Jesus, don't they ever learn? There is only one country that effectively does internet filtering, and that is China. In the rest of the world it's against the law to do that (how would you like it if the postal service opened all your mail just to make sure that you weren't receiving something you're not supposed to be?)

UK is however moving more and more towards a genuine police state, with cameras tracking your movement using advanced facial recognition software, incarceration if you don't give out your encryption keys when asked, and now this. If only Orwell could see this.

Read this excellent blog post on the matter. Fact is that Denmark just tried to force the danish ISP Tele2 to block The Pirate Bay, which made the topic pretty much explode. Internet providers should not play the role of law enforcement officials. According to the European Union Infosoc directive, ISPs should act as neutral carriers of data and they are simply not responsible for the content being transmitted. Forcing them to inspect and punish is a clear violation of the given directives, and against the law.

Yes i agree this is a direct slap in the face to internet users and their privacy. This should not be allowed.

It's even worse in Denmark. Here you can't even download legally from thepiratebay for example...
Soon I can't even update World of Warcraft without being a criminal.

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-blocked-by-isp-080204/

There is hope even for our Danish friends... http://courtblog.thepiratebay.org/2008/02/08/denmark-first-look/ :)

And the Danish ban of TPB has actually *increased* the traffic by ~15%. Every time they try to slap internet piracy, internet piracy seems to slap back :)

If they decide to ban Bittorrent somewhere, you're semi-screwed tho. There are sites to download the patches from, and there are protocol encryption for bittorrent. But my gues is that as this witch hunt continues, the protocols will evolve as well. Sending smaller fragments in random order with encrypted headers would be practically impossible to reassemble into any kind of evidence. The smaller the packet, the more ambiguous it gets :)

Bad Article Title

Piracy is already banned regardless of what "first-world" country you are in.

However this strikes me as really odd, considering the recent steps taken by the UK Governments to slap the UK equivalent of the RIAA. I'm wondering exactly how the ISPs are to detect whether or not the P2P packets contain copyrighted materials, and even then how they are to assume the licenses are set up. For example: Last week I downloaded a free title developed as a school project for the developer's last year. It is only available as a .iso file. Understandably this is a pretty big item, and at the same time could turn out to seem exactly like any other illegally transferred .iso file to any "partially trained" tech, or even worse an automated system.

The problem with this is that there really is no "Trial" for this type of thing and even worse is that it comes down to the ISP being threatened with fines and punishment for not "doing the job". What is going to come of this? A LOT of false positives as opposed to only a few false positives. What happens when a lot of false positives show up? The company gets a bad reputation and as a result ends up suffering financial damage. (I wonder if the ISP could sue the government in this case.)

All in all, the technology or methods to do this type of filtering has either not been disclosed for the public to understand (as law should be completely disseminated as cause and effect, not a 'you might do this and get this effect') or is outright missing. This bill may be a decent attempt at curbing piracy, but the eminent violations to privacy, and technically even the agreed-upon internet service contracts. (Something along the lines of in case of illegal activity, press panic button, else ignore).

Piracy is bad, pure and simple. It's sad that I see a lot of "support" for it, and even worse, I sympathize with the Pirate Party once in awhile too. Electronic Arts used to be good, but now is mediocre at best and still demands it's $50+ in US Cash for it's endless sea of modifications and expansions (See Battlefield 2), and on the other hand, legal uses for Peer2Peer technology will be (and currently is) being hampered because of these pro-active approaches. At what point can the guys that are legally using this kind of technology sue in retaliation for damages here? (I'm looking at you, Blizzard.)

Don't worry, the law has to go through parliament first. Then if ti gets trough that it has to have a 3 month committee period in the House of Lords before they vote on it. All in all, writing about this now is a somewhat moot point as it takes about 6 months for a law like this to actually be passed. And then you never know, the Queen may be in favor of pirate activity and just refuse to put her seal on the bill, meaning it can never be a law. Although she has yet to have done that at any point in her 50+ years as Queen.

