I note that further to the court order presented to BT to block file sharing promoter Newsbin2 Sky is now also doing so. I have covered this a fair bit of late here here and here .
It is anticipated that all major consumer ISPs will get the same court order. It would be useful to measure the effectiveness of this activity. It will also be interesting to see whether Newsbin2 clones/mirrors will surface as was the case with Wikileaks and Pirate Bay although to my knowledge Newsbin2 is only being blocked in the UK (happy to be corrected here). Furthermore it will be useful to see how much growth there is in encrypted traffic out of the UK following these court orders.
Newsbin2 is itself a phoenixed version of Newsbin.
Coincidentally in the House of Commons on Tuesday there was an adjournment debate on the illegal downloading of music. Tabled by David Norris, Tory MP for Morecambe and Lonsdale, the debate was used to highlight the continued work in tackling online copyright.
Given that Mr Norris was once part of Rick Astley’s backing band on the 1980s the debate was fairly balanced. He called for a combined approach of new content services, enforcement and education. Interestingly, he highlighted the important role of free content and accepted that due process had to be followed.
Other contributors included Martin Horwood, who attacked BPI for being heavy-handed in their approach; David Amess, firmly on the side of rights holders, who welcomed government’s efforts to broker a solution; Mike Weatherly spoke of the economic harm online copyright infringement can cause; and finally, Kerry McCarthy called on Government to look at the economics behind legal services to ensure that artists were being fairly rewarded.
In response for the Government, Ed Vaizey said “we will never eradicate online piracy—such a goal would be foolish—but we can reduce it significantly“. Whilst praising the economic and social benefits of the internet, he cautioned that it had made infringement too easy. He updated on the status of the DEA (Initial Obligations Code should happen in 2012) and the Hargreaves Review (ichard Hooper has been appointed to take forward the digital copyright exchange).
On search engine ranking and advertising the government is keen to find a voluntary solution:
“We are also working with internet advertisers to try to reduce the amount of advertising that appears on infringing sites. This can often be inadvertent, given the wide spread of internet advertising, but the Internet Advertising Bureau has made significant progress in reducing the amount of advertising that appears on illegal sites, and it continues to work on the issue.”
During his speech Ed Vaizey also demonstrated considerable knowledge of “popular music” quoting Chumbawumba, Michael Jackson 1, Jarvis Cocker and Adele. I’ll keep quiet – he knows more than me on this subject.
My thanks to the ISPA secretariat for drawing my attention to the debate which is a good read and can be seen in full here. Sorry about the shameless hashtagging today. Felt a bit rebelious 🙂
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One reply on “Sky blocks Newsbin2 too @edvaizey #deact #Chumbawumba, #MichaelJackson #JarvisCocker #Adele”
As is Virgin Media Tref – (don’t know if you have mentioned this already). I read an interview with Mr White (unsure if this his real name) the spokes person for Newsbin2 & the boss of Team R Dogs who brought back Newsbin1 back after the MPA shut it down. He was speaking with members of his community – and some were saying they could access the site still from the blocked providers, some could only access it via the IP and not the URL. His brash attitude was they could “try”.
They have a mailing list of all members once they get the point where it effects them – they mail all user with come to this [URL/IP] from now on – just like they did when they took on Newsbin1.
Although i do not agree with online music/film piracy – surely the government should spend more time on other aspects of what people look at online – that that causes real hurt/pain. But then they did try in the past with Operation Ore – but did not have the resources to bring them to justice.
BE.