comp_ali

Business secretary Lord Mandelson has confirmed the government's 'get tough' policy on illegal file sharing, with persistent illegal downloaders looking at being cut off from the net from summer 2011.

Speaking at the government's digital creative industries conference, he said net connections could and would be blocked, but only as a last resort, claiming that a 'legislate and enforce' strategy was the only way to protect the intellectual property rights of content producers. 'Three strikes is a reasonable way of describing our approach,' he said.
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source : T3

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"It is doubtful how DRM could reduce piracy and there no way it can boost games sales either"

dj_stick

i can imagine this won't be too popular, but I doubt there'd be a large percentage of people affected

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niceguyrichy

unless there's a big shift in the general opinion of the ISP's , this isn't gonna happen anytime soon. not properly anyways.
it would need full and total support of the service providers to implement it at all, and the majority of isps are dead against it..

the one ISP who decided to cut off file sharers of their own accord, very publicly back-tracked less than a week later

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IvanV

Yeah, well, at first they won't implement it correctly. Then the implementation will gradually get better and better and in a few years it'll there as they intended and the end users will end up like a frog put into a pot of water that's slowly being warmed and before it realizes what's happening, it's cooked.

Similar goes for what dj stick said. The system needed to do this effectively would have a huge potential and I doubt that it's uses would end with individuals downloading music (that's hardly our society's biggest problem).

At first, the monitoring system will be used to track down file sharers and the majority of people won't complain. The means of detecting what exactly a user is doing will advance, but again, most people won't be affected and they won't complain. Then, as that advance in Internet traffic monitoring goes on, it'll probably be used to detect terrorists and once again, as the majority of people aren't terrorists, few will be complaining too loudly. Then, I suppose, as the resources grow, it could be used to look for criminal activity, and no need to repeat the part about not complaining. Then, at some point, the evolved system could be used to detect potential pedophiles, which, again, won't be protested by many; the data gathered that way will need to be distributed to schools and such as we wouldn't want a possible pedo working in one. The only problem is that as the process unfolds, as techniques, applied to the widest population (as Britain has a plan to get everyone connected to the Internet by a broadband connection by 2012 or something like that) get more effective (and more intrusive) and as the circle of those who have access to the data keeps widening to include more and more agencies (and individuals that make them) and, eventually, employers, we could end up in what won't make for a very pretty picture. And as the process will be gradual and no change will affect too many people, each of the changes will be accepted without much more than a stifled grumble.

Of course, this is a bit of speculation, but seeing how similar processes have been unfolding over the last decade, I find the scenario not implausible.

EDIT: I'm not British, but I'm saying "we" because this sort of trends isn't local. Some countries are ahead of others, but many are facing the same challenges and, whether it's because those in power usually have the same goals or people simply copy others' solutions, as far as I can see, what happens in one place is often repeated in many others.

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Feed the porkers and don't touch the buttons!