Only China? Singapore, Russia, Turkey, hmm... Even google has started blocking some sites.

Organized piracy is bad. Chinese sweat shops where the kids copy CDs in the thousands. That is bad. They sell for money, and at the same time steal the profit from the author.
Private piracy on the other hand is probably more often good than bad. How do you discover music? How do you discover TV shows? How do you find what movies are good enough to buy?
I have a pretty nice DVD collection as well as a wishlist at my favorite online DVD store, and to be honest, what's in that wishlist or the collection has been downloaded prior. For me it's a kind of insurance. Either that, or I could pay money for a movie that would turn out to suck and it would spend the rest of it's lifetime as a bookstopper.
The same is valid for many artists. Friend hints you of the group, you download it, take a listen, and like it. You probably would never had even looked at this group in the recordstore, if they even have their CDs. Commercial interests are at work there, meaning that if it doesn't sell good, they don't sell it at all.
And the arguments that "piracy is killing music sales" is crap as well. Their comparison is always done in percent when they explain this. Never in units. And 1/10 is less than 2/30. Read the fine print in those reports and sales summaries, and you'll see that they have sold more units, but they have also shipped more units, causing a decrease in sales.
This is a pretty big topic with a whole lot of lobbying going on, and if you let them go on with this they are just gonna keep on pushing the limits. This means *at a minimum* that your ISP will be (intelligently) inspecting all your traffic, including mail, chat, surfing etc. looking for that britney album. And if they find it, in order to save the poor record label from losing money over you, they instead decide they don't want your money and terminate your subscription instead...
...which will, with the 6 million filesharers in the UK probably kill your broadband providers :) So, keep up the filesharing! If you're not sharing already, start doing it, just to see at what time the providers decide to value their revenues and the customers integrity and privacy over the record industry's whining. Simply put: make them shoot themselves in the foot! :)

Turkey: Youtube blocked. Why? A video, which has now been taken down, showing Greeks criticizing Turkey and insulting Turkey’s national flag and founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Turkish bloggers are fighting decision 2007/384 dated 06.03.2007 of Istanbul First Criminal Peace Court. The "great firewall of Turkey" also blocks parts of WordPress! Apparently, some government officer were spreading military related information. This critical situation led to a fast court order and the district attorney issued a written order to TTNet, the main Internet and ADSL service provider of Turkey, and within a few hours the problematic blog was blocked. How a national ban would prevent the rest of the world from reading this I can't actually wrap my head around, but whatever.
Russia effectively blocks a bunch of nationalistic websites and probably all the non-government sanctioned news channels. Using Russia as a reference here is kinda funky, considering flying pigs and red herrings are a part of their government. If you don't want people to fight it, don't let them know about it. If I remember correctly, Russian officials caused the close of a Swedish independent anti-russia news site a little while ago as well. I assume "Independent news is bad news" ;)
Singapore is going all in to create the ultimate pure citizen. A few gay websites had to go, as well as a lot of porn, and also foreign political websites that aren't approved by the government. They seem to have an interesting view of international law and jurisdictions, stating "Whatever law they pass will always be binding on Singapore citizens -- whatever a citizen does outside of Singapore will still come under Singapore law", causing them to hunt down websites all over the world that violate the law in Singapore, but is hosted or maintained by a Singapore citizen.
Sweden decided to be funny and put The Pirate Bay on the Swedish police's child pornography blocklist, distributed to swedish ISPs. Needless to say, this one didn't make it very far. Instead the result was that using OpenDNS (bypassing the banlist) the entire filter were more or less shot to shreds when researchers discovered that f.ex. Bonsai (yes, the tree!) websites were in there. And a lot of other stuff that wasn't child pornography.
Denmark blocked the Russian website AllOfMP3 by order of the record industry. Selling cheap music is never good, not even if you're working with the Russian record industry, paying them the appropriate license fees. And next, The Pirate Bay went poof. Both of these in total contrast with european directives and law.

So, who's pro censorship? Raise a hand please :)

There are no first world countries in the UK.

Learn geography.