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davieG

Net providers to begin sending 'pirate' emails

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Image captionThe letters do not include illegal streaming services such as Kodi

 

UK ISPs are to start sending "educational letters" to customers identified as downloading copyright material without paying for it.

It is part of the UK government's attempt to crack down on piracy.

BT, Virgin Media, TalkTalk and Sky have agreed to send the missives, which will be emailed rather than posted.

The controversial move has been years in the planning, and some experts believe it is too late to be an effective deterrent.

BT, Virgin Media and Sky will start sending out letters on 17 January, and TalkTalk's campaign will begin at the end of the month.

The BBC has seen a sample letter, which will be headed with the customer's telephone number.

It reads: "Get It Right from a Genuine Site' has got in touch with us.

"Get it Right is a government-backed campaign acting for copyright owners who think their content's been shared without their permission.

"It looks like someone has been using your broadband to share copyrighted material (that means things like music, films, sport or books).

"And as your broadband provider, we have to let you know when this happens."

It then provides a list of the content in question and directs users to a website with "tips and advice on how to stop it happening again".

No delay

The government's plans to crack down on piracy were tarnished by so-called speculative invoicing, in which law firms sent bullying letters to people accused of downloading content, including pornography, free.

The letters threatened court action unless a one-off fee of about £800 was paid.

Many lawyers said such cases could never be proved, because the owner of the broadband connection may not be the same person who had downloaded the content in question.

The plans to send out letters to people identified as net pirates were first agreed in 2014.

Get it Right from a Genuine Site insists there has been no delay to the plans.

"The educational campaign has now been running successfully for over a year with the educational email element beginning during the early part of 2017," said a Get it Right spokesperson.

Get it Right monitors peer to peer networks for illegal downloads.

But many newer forms of consuming content free, such as streaming and cyber-lockers, are not included.

Neither is Kodi and other set-top box software that allows users to stream pirated movies, sport and TV programmes.

Ernesto van der Sar, editor of piracy news website TorrentFreak, said: "Over the past several years most pirates in the UK have shifted towards direct download and streaming services.

"Since the piracy alerts only target peer to peer sharing, they will have less of an impact today than they would have had a few years ago.

"Due to the relatively small number of notices that will be sent to users and the fact that there are no consequences for getting 'caught', I expect the deterrent effect to be minimal.

"As for the educational part, most pirates are already aware of the legal alternatives.

"They simply have no desire to pay or can't find what they want on authorised channels."

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27 minutes ago, MPH said:

 

 

Why are the government getting involved?

Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

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People get mad about this and it distracts them from our shite education, health,  transport  and general economic well being. :P

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The people who make these films/TV programmes, who own the rights to sport spend 100s of millions on them. Is it any surprise they don't want us getting them for free?If they can't make any money they won't spend the money in the first place and there'll be no films/tv/sports to pirate.

 

I've done more than anyone to push Kodi on here, I'm just as guilty as anyone else but I don't blame the companies/govt trying to stop it. I can't understand why someone would get angry about it.

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12 minutes ago, Webbo said:

The people who make these films/TV programmes, who own the rights to sport spend 100s of millions on them. Is it any surprise they don't want us getting them for free?If they can't make any money they won't spend the money in the first place and there'll be no films/tv/sports to pirate.

 

I've done more than anyone to push Kodi on here, I'm just as guilty as anyone else but I don't blame the companies/govt trying to stop it. I can't understand why someone would get angry about it.

I can take or leave the movie/tv/boxsets, being free. Most things I watch are available free to air anyway. I'd be devastated if my Leicester sofa season ticket goes, I'd happily pay for it legally if it were available.

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If the industry wants to stop people pirating it needs to give them what they want which is material available on demand either live or as it comes out for a fair price. If I see a movie I want to watch I want to be able to stream it to my living room as soon as it comes out not wait a year for an overpriced DVD or three years for it to get to Netflix. Likewise I'll happily pay a tenner week in week out for a good quality stream of the Leicester game. They say this would impact on revenue at cinemas or live attendances but right now everything is available for free online and millions of people take advantage, how could it be any worse for them than it already is? Just make everything available immediately at a fair price and I think most people would pay rather than pirate.

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26 minutes ago, Barky said:

If the industry wants to stop people pirating it needs to give them what they want which is material available on demand either live or as it comes out for a fair price. If I see a movie I want to watch I want to be able to stream it to my living room as soon as it comes out not wait a year for an overpriced DVD or three years for it to get to Netflix. Likewise I'll happily pay a tenner week in week out for a good quality stream of the Leicester game. They say this would impact on revenue at cinemas or live attendances but right now everything is available for free online and millions of people take advantage, how could it be any worse for them than it already is? Just make everything available immediately at a fair price and I think most people would pay rather than pirate.

Exactly, I'd happily pay for a service like the one I get for free illegally. But they don't have that. I work minimum 10 hours a day, the majority of the time 12 hours a day with an hour travel added on, the last thing I want to do is watch a film on telly at the set time it's on that lasts an extra hour because of adverts. 

