Is it Legal For Your ISP to Monitor Your Traffic?

[DoPo]

This is just me assuming here but I think in the UK they can track it but no law in place to do much else because our government has just started its combat on illegal cyber activities (We are slow compared to the rest of the world). If you yourself aren't flagged by MI5 or whatever other agency, then you may just get a warning on your browser and whatever data is collected on the net, it is stored in a government file for only 3 days and then automatically deleted. Boy we are way behind in the UK, we barely get 100Mbps broadband.

Well, here is what I can tell you about it, assuming you're talking about the same thing. It's basically something I wrote almost a year ago but it's still relevant...as in, it's still as much as I know (haven't bothered)

I don't know if it passed or not but you can find it here [http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/consultations/infringement-notice/]. And this is what I got from it back then.

Right, I read the thing. Well, not all of it (it's 130 pages...OK, technically 40 with another 90 around it) but I think I got the gist of it. Someone should have really just laid it down simply, here's how it works.

1. The copyright owner[footnote]there is some criteria to meet to be qualify here[/footnote] does the monitoring themselves. I don't know exactly how they'll do that, but the idea is that they should be looking out for pirates.
2. Once they find somebody, they produce a Copyright Infringement Report (CIR) which they send to an ISP[footnote]There is also some criteria to meet to qualify here, foe example, the ISP should have more than 400 000 subscribers.[/footnote] and the ISP should then either say it's bollocks[footnote]criteria, you know[/footnote] or match the information to find the subscriber and send them a notification by mail.
3. The ISP would also keep records of all CIRs attached to each subscriber. They should also compile these into Copyright Infringement Lists (CIL) which contain any subscribers with too many CIRs[footnote]you shouldn't be surprised there is criteria here...but it's something like "more than 3 CIRs in a 12 month period".[/footnote].
4. Copyright owners can ask for relevant parts of these lists, but the information will remain anonymous.
5. The Copyright owners can then try to sue people in the lists. Actually, I sort didn't get that fully, but it's something like that. At this point, I was sick of reading and besides, I got the information I was looking for. But basically, they wouldn't be able to sue people with a low number of notifications, also the lists cover a limited period.

And before you ask, here is what the copyright owner should privide in a CIR

Spoiler: Content of copyright infringement report

Content of copyright infringement report
5.?(1) A copyright infringement report must include?
(a) the name and address of the qualifying copyright owner;
(b) if the qualifying copyright owner is a person falling within the description in paragraph (b) in the definition of copyright owner in section 124N of the Act, the name and address of the person on whose behalf the qualifying copyright owner is authorised to act and evidence of authorisation;
(c) an identification of the copyright work(a) including the title of the work and a description of the nature of the work;
(d) a statement that there appears to have been an infringement of the copyright in the copyright work;
(e) a description of the apparent infringement(b) and the evidence gathered of that apparent infringement, including information which would enable the subscriber to identify the means used to obtain evidence of the infringement of the copyright work;
(f) a statement that no consent has been given by the owner of the copyright in the copyright work for the act giving rise to the apparent infringement;
(g) the start time and end time and date of the online session (using Coordinated Universal Time) during which evidence of the apparent infringement was gathered;
(h) the day on which the copyright owner believes the apparent infringement to have taken place;
(i) the IP address(c) associated with the apparent infringement;
(j) the relevant port numbers used to conduct the apparent infringement;
(k) the website, protocol, application, online location, internet-based service or internet-based system through which the apparent infringement occurred;
(l) a unique numerical identifier allocated to the copyright infringement report by the qualifying copyright owner;
(m) the date and time of issue of the copyright infringement report.
Procedures

Which is a lot to do, really. Also, not hard to avoid, too... I mean, from what I read so far, it seems that this law would work against obvious pirates, but also they will be the stupider ones. Most people with a technical knowledge, would be able to avoid notifications.

Overall, the code sounds somewhat reasonable. But also I didn't read it in very much detail.

Also I think Blizzard would just work to get the file removed instead of threatening people who downloaded it.

How would you remove a well seeded torrent? All you can do is threaten those who use it.

I guess you can't remove it. Maybe remove the links, but not much else.

Doesn't work.

All I was saying is I doubt there was any outside intervention from a third party to cause his ISP to call him over possible piracy.

How are you sure? You can see above a particular spin on IP protection that is exactly that. Besides, a random IP holder (e.g., Blizzard) is really unlikely to just straight out try to apply legal pressure to...an actual IP address, as that's what they see. They really should be going through the ISP in order to connect the IP address to an actual person. Kind of doesn't work if they don't.

(Is it still piracy if you've bought the product and are also paying for the service?)

Really, really fuzzy and it heavily depends on the country and probably the judge who takes a look at it (and by conjunction, the lawyers that try to explain what this "In-ter-net" is and how they are correct). But I'm not entirely sure how it goes in the USA. The closest thing I am aware of is the Betamax case [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc.] but that is not directly applicable to Internet downloads (not sure if it is applicable or not). At any rate it's Blizzard and they really, really dislike this sort of stuff. Moreover, maybe you'd have something to stand on if you were merely downloading, but by default, if you're using torrents, you're both downloading and uploading. Thus you are actually sharing the data with others that you have no guarantee if they have bought the product or not. Distribution of pirated materials tends to be judged more harshly than merely downloading it.

Thanks for the replies. I just thought it was strange for someone to get a call from their own ISP over something like this since I've NEVER heard of this happening. I could understand a copyright holder or something in that category. While I'm aware that our browsing information is "there" I never thought a provider would take active interest in it unless it was something horribly illegal+harmful done over a long period of time.

Is this something we'll be seeing more of as time goes on?

Maybe not active interest but, again, you can see one example of a law above. Maybe it's accepted, maybe it's not - as I said, I haven't followed it.