Japan has decided to beat France and the United Kingdom (both who have similar proposals) to become the first country to ban file sharers from the internet.

Oddly the agreement to do so has not come from the Japanese Government, but from Japan’s four internet service provider organizations after pressure (not surprisingly) from the record and movie industries. According to Torrent Freak, the agreement would see copyright holders tracking down file-sharers on the Internet using “special detection software” and then notifying ISPs of alleged infringers. File sharers will initially receive a warning for a first offense, then be disconnected for subsequent offenses, eventually be disconnected from the internet permanently (it wasn’t clear whether the agreement is a three strikes proposal).

The process will formally commence in April and will primarily target users of Winny, the most popular file sharing network in Japan

I don't think it will be long before this hits us in the UK

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if i cant file share then i may aswell have dial up lol

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if i can not share then i would sell a pc lol

It would just mean that it would be time for more creative individuals to come out with the next leap forward in file sharing.

Perhaps never sharing anything that could even resemble anything complete, but what could only be described as seemingly random chunks of data. The client application could consume lists of md5 hashes, obtained from its peers after quick seed and DNS query to a group of DNS servers around the globe.

The client would never query any tracker directly, but instead use the peer network itself as a multi-node cluster, redundant and self healing. It would contact its peers using an algorithm similar to the BGP protocol finding the closest peer. Each peer wouldn't know if the "peer" its communicating with is a tracker or another client application. The actual tracker itself updates status via DDNS updates and randomly picks its succesor from among n of the nodes with the best statistics over a given period of time.

Envision it the same way that files are split up on your hard drive, but on a global scale. The seeders would never have any type of complete data and thus what they are actually sharing is not copyrightable at all. It would be analogous to pixels of an image, which depending upon the recipe could become either a platypus or a picture of HillBilly. It would be extremely tough to stop that kind of a solution, ever.

I am not too worried...yet.

They should leave the internet alone and try to addapt to it instead of trying to change it to their will, going against progress.

I already pay taxes on every media susceptible of being used to store or load shared content. At least if they ban me life will be cheaper.