 

I simply don't have the hours in the day to waste on that sort of downtime. :dry:

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It's alright saying you'd pay £5 or £10 to watch a football match, but if you went to the ground it'd cost at least £30. Not only that you could have 5 blokes in your sitting room watching the match, it would definitely affect the gate. Now you could say that with all the money they get they could afford to let people into the ground for free and that's true but while there are people who willingly give them money to attend why wouldn't the club take their money?

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So they're just going to ask you to stop, not tell you. If they were serious they'd cut off your internet or even bring charges against you, but they clearly can't. All they can do is plead you to stop, and obviously nobody will.

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Big sport should be accessible, nearly all PL games are sold out. So people will find away to watch a stream regardless and most would happily pay for it if it was available. Likewise TV shows unless you are signed up to every provider you will not have access to everything you want to watch.

 

Films and music I agree with, there needs to be an exclusivity for cinemas because they are struggling but once on DVD most films can be bought or rented legally and easily through most media. Music is also very readily available to buy and subscribe to streaming services and there is no excuse to illegally download.

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What's most annoying is that live Premier League football is available on TV at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon in virtually every country in the world.....except for the country it's being ****ing played in! It has become so greedy that it's no wonder everyone is jumping on the kodi wagon. 

 

In the same way that football clubs are gonna charge over the odds to attend games because they know people will pay it, other people are gonna try and find ways to save a few quid and watch the game another way because they know that they can get access fairly easily. 

 

Simply put, karma is a bitch.

 

If they made access affordable they would maybe make even more money.

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9 hours ago, Facecloth said:

So they're just going to ask you to stop, not tell you. If they were serious they'd cut off your internet or even bring charges against you, but they clearly can't. All they can do is plead you to stop, and obviously nobody will.

Pretty much it. The government has to make it look like it is doing something, but they don't really care and have bigger things to worry about.

 

lol At whoever managed to get "fascism" into the thread, yeah, it's just like that.

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13 hours ago, Webbo said:

If someone was stealing your property wouldn't you want the govt to try and stop it?

No I'd want the police to try and stop it.  And since they had no interest in finding the guy who stole a couple of grand from friends of mine - not very well off friends I'll add (the money stolen amounted to the majority of their savings) - all because we couldn't give them the guy's home address when I took them down the station to report it, then I don't particularly want them to prioritise cracking down on low-income people who pirate films (slightly denting some millionaires' incomes) when they clearly have more important concerns.

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1 minute ago, pSinatra said:

If Kanye was having to get to gigs in the back of a Transit & didn't have a billion sitting in his bank account.  If Jamie Vardy was working nights at Magna Park to supplement the money he gets from football, I might have some sympathy.

Magna Park Argos. I still have nightmares about that place. :revenge:

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They need to realise that they're fighting a losing battle by sticking with their method of delivery to consumers, which is clearly broken in some cases. It's a massive grey area.

 

For football it's frankly absurd that I can walk into a pub in the middle of the Botswana bush and legally be able to watch a Leicester City match while simultaneously my dad is 8 miles away from the ground and can't legally watch it in the UK because it's a Saturday 3PM kick off. Even for "broadcast" matches, having to pay £50 a month on the off chance that one of your games might be selected by the broadcasters because they're playing against one of the "elite" teams that week. It's no surprise that people will chose something that's freely accessible over either being extorted or no alternative at all.

 

For films I personally love going to the cinema so I'd never download something that's on release but the issue is that some cinemas just don't care enough about the actual screening of films to have a) enough screenings of non blockbusters or b) the convenience of the customer. There's been so many films that I've missed because it was only out for a week or two and even then either only available in 3D (more expensive for no reason) or they just haven't been available at all. It's great that they come to Netflix or Prime to make them more accessible but when they remove them is it therefore wrong for viewers to download them from elsewhere? What about when films have been broadcast on free to air TV; if it's been freely available to the public to record onto a DVR/DVD/VHS, whats the difference with downloading a better quality copy for personal use? It's just a massive grey area with rights and wrongs on all eyes.

 

And then there's TV. HBO complain about piracy of Game of Thrones (though some connected with the show have actually said piracy was good for the show) but when they put it behind a gigantic paywall are they actually surprised? Of all the broadcasters in the UK they chose the least accessible to the market with the fewest customers - can they really justify forcing you to pay £26 a month to access something only broadcast 10 weeks a year? They're completely ad-free on HBO, if they really cared about the integrity of their product they would have chosen an ad-free broadcaster in the UK instead of one that breaks up the narrative. I'll happily pay for ad-free broadcasts of GOT or Westworld or buy a DVD for a reasonable price afterwards.

 

Basically, improve your services.

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Well that's the us sorted then, but what about the chinese, russians,polish etc, who are the real perpetrators of downloading hookie software and copyrighted material.

   Another thing, Surely it's the ISP's who are breaking the law as well by providing a gateway to enable end users to download copy-righted material. It's like who is more at fault, a drug pusher or a drug user. 

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