In our reporting on P2P issues, it's rare these days to get wind of some good news; today, we've learned that this plan to ban would not, in fact, apply to most file-sharing fiends. After one ISP stood up to the government's proposals by circulating a petition, the government responded favorably, saying, "We are not requiring ISPs to monitor for unlawful file-sharing. Nor are we proposing that ISPs look at what users download in order to combat piracy... We will not terminate the accounts of infringers."

However, UK ISP TalkTalk vigorously objected to some of the measures laid out in the bill and drafted and circulated an e-petition to abandon the idea that illegal P2P file-sharing should result in a permanent ban from the Internet for guilty users.

"If citizens are innocent until proven guilty," the petition reads, "ISPs would be forced to monitor internet usage to ensure that no copyrighted material is being transferred. This flagrant disregard for privacy is comparable to forcing the Post Office to search through parcels for photocopied documents or mixtape cassettes. Such requirements would place enormous strain on ISPs whilst failing to prevent the distribution of copyrighted material...

"Who is punished in the case of shared family connections? The increasing role of the Internet in access to society should not be underestimated. Cutting off households deprives families of education, government services and freedom of speech. We do not see this as a fitting punishment, nor do we believe the breaches in privacy involved to be justifiable under copyright law."

The government's full response states that officials are working with rights holders and media companies to find a balanced and equitable solution to illegal file-sharing - one that includes attractive, legal options for end users to access content, as well.

The Digital Economy Bill will require ISPs to notify users whose accounts had been flagged by a copyright holder as having been used for illegal file-sharing. "In the cases of the most serious infringers," reads the response, "if a rights holder obtains a court order, the ISP would have to provide information so that the rights holder can take targeted court action." As a last resort, the Bill provides for ISPs' taking technical measures to stop illegal downloading, ranging from bandwidth restriction, daily downloading limits and temporary Internet account suspension.

All in all, the government hopes to see a 70 percent reduction in illegal P2P downloads.

It'll be interesting to see how various national laws and regulations hold up if something like ACTA ends up being passed. In a nutshell, a U.S.-drafted chapter of this treaty on Internet use would require ISPs to police user-generated content, to cut off Internet access for copyright violators and to remove content that is accused of copyright violation without any proof of actual violation - a far cry from the more lenient proposals we're reading from the UK.

Let us know what you think in the comments.

This guest post was written by Fabrice Epelboin, the editor of the French edition of ReadWriteWeb. He took an active part in fighting the HADOPI "three strike and you're out" law. He's a Creative Common evengelist, an entrepreneur and is active in social media and webTV.

The HADOPI law, known abroad as "three strike and you're out," will monitor file sharing, and will cut Internet access - after three warnings - to illegal file sharers. But wait. One more thing: French netizens, to prove their innocence will have to install special spyware, which will report their every move to the French administration.

The law, which led to an intense battle between the blogosphere and the government, was rejected by the French Assembly when it was first voted on. Then it was rejected by the French Supreme Court after a second vote, and received some severe warnings from the European Union. A third vote was needed by the French Assembly to pass the law, despite a close to zero support within the French population.

Happy new year

2010 is a brand new year. HADOPI has been voted on and there's nothing we can do about it anymore, even if it still makes the headlines in the local bloggosphere for its technical difficulties, or that it will probably be a financial disaster, or, more recently, because its brand-new logo illegally used a font licenced exclusively to France Telecom, the state-owned leading French ISP.

This year, President Sarkozy has a new law to pass regarding the Internet. Its name is LOPPSI, and only a small part of it is related to the Internet: filtering it.

The LOPPSI law, which could be voted on in March, will make filtering the French Internet a reality, "the Chinese way", like Deputy Jacque Myard recently said. Contacts have been established between the French UMP party and the Chinese Communist Party to talk about "Democracy and Internet access" (video, in French), and just like in Australia, pedophiles were used as a very good reason to filter the Internet.

But recently, child molesters weren't even used as an excuse. President Sarkozy announced filtering will be used to "automatically de-pollute networks and servers used for piracy." Greentech? Think again.

Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement Beta

If nothing is done, within a year, not only might Big Brother-like spyware be mandatory on every French computer, but everything that goes through its pipes could be scanned for possible copyright infringement.

France is more and more looking like a beta test for the proposed multi-country Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, and it's not looking good for free speech and democracy.

So far, not a single French newspaper has written anything about ACTA, and before the first battle against HADOPI was won, last March, by the opposition at the French National Assembly, very few had written about HADOPI. The same is happening again with LOPPSI; if you want some information, the only place to go is the Internet and the blogosphere.

