Spain Outlaws P2P File-Sharing 432
Section_Ei8ht writes "Spanish Congress has made it a civil offense to download anything via p2p networks, and a criminal offense for ISP's to allow users to file-share, even if the use is fair. There is also to be a tax on all forms of blank media, including flash memory drives. I guess the move towards distributing films legally via BitTorrent is a no go in Spain." Here is our coverage of the tax portion of this law.
WoW (Score:4, Interesting)
Also if you want to really push the boat out they've now made it illegal to play online games, since they work in a way you could argue is P2P in some cases.
How stupid. (Score:2, Interesting)
How can a country be so progressive (at least on paper) on some things, and so idiotic on this?
This just in (Score:2, Interesting)
This seems like not only a bypassable law (encrypted ssh tunnels, etc...), an uninforceable law (what're they gonna do? punish the MILLIONS of people who fileshare?), but also a VERY STUPID LAW (legal file sharing is now a "no no"? why the FUCK was that even proposed, let alone passed!). For shame, Spain, for shame.
They got it all! (Score:3, Interesting)
These guys got it all! Now they just need to ban internet and computers, even if your use of it is fair, this way there will be no more piracy.
In other news, arresting 100 persons is still a good thing provided that one of them is guilty.
it's not FUD.. (Score:5, Interesting)
since every protocol on the internet can be used for unauthorized p2p sharing ISP owners must now either cease all service or go to prison.
This is a subtle but radical difference from what other nations have done, and it spells doom for all spanish ISP's
Re:WoW (Score:4, Interesting)
On the flip side, if I rent a server at a hosting company for $50 a month.. or for that matter, a virtual host for $15 a month, is it no longer "peer-to-peer" since I'm just a server?
If I set no outgoing connections on bit-torrent, then aren't I just downloading like any other?
Re:How stupid. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:What about Windows Update (Score:5, Interesting)
Ummm, wasn't copyright infringment already a civil offence in Spain? So you're saying that they passed a law to make the civil offence of copyright infringment into a civil offence?
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Re:Score (Score:3, Interesting)
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Re:So let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
They can also expand the term "ISP" (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Inbound bandwidth proportional to outbound? (Score:5, Interesting)
* Peers are people who are both downloading and uploading.
* Seeders are people who have already downloaded the entire file and are uploading it out of the kindness of their hearts.
Peers will continually kill the connections with the worst download/upload ratio, meaning you will get virtually nothing from peers if you don't upload.
Seeders upload to anybody, though they _may_ be clever by avoiding uploading the same parts of the file more than once during a limited amount of time in order to maximize the amount of data that can be distributed between peers.
So in other words, if trhere are a lot of seeders you will get ok download speeds without uploading.
Re:How stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:How stupid. (Score:3, Interesting)
So if a lobby manages to get the Law to state that P2P is going against that common universal goal, tough luck. There's no place for any "minority" (or non-lobby) opinion in a system driven by votes: winner takes all.
Re:So let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
The traffic analysis necessary to detect BitTorrent traffic is trivial; nothing else opens a large number of connections and starts sending data the way that BitTorrent does. Encryption has worked with some ISPs because they've only made a half-hearted effort to traffic-shape. As it currently stands, many users have a choice of broadband providers and will switch if their carrier is too aggressive, and in most cases it's easier to simply cap all of an heavy user's bandwidth than to waste the cycles trying to find the BT traffic in particular.
But rest assured, the traffic analysis is child's play. If ISPs want to stop BT traffic, encryption won't present any impediments.
Well at least they're not banned from Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Why has this happened? Oh well you see Telkom likes to save bandwidth because they're cheap. So they force every international connection through a cache server. Slashdot has deemed the cache server an "abusive" IP, so it's banned from posting on the site. But you can't NOT submit from that IP, because it's forced by the only internet provider in the country. So basically 45 million people can't post thanks to lazy site administrators.
Have I submitted this to the appropriate channels? Of course, countless times, and never recieve any reply. I've even submitted it as news. I've asked about it as an ask slashdot.(both rejected of course). Nobody seems to care.
After all, I'm sure it's just so easy for everyone to VNC into a machine in the US like I'm doing so they can struggle with laggy shaped international connections just to submit text to a website. It's our fault for living in a third world country with a government that artificially maintains a monopoly now that it's no longer "official" since half of the government still has stock in it, right?
Go ahead, mod me offtopic or troll or whatever. I don't give a damn. If you people bothered to read your own damn mail and fix the site I wouldn't have had to spend a year trying to find a solution only to wind up bitching about it in posts!
Re:How stupid. (Score:1, Interesting)
(a) de-regulated markets
(b) implemented a federal system in all but name despite the objections of the arch-conservatives;
(c) changed from an electoral system based on the family where women had no vote to true, universal adult suffrage;
(d) gone from an ultra-religious, reactionary social system to a forward-looking, liberal one accepting of gays (at least legally; by using the word "marriage" in their gay-partnership law the Spanish have come even farther than the British, who allow only "civil partnerships")
Re:Well at least they're not banned from Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Mod parent up, at least as funny (Score:2, Interesting)
So, if every GNU/Linux contributor claims refund... Well, at least they'll make a good DDoS!
Imagine that, a crowd of people, all swinging copies fo their own copyrighted materials...
