Fergie's Tech Blog

Use BitTorrent in Germany, Get Your Internet Disconnected

Via TorrentFreak.

Last night, heads of the international music industry had ‘crisis’ talks with Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin, centering on the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s claim that the German music market has declined 50% since 2002. Demands came for more assistance to help the industry against piracy and measures to make ISPs take action against their own customers when the music industry feels they may be trading copyright material.

Indeed, the IFPI have something specific in mind. They would like to ‘introduce an obligation on ISPs to terminate service to subscribers abusing the service to make infringing content available’. Potentially, that means terminating your internet access if you’re caught uploading one track. But if you prefer to take it literally, ‘making available’ means that a track sitting in your shared folder that you have never uploaded to anyone, could cost you your internet connection. Quite a punishment. To make matters worse, uploading is built into the BitTorrent protocol so using torrents and not falling foul of these demands becomes almost impossible.

posted by Fergie @ 5/09/2007 04:00:00 PM