Filtering the French Internet has not made the news, either here in France or in the international press: everything is about the Google Tax. Don't let this fool you. In France, the truth is elsewhere.

France-China photo by Flickr user neo2004pf. Face photo by Flickr user Alexx Sky Productions.

Now, Israeli ISPs are throttling P2P network access, too, as confirmed in a report just released by an Israeli cyberlaw attorney and a partner news site. Whether you consider file-sharing an affront to content creators and copyright-holders everywhere or whether you see P2P networks as a permissible and valid way for users to exchange data, this trend is gaining considerable momentum around the world. Where will P2P restrictions pop up next?

Traffic shaping is a practice sometimes used by some ISPs to discourage the use of certain applications. A couple of years ago, Comcast caught some heat from users and media for filtering user traffic when torrent files were being downloaded, even causing some to speculate that the ISP was violating U.S. law by prohibiting this traffic. Eventually, Comcast did strike a deal with BitTorrent to allow protocol-agnostic traffic management, but only after the sparring had been brought to the attention of the Federal Communications Commission.

It's currently unclear whether Israeli ISPs are filtering traffic due to piracy concerns or simple due to bandwidth concerns, as shared files can often amount to multi-gigabyte, hours-long downloads. However, traffic-shaping that blocks P2P protocols can also apply to VoIP calls, IM clients and other applications. Although P2P traffic is associated with illegal downloads, nothing about the protocols themselves is inherently illegal. "The element common to all P2P services," reads the Israeli report, "is the lack of economical benefit to the ISP."

Klinger noted that although complaints have been brought to media outlets and ISPs since 2007, the ISPs have typically ignored these criticisms. Netvision and Internet Zahav were the two ISPs determined by this research to be blocking file-sharing traffic. Bezeq International was the third ISP investigated. Although Bezeq was cleared by this particular investigation, a plug-in introduced last year from popular bittorrent client Vuze shows that this ISP, too, throttles and disrupts file-sharing network traffic.

In response to the findings presented by Ynet and Klinger, all three of the investigated ISPs gave typically canned responses claiming to offer users excellent surfing experiences. Israeli Communications Ministry rep Dr. Yechiel Shabi told Ynet, "The research materials relayed to us paint a picture which arouses the need for thorough examination. After we become familiar with the study's findings, we shall consider the need for interference, supervision or regulation of the matter."

So, while we wait to see what results this report will yield in Israel, we are left to ponder the perturbing question: Where will traffic-shaping pop up next to prevent P2P activity? Take another look at the findings from Vuze's traffic-monitoring plug-in. You'll see that ISPs around the world - including Verizon, BellSouth, AOL, AT&T, Charter, Road Runner and ISPs in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, the UK and the Middle East, to name a few locations - are already interrupting traffic.

Vuze's researched was released in April 2008; in August, the FCC declared that ISPs should not be allowed to target and interrupt P2P applications. Still, suspicious Americans and other users around the world should consider using a tool such as the EFF's Switzerland to determine whether torrent downloads and VoIP calls are being interrupted by their ISP.

Do Israeli or other ISPs have the right or the moral imperative to throttle traffic in this manner? Do they have the need or right to examine the applications, files, and protocols being employed by users on their networks? Or do ISPs around the globe need to read the wiki on net neutrality and get their act together? Let us know your experiences and opinions in the comments.

Who Pays, Who Doesn't

The European Commission's Digital Competitiveness Report (PDF) is a comprehensive annual resource which looks at everything from broadband penetration to use of social networks and more. One of the chapters in the latest report, published earlier this month, deals specifically with online entertainment.

In this chapter, the EU study reports on the state of the online entertainment industry, revealing factoids like "less than 5% of Europeans have paid for online content in the last three months."

The most interesting results from the report, though, are not the details about who pays, but about who doesn't. Among the non-payers, factors like lower prices would convince about 30% to pay while things like better quality, wider choice, better availability, and others would convince between 15-20%. Yet one figure stands out: only around 20% of online users would pay for online content if all the other free options suddenly disappeared.

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Not to Blame, Says EU

The impact of this finding didn't escape the notice of the EU researchers, who go on to point out that this seems to mean, contrary to what industry execs say, illegal copying is not to blame:

"...the low percentage of individuals that consider the possible lack of freely available online content as a reason for paying, calls into question the argument put forward by representatives of the content industry that European consumers will in the long term suffer from a lack of commercial availability of high quality content if the current model of audiovisual content distribution, based on illegal copying, is not curved."

