EU Has Doubts As ISP Rolls Out Deep Packet Inspection For Copyright Enforcement

[jayfish]

Source: Ars Technica

In the middle of last year, Virgin announced a stunning music plan: unlimited streaming and downloads of non-DRMed music files from Universal (with deals hopefully to come from other labels). The music would be part of your ISP subscription fee, and downloads would be yours to keep forever. After giving Virgin permission to use the "carrot," though, labels wanted a bit more "stick" applied to users who continued to infringe copyright. Virgin had no real way to measure the effective rate of copyright infringement by its users, so in November 2009 it turned to Detica, a unit of European arms contractor BAE systems. Detica developed a product named CView that, in the words of the company, "applies high volume, advanced analytics to anonymous ISP traffic data, and aggregates this information into a measure of the total volume of unauthorised file sharing." The data appears to be "anonymous" only in the sense that it consists of IP addresses and not usernames. When deployed by an ISP, however, linking IP addresses to one's own user accounts is trivial.

Read more: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/eu-has-doubts-as-isp-rolls-out-dpi-for-copyright-enforcement.ars

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More shades of "1984", "Brazil" and any other dystopian horror you can imagine.

Jay

[wtmusic]

1. "We can't prove that you've been sharing, but it's very likely."

Our Advanced Analytics say so. Step this way, please. :scared:

[Kurska]

2. How the hell would it even tell legitimate large downloads from illegal fire sharing.

Blizzard uses P2P software to disturbute their patches for the best selling game world of warcraft as do most MMORPGS and innumerable other online games. Many services offer massive legal file download like music or movies, how is any of this going to work without completely violating their privacy and tracing all the data from point A to point B.

[pimpbot]

3. P2P has already started encrypting data

The only people making $$$ out of this are the slimy companies that develop these products. BAE probably just reused some product they made for the government to sniff packets and is now selling it to the private sector. Cha-Ching.

I'd like to see them go after encrypted data. The amount of hardware they'd need wouldn't make it worth it for the RIAA.

[bemildred]

4. I'm guessing, but I guess they can't do much with TOR or BitTorrent.

Cause they would have to do packet re-assembly. And the same would apply to properly encrypted traffic.

[Pavulon]

5. Crypto time.

everything except src and dst info.