No, not a serious piece on the issues mariners face in many areas of Asia and Africa, but instead links to a couple of articles on plans to punish those who download and share copyrighted material by withdrawing their access to the internet.
On one hand, we have the British government considering such plans, whilst members of the European Parliament have voted against (only just) such rules, at least at a Europe wide level. Individual governments will obviously still retain the right to put such policies into practice.
Even without any actual UK legislation in place, I know from personal experience that repeat offenders in Britain can find their ISPs cancel their account. Perhaps I know from being caught downloading movies or programs? Nope, part of my job a few years ago was to trace specific users (those who didn’t use PeerGuardian at least 😉 ) that were caught by organizations who scour Peer2Peer networks, looking for illegal copies of copyright material. However, all that would happen back then was if I found a specifically named file was still being actively shared by a customer, they would receive a warning. If the same person ignored the warning, or was caught with new files we were alerted to, their account would be closed. However, as we ran more than 100 different branded ISPs, all working on the same equipment, we’d often see the same people come back again, under a new ISP label 🙂
May 01 2008
Pirate Isolation Plan
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