14 DAY TRIAL // European computer users are one step closer to getting jailed for downloading pirated material from the Internet. This is because of a vote cast by the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee in which a set of amendments were adopted. This is part of an IP law which was released in order to protect the rights of intellectual property from infringement.
The first release of this law saw the infringement of intellectual property as a civil offense, stating that only commercial-scale infringement of copyright will be brought to justice and face criminal charges. The second release of this law, the IPRED2 (Second Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive) crosses that fine line and takes aim at any given person who might break the law by downloading, storing or using copyrighted material.
Yes, everybody that does this is subject to a long sentence in the big house and/or a pretty big fine, to say the very least. Who has the upper hand in this deal, well, believe it or not, it's not the music and movies industries, that is because copyrights, trademarks and designs are being protected through imprisonment and fines for commercial uses, not for personal use.
So how come the ISPs have to play the cops in this "game", simple, it's a known case of tribunals to order the blocking of certain websites or services from ISPs. The new law favors this by stating that "aiding of abetting and inciting such infringements" will get you criminally prosecuted. If it is not as clear as it should be, think that an ISP, by allowing communication through certain protocols and/or ports is indirectly "aiding" to the violation of copyrighted infringement.
Therefore, their only choice is to take definitive and preemptive action against such acts. Of course, they aren't able to stop downloading through the use of an Internet browser because that would stop other services as well, but they can block ports that BitTorrent communicates through. Intelligent programs like uTorrent are able of using random ports, thus increasing a person's chances of connecting to this type of network, but nevertheless, it's a showdown, and we'll just have to wait and see what the outcome will be.