It's brilliant don't you see - the government forces ISP's to block all porn. Then some kind soul comes up with a free work-around that happens to proxy all your traffic. Could that kind soul perhaps maintain a large data center in Cheltenham? or maybe they got their cousins in Maryland to help out ...
News is an information product, for a paywall to work the customer has to perceive that this information source has more value that the free source one click over. The Sun was never known for being a high value information source.
The UK market is particularly interesting because there are multiple, national, daily papers each carrying the same news withe a different editorial slant. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGscoaUWW2M for an explanation). What's been interesting is the Daily Mail and the Guardian, have embraced the web and seem to be riding the wave and the rest still seem to be struggling with how to adapt.
Google could easily solve this - they could rate the accuracy of DMCA takedown notices and negatively rank companies that send bogus ones as a penalty for wasting everybody's time. Watch how fast the studios clean up their act when their own sites stop showing up on page on.
Hopefully on appeal this will get reversed and the judge will get suitably reprimanded. I do find myself mentally speculating what motivated the judge to be so intemperate. I'll leave the actual reasoning to your imagination because imagining judicial corruption isn't illegal yet.
So does charging for facetime data constitute a material change to ATT's data plan (I have unlimited data grandfathered in, this is a limit on data, ergo a material change)? If it does then that means I'm off the hook for my contract and can dump AT&T when the iPhone 5 comes out ...
This could be a huge issue for ATT if the idea catches on ...
If the forged uTP data backed contains the address of a legitimate uTP node and if the target uTP peer responds with a FIN, sent to the real node, due to the invalid sequence this would provide a mechanism to force peer disconnects which matches closely the Pirate Pay description. If this is the case it's very easily defeated by discarding invalid sequences instead of sending FIN. If it were a legitimate connection the a correct packed will eventually arrive and all will be good and if it's a spoof there is no harm done.
It's complex because the line as to what is software is not easy to define. If you build an analog device that does something and get a patent but if you build the exact same device using off the shelf programmable parts under the 'no software patents' logic it's not patentable.
For example - there is an important patent on intermittent windshield wipers, one that was litigated for a long time and eventually the auto makers lost. But clearly it's just automating a manual process and if you use a gp micro to do it it would be considered a software patent but if you used a 555 timer it wouldn't - that's nuts. The invention itself should be what matters.
The problem is not that inventions implemented in software are getting patents - it's that pretty much anything thrown at the patent office gets a patent - if the standard for examination and issue were higher we wouldn't be in this mess.