Re:Mod parent up, at least as funny (Score:2, Interesting)
We have the blank media tax here in Canada as well. And it isn't all that bad. How often do you buy stacks of CD's? SO for pennies per year, the tax goes to these people. What it means is that the RIA cant go after your ass for anything because the tax on CDS. Its not like its a dollar/per cd tax. The other way around it is to buy DATA cds, which seem to not have the tax, because its the AUDIO ones that have them. There isn't as much kuffufle as one might think over this. Whats happening now is that the CRA (equivalent to the ria) is salivating at the mouth thinking at what it might have lost out. Some Canadian artists have started a website that lets everyone know that they don't feel represented.
The problem is that the tax doesn't seem to get distributed amongst the artists. Thats where it breaks down. Its up to the artists to sue the CRA or the government in order to insure that it gets divided up fairly. Its where corporate greed wins out over their advertisement campaign.
Re:money terms.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Making copyrighted content available on P2P is simply letting people know what you have. If no one else wants anything, nothing is ever going to be downloaded. It's the other person's decision....not yours.
The bullet doesn't make a decision...at least...not yet [slashdot.org]....so your analogy is piss poor, to say the least.
ISP Filtering - Affects VoIP? (Score:1, Interesting)
If Telefonica, not the most efficient or technologically progressive company in the world, were to implement a blanket throttling of P2P traffic, would that destroy my Skype connection? I ask as someone who has had to rely upon Skype telefony for a year now because Telfonica are a bunch of useless gibbons who can't get it together to arrange for my landline to be installed.
A year.
Seriously.
Any insight?
Re:SENSATIONALIST CRAP and LIES (Score:2, Interesting)
Please name some, I'd like to know.
Re:WoW (Score:3, Interesting)
I would beg to differ - Rogers in canada has been doing quite a good job of blocking all bittorrent traffic, encrypted and nonencrypted. They just recently put into play heuristic pattern matching to catch the encrypted traffic.
Not saying it doesnt suck. People are talking about a class-action suit against rogers.
Re:Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? (Score:3, Interesting)
technically, P2P _can_ be banned (Score:1, Interesting)
step 1. only allow tcp packets, or other state-based protocols (meaning, udp and icmp would become invalid protocols in Spain)
step 2. require the ISP to enforce stateful tcp: keep state of SYN/FIN packets and firewall block unauthorized data packets not sent inside an initialized tcp tunnel (after SYN, before FIN between SRC:DEST addresses on port X). This is a no-brainer, 95% of routers already do this, and 100% of firewalls and NAT'ing routers already do this.
step 3. restrict at most N simultaneous tcp tunnels per customer IP. Configure N so that it is a reasonable number of simultaneous socket_pairs for a home user. Perhaps 200 to accomodate roommates NAT'd behind a single IP.
This will prevent _direct_ access to P2P networks without seriously dropping connections, in both directions. If the customer cannot accept new connections after 200, most peer clients would either ban them or prioritize them low. (LowID in eMule). If the customer cannot create new connections, many p2p app would cause problems. Some smart clients (eMule or Azureus) allow you to specify Max#Connections, but when it is a paltry number like 200, compounded with the problem that usually only 1% of the connected peers even transmit any data (and when they do transmit data, it's at 1KB/s), the customer will get horrible bandwidth on their P2P, so little that it makes infinitely more sense to rent a DVD than wait two months for it to download (and that's bandwidth, not just latency).
There are, of course, ways to bypass such restrictions through tunnelling all IP traffic inside a single TCP sockpair. SOCKS5 would accomplish this - however, only outbound connections can be established. Peers will not be able to open connections with you. (If you did have a customized host that allowed such level of port forwarding, the 65535 ports will quickly run out if that socks5 host is NAT'ing 100 or more Spaniards -- and, if each Spaniard is fortunate enough to find his or her own dedicated socks5 server abroad, can we really still call them a "Spaniard"? At that point, with such resources abroad, they'd be much more of a 'global citizen' and hence any domestic law wouldn't properly constrain them). With socks5 and inability to port forward, the topology of the home-based IP will be radically different - no spaniard will be able to directly connect to a fellow spaniard unless within that 200 allocable connections.
An alternate, but similar, solution would be to internationally segregate customer IPs from corporate IPs and prevent any more than 200 connections forming between any given customer IP and other customer IPs. The evolution into corporate apartheid over customers is saddening, but that's the strong trajectory we're on. Even my use of the word "customer" is dating this writing to post-1990. Curiously, is China all that bad, are they not just politically five to ten years ahead of where we are?
Re:technically, P2P _can_ be banned (Score:3, Interesting)
Stuff like this is already well in development. Not everything has to use a thousand inbound and outbound TCP connections like Bittorrent, there are many different approaches to this sort of thing. Not to mention there are a lot of tricks in TCP. Some threat models see the ISP as malicious. Free speech ultimately demands anonymity, and the ability to be able to punch through any effective barriers blocking the protocol that allows that.
By the time they would successfully enforce such a thing, we would probably already have a fielded, very good way around it, and by then, it would be extraordinarily difficult - possibly computationally infeasible, given enough time and effort - to block, or perhaps even detect.
And remember, comparatively very few peers are in Spain.
You could just turn the upload of Spanish residential connections down to shit, like 32kbps or something, and allow only ACKs to bypass that limit. But there'd still be enough left over bandwidth from everywhere that *doesn't* legislate itself into the Internet Dark Ages to keep the stuff moving, and there are tricks on top of anything that has already been done, at that...