The stupidity of the three strike law is highlighted by TalkTalk

The current goal of the entertainment industry, which is to ban heavy P2P broadband users that are caught transferring copyrighted material three times, is currently being worked on by the government in the UK.

Many experts, however, have said on a number of occasions that there are various reasons why this is not a good idea. Among the many reasons given are the cost of implementing the system, offenders will often need to be tracked across ISPs, banning P2P broadband users destroys any chance of them becoming paying customers, falsely accused customers have no independently verifiable protection and the fact that piracy detection technology systems are highly unreliable.

Paying for these systems is something that most ISPs do not want to do and don’t believe they should have to unless it is their own content that is being accessed. Implementing this system would essentially mean that ISPs would be forced to remove customers paying for access to their broadband service whilst spending all their revenue to cover the failure by the entertainment industry to adapt to the broadband age.

The UK ISP TalkTalk has recently conducted what many would consider to be a publicity stunt by driving round and using open Wi-Fi hotspots to download music in an effort to highlight how such a system could be susceptible to false positives and manipulation.

The report from the ISP advised “Within a couple of hours he had identified 23 wireless connections on the street – more than one-third of the total – which are vulnerable to Wi-Fi hijacking. These connections are either completely unsecured (6%) or use WEP technology (28%) which many users think is secure but is in fact easily hackable by anyone with a laptop computer. To show how vulnerable people are to unauthorised filesharing, our expert downloaded legal music files from two connections, including Barry Manilow’s hit Mandy and the soundtrack from the 1992 film Peter’s Friends.”

Many experts believe that the music industry would be better spending its money on building a more inexpensive and easy to use content platform that will allow it to compete with piracy rather than suing customers and lobbying for a three strikes policy.

Source – DSL Reports