Instead, what seems to be happening is that people pay for their internet connection and then gorge themselves on the abundant free content that's available online. Because there's so much out there which costs nothing at all - from web news to streaming video to software applications - internet users tend to balk at the idea of actually having to pull out their wallets to make a purchase. It's the internet itself that has led us down this path to a place where old monetization models simply no longer apply.

What's the Answer?

The report goes on to look at the business models of all sorts of content sites in detail including online news/newspapers, video, movies, music, and online games. While the ways consumers access these different types of content may vary (RSS for reading news, streaming videos, downloading music), the findings are relatively consistent across the board. With only a few exceptions (Apple's iTunes Store, music-based games like Guitar Hero, etc.), many of the current business models are not sustainable.

So what's the answer? There isn't really a good one just yet. Many businesses try "freemium" models which convert power users to paying users. Other sites try sustaining themselves on online ads (which is difficult to do in a down economy). But the best ideas for new business models may very well be the ones that haven't even been thought up yet. The only question is whether or not they'll be discovered in time before more content-producing industries fail.

Image credits - used freely thanks to the Internet and Creative Commons: downloading, flickr user Arenamontanus; I love P2P, flickr user Brocco Lee; p2p logo, flickr user jatop

Trend: Illegal File Sharing Sites Go Legit

The interesting trend, here, though, is that a lot of companies and services that were previously known for being 'illegal' hubs for file sharing are now trying to go legit. Napster, the grandfather for Kazaa and most of its brethren, is now a respectable paid service, and the Pirate Bay may offer a legal version of its service soon.

As Eric Pfanner pointed out in the New York Times, we are now getting to the point where using legal services like Spotify or Lala are actually so much more convenient than illegally downloading music. Given this trend, it makes sense for centralized services like Kazaa to slowly drift to a legal model. At the same time, decentralized file sharing options like BitTorrent, which don't depend on a single company to work, will still continue to be popular. Chances are, though, that users will probably share less music through torrents over the next year or so, as more cheap and free options allow users to legally access music more conveniently.

Sadly, video files are not on the list of accepted formats. Yet. And users can only upload three MP3s in a 24-hour period. However, other file types, from PSDs to RTFs, are accepted and up- and downloadable.

Users can click the posted links to download files. With MP3s specifically, an embedded media player appears in the post.

Users can also choose to post via email, sending files as attachments to share@friendfeed.com. Naturally, there's a file-size limit, as well, which we hit pretty quickly while trying to upload a large Photoshop file and were given a simple "Could not upload" error message in return.

There's no pause or cancel button on uploads, and there are no clear guidelines yet on exactly what the size upload limits are, either for single files or cumulative daily uploads. Another missing link is a possible expiration date on uploaded files. While these questions remain unanswered, the biggest question in our minds is why the implementation of this feature took so long in the first place.

After the verdict, Thomas-Rasset told the Associated Press that the penalty was "kind of ridiculous," but also pointed out that she simply can't pay $2 million, so she is "not going to worry about it now."

As we pointed out in our earlier stories about this trial, the evidence clearly incriminated Thomas-Rasset, and the jury found that her conduct was willful. According to the Copyright Act, the jury could have awarded the music companies between $750 and $150,000 per song, but the jury, which clearly wasn't convinced by Thomas-Rasset's defense, came down in the middle at $80,000.

Could They Still Settle?

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson points out that RIAA spokesperson, Cara Duckworth, told reporters that the recording industry would still be willing to settle with Thomas-Rasset.

It seems like the RIAA is mostly interested in setting a precedent here, and if the two parties do eventually settle on a much smaller number (typically these cases ended in $5000 settlements), it surely wouldn't get the attention this current verdict received, leaving most of the public under the impression that a $80,000 fine per shared song is a real possibility.

We wrote Brinker with these concerns, and his response was an interesting commentary on how folks use Twitter and how apps should adapt to those user habits and patterns. "Our experience is that Twitter is for fast, real-time consumption of content, not collaboration and file sharing in the editing mode," he wrote. "We find most of our users are focused on display-only content." And for display-only files, you could hardly find a simpler solution.

Here's how it works.

User A fills out this dead simple form:

Once the upload button's been clicked, the tweet is posted. That's it. TwitDoc gives User A the status ID for the tweet as well as a short URL for the file itself. Here's what the tweet will look like:

And here's what a text document looks like. PDFs fare well, too. TwitDoc uses Scribd for these files types, and Scribd allows the files to be emailed or embedded, for when retweeting just won't cut it.

