, ISPs have continuously raised concerns regarding the accuracy of correctly identifying offenders and the fact that cutting a user off is presuming guilt before a fair trial with minimal and potentially flawed evidence.
This topic continued to be covered for several months and was once again inflamed with the release of the Digital Britain Report which actually advised against a three strikes policy, much to the annoyance of the entertainment industry.
So where are we at now?
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Dec 2, 2009 Advertising, Copyright, Featured
Last month Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp which owns titles such as The Wall Street Journal, The Times and The Sun, announced plans to block Google from searching the company’s websites as he believes companies such as Google and Microsoft are “stealing” his stories for their own benefit.
Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing
In his interview with Sky News Australia he stated “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.”
He continued “There’s a doctrine called fair use which we believe could be challenged in the courts and barred altogether — but, you know, it’s OK. We’re getting a lot of advertising revenue, so we’ll take that slowly.”
But it’s not as one sided as Murdoch would have us believe. News Corp also benefits from its involvement with Google. Google is reported to deliver 100,000 clicks a minute to News Corps’ websites, that’s a lot of traffic to simply dismiss. Murdoch responded to this by questioning the quality of the traffic delivered by Google, stating that Google does not deliver loyal customers that would be willing to pay for his stories. “What’s the point of having someone come occasionally who likes a headline they see on Google?” he asked. “There’s not enough advertising in the world to make all the websites profitable. We’d rather have fewer people come to our website, but paying. Customers are very happy to pay for it when they buy a newspaper.”
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Nov 25, 2009 Privacy, Regulation, Security, Social Networking
Following our earlier articles regarding the rise of social networking and its potential privacy issues and our coverage of subjects such as cyber-bullying, when we heard the results of Ofcom’s latest report it raised a number of concerns.
Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing
Last month Ofcom released a report into children’s web access and their online habits.
The report shows that 35% of 12-15 year olds and 16% of 8-11 year olds now have access to the web in their bedrooms, up 20% and 9% respectively since 2007. Worryingly 60% of 12-15 year olds and one third of 8-11 year olds use the internet mostly on their own and one in five 5-7 year olds say they use the internet without an adult in the room.
From the parents’ point of view 45% of those whose children use the Internet at home state they have filtering software and controls in place but this leaves an obvious 55% of children using the Internet unsupervised with no parental restrictions in place.
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Nov 23, 2009 Copyright, Featured, File Sharing, Privacy, Regulation
Last month (here) we discussed Mandelson’s announcement at the ‘C&binet Conference’ regarding the tackling of illegal file sharers and his continued proposal of a three strikes system. These proposals have now progressed further with the release of the Digital Economy Bill.
Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing
The bill covers a number of issues but the key features affecting ISPs and broadband users are as follows:
- 1. ISPs will be forced to provide written warnings to alleged illegal file sharers when alerted to do so by the copyright holders. Additionally, ISPs will be required to record how many warnings the accused customers have received and feed this back to the rights holders.
- 2.The Secretary of State (currently Mandelson) will be given new powers to update the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act in order to react to changes in technology more quickly. The powers will be exercised by statutory instrument rather than primary legislation which means although the proposals will need to be debated in the Houses of Parliament and will be subject to public consultation the MPs and Lords cannot block them.
- The Register: Filesharing laws to hit websites and newsgroups too
- 3. The use of orphan networks will be allowed where the rights holder cannot be found or identified.
- 4. The government will be given the power to reform and restructure Nominet, the body responsible for domain names in the UK. This follows recent board resignations.
- The Register: Mandelson to get Nominet reform powers
- 5. Ofcom will be assigned new duties to promote investment in the UK communications infrastructure and will be required to assess this every two years.
Alongside other ISPs, Entanet has voiced concerns over this policy for some time now but it appears that Mandelson has finally got his way – although the bill has not actually made it into law yet. Once the Digital Economy Bill is on the statute books ISPs will be forced to send written warnings to alleged copyright infringers at the request of the copyright holder. As expected the suspected users will be identified by the copyright holders using IP addresses from BitTorrent. The ISPs will then be required to record the number of warnings each suspected user receives and supply this information to the copyright holders. If the copyright holder wants further information on a particular persistent offender they will require a court order.
READ MORE…
Loading ...
Are YOU on the list? – Update
W_Churchill on 
CarstenDK on 
Loading ...