The service is still fairly young, so kinks are being worked out constantly. For the time being, image files are a mixed bag. Everything gets sized to fit the screen width at the moment, so a small PNG was bloated and awful-looking, and a larger JPEG looked ok but was definitely smaller.

Also, the creators are working to expand the number of supported file types. Currently, in addition to image and text/Word files, TwitDoc supports PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, and PowerPoint presentations.

"Our primary focus is on sharing documents, but we also want to smartly handle all types of files as we grow," wrote Brinker. "Our plan is to identify the best handlers of various file types and route them the way we think users would want them handled.

"We also want the reader experience to be safe, fast, and easy," he continued. Especially considering the risk of virus transmission during file swaps, he wrote, "We do not think downloading files to users' machines is the right model for Twitter."

Brinker also wrote that TwitDoc has an open API and that his team is working with Twitter clients to provide support to those who don't use the Twitter web interface.

Oh, let's be honest. Each for our own reasons, we want to send one another songs online, usually as illegally downloaded and shared MP3s; and Twitter seems like a more interesting way of doing that than email. We've discovered a new site that lets us send songs as MP3s on our hard drives, as MP3s hosted on a website, or even as YouTube videos or imeem audio clips plucked from the app's library. Ladies and gentlemen, we give you SongTwit!

If the user is working from the SongTwit library, he is presented with a range of selections and is able to preview the song/video before it goes out as a tweet:

The user then provides his Twitter username and password and a message of 115 characters or fewer. The tweet is sent (publicly or as a reply; the creators are still working on DMs); and the world rejoices.

When other users click the SongTwit link, they are redirected to a SongTwit page with a little custom player (video for YouTube clips is minimized) and the original sender's message:

There are a few flaws of the service, aside from the DM-less-ness. No downloads from these pages are yet available, and they're still working on the broken pause button on the media players.

Still, the search function really does help save time that would likely have been spent trolling YouTube for clips of that one Venga Boys song from 1999. And that's what the Internet is for, no?

We'd love to see musicians using Twitter more for blatant self-promotion, and this would be an excellent way to send fans demos or previews of new songs. The download function would be an excellent addition to the service for this use case alone. Then again, without the download function, that's one more piece of content the musician doesn't have to completely give away for nothing while not denying the fans who really just want to listen.

At the moment, the UI is a bit clunky and the file sizes are capped at 20MB, but the service presents an exciting opportunity nevertheless. Once mobile capabilities are introduced, FileTwt would allow more freedom for the 9-to-5ers among us. And it already allows for mass sharing (either via public streams or multiple-recipient DMs) of files, which is awesome news for self-marketing musicians, who desperately need better online promotional tools.

Here's an initial test DM:

Here's the FileTwt page for the download:

Redirect! The adventure continues at RapidShare's site:

But RapidShare wants you to consider a paid account for a few seconds:

Finally: The download.

Filetwt is now uploading files only to RapidShare. They plan to add more hosts, namely DepositFiles, FileFactory, and MegaUpload, in about one week.

The 20MB file size limit has been instated to allow the startup to remain profitable, since any significant volume of traffic will mean more server bandwidth. Premium accounts for larger file shares will be introduced in the event that a significant number of users demonstrate a demand for increased bandwidth usage, according to company representative Ankit Sakhuja.

"We see Filetwt as more of a document sharing tool," he wrote in an email Sunday afternoon. "The private share option was introduced specifically for that purpose."

He noted that site developers are also working on a better user interface, a progress bar for uploads, and a virus scan, among other features.

As with any peer-to-peer file-sharing service, copyright infringement and piracy are immediately raised as primary concerns. The site states, "It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," no other information is given. Particularly for direct messages, how would FileTwt receive notice of illegally distributed files? Unlike the downloads that occur on larger P2P or torrent-sharing sites, these transactions are primarily going to be one-to-one or one-to-a-select few.

However, RapidShare has been successfully sued in a German court in 2007 over copyright infringement, specifically for MP3s. Although the DMCA Safe Harbor clause might prevent RapidShare and similar file-hosting companies from prosecution in the U.S., it certainly makes no exception for end users. Ultimately, users are given the standard "enter at your own risk" caveats with little available information on exactly how illegal one-to-one MP3 sharing is or what the consequences (or likelihood of getting caught and being prosecuted) are.

Finally, we've concluded through our own testing of the service that smartphones and other mobile devices do not handle FileTwt well. But of course, FileTwt is working on mobile apps, which Sakhuja promises will be "one-of-a-kind."