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OptimumOnline Bans uploads to P2P networks
An anonymous reader writes "In disturbing news this week Cablevision's high speed broadband unit OptimumOnline has sent letters to subscribers warning that uploading to P2P networks will no longer be tolerated. Obviously bowing to record and movie industry pressure the letter includes a link to a page that gives directions on how to disable file trading on 18 P2P services from KaZaa to Xolox. If you don't comply, they will cut the cord. I remember not to long ago where OptimumOnline ran TV ads touting the ability to grab music from the Net. The story on this can also be read here."
It doesn't matter if your right, it doesn't matter if you've done nothing illegal, what matters is who has the better attorneys. The logic used here is the same that is used with gun control. Punish the innocent and the people capable of potentially commiting a crime. Assume they are guilty first, ask questions later.
The cable company capitulated because the legal expenses to fight the threat of legal action is more than sending out a letter to each user. It's really that simple. If this isn't a SURE sign our legal system needs a review, then I don't know what is.
cluge
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
This may seem heavy-handed, but most of the stuff they're uploading is probably copyrighted, and hence illegal to share. So, really all the ISP is doing is banning people from breakng the law. Just because you don't agree with a law doesn't make it ok to break it with impunity - if that was the case, nobody would drive the speed limit.
At my present job, we recieve DMCA violation tickets sent to us, which include the ip address of the customer that was sharing files. We then track down the customer based on the ARP logs and issue them a letter notifying them that they are in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy which prohibits the usage of servers on a residential service, as well as our clauses that allow us to terminate a customers service. If we recieve 3 DCMA tickets from a particular customer we permanetly terminate their service. On a side note, due to the asynchrous nature of most cable modem service, as well as the fact that a node is essentially a LAN, I can certainly understand the concern about people constantly uploading files. Saturating the forward path can cause problems with download traffic as TCP requires ACK packets to be sent stating that a packet has reached it's destination, if the ACK packet is not recieved the packet needs to be re-transmited. So the next time you think your not causing any problems for anyone when you spent the last 2 weeks on Kazaa allowing people to leech files think again.
Optimum Online doesn't seem to have a good method of tracking or enforcing these rules. I've been running servers off my home OOL cable connection for over a year, and they've never said a thing, though I've contacted technical support for other unrelated issues.
Anyone else have any problems with running servers on Optimum Online? I'm running POP/SMTP/HTTPS/SSH services for my own use.
I'd be interesting to hear stories from people who have been told to shut down servers or reduce their bandwidth usage.
Good information can also be found here , here and here.
Basically, their excuse is security related, which is crap since more security problems occur with Internet Explorer, IIS and Windows itself than with P2P software...
As mentioned at DSL Reports, the upload is being capped at 128kb/s, NOT banned... Here's a quote from one of the links above (by HaveOOLnow)
No, it affects all uploads. If you upload at a certain rate for more than a certain amount of time, you automatically get capped [at 128kps]. But all you have to do is call them to get uncapped. The system is just designed to make people aware of the fact that they might have P2P apps running in the background.
The cap seems to be about 6 hours in length. Quite horrendous, but we all saw this coming, right? To be honest, I'd rather this and have unlimited download/uploads, than both... *shrug* Or, maybe if it only happens when the server is being heavily used (evenings and such).
Im sorry but this article is completely inaccurate. Im an OOL customer and I actively participate in the OOL discussions on broadbandreports. The discretionary cap was put into place because users were clogging upstream channels with p2p uploads. It got so bad that DHCP requests on some nodes (mine in particular) could not be recieved within even a 17 second ack window. It does NOT have to do with pressure from the RIAA.
Here's why: The cap is not a new portblock (they already block 80 to discourage webhosting), but simply a different cable modem config file with a lower upstream maximum. The ordinary config for OOL is 10 megabits down and 1 megabit up. the altered config file is 10 megabits down and only 150 kilobits up.
Obviously this is a solution that was implemented to control bandwidth, not specific applications. If OOL were to start battling p2p apps, it would come in the form of a portblock or traffic shaper - NOT an upload throttle.
To the author of the story, please do your homework. You can start in the OOL forums on BBR:
http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/cable,opt
Clearly not all shared content is illegal (although there is little doubt that most of it is). Small artists have been able to use it legally for self-promotion, a perfectly legal use that the RIAA is also glad to put a stop to, as it might slightly impeed their ability to steal from artists.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
..let me tell you the service level has dropped off so much it is ridiculous.
First they have been running "brown-outs" in Brookhaven township (Suffolk County, NY.)
Second the Helpless Desk has been telling people to turn of and especially DISCONNECT their routers when they call for outages. They do not explain themselves they simply tell people to disconnect the equipment. Then when the problem is not resolved they tell the customer to leave the Router out of the mix and wait a while. "Do not hook the router back up.," they implore.
Third, and this is just heinous, the cable technicians have been "chopping the lines" of customers they suspect have either extra cable runs, or (God forbid) who have Satellite Dishes. I live in Farmingville and not only has this happened to 6 (SIX) of my neighbors but one of those fukkers was in my yard when they were supposed to be working across the street. My wife confronted the guy and he told her that satellites were unreliable and "anyting" can happen to them and that she should consider going back to cable. I came out and exlained that if he didn;t get off my property I'd bury him in it. I took his plate number and Van number and Cablevision has denied he was even in the neighborhood. We are pressing charges along with our neighbor's who's Sat Dish lines he cut. I doubt we have a rogue installer.
As soon as DSL is on this block we're switching.
This
I can think of two notable exceptions to the mantra that they only use being made of p2p is for pirating. Furthurnet is a p2p network which grew out of the tape trading community which takes copyright and the artists wishes very seriously.
The other example Transmission Films is distributing high quality movies protected by DRM via Overnet.
The Internet Archive has terabytes of share friendly information, they are evalutating several p2p platforms for helping to keep their bandwidth bills down. I've downloaded Redhat ISO's from edonkey, when they first come out the primary distro point and mirrors are swamped for at least a week.
Are you being sarcastic? I do not believe these two are related in any way shape or form but I'll bite anyway.
Guns have tons of legitimate uses that cannot be carried out with any other tool: hunting, sport shooting, defense.
You mean no other tool if you want to sit on your lazy ass up in a tree stand and hope something comes within 100 yards of you. I have nothing against hunting with a gun, just trying to show a different viewpoint.
Yes, obviously sport shooting as that does require a gun but the others are bull. You can hunt with many tools like arrows, traps, spears, rod and reel, sling shot, knife, stun gun etc... Might be a little harder from a distance but people have been using these for thousands of years and still do, well not the stun gun.
P2P networks have no legitimate uses at all that cannot be (better!) carried out with another tool.
Just because a tool might seem better for what you are doing does not make it better for everyone. I have downloaded and upload gigs worth of car pictures, street racing videos, local track racing videos, and amature videos (not porn either) from P2P, all non MPAA/RIAA and free to distibute. Where else can I find a repostitory of these things? Where else can I post and share my material with others and NOT have to go through a third party commercial entity that charges per GB or can hold a few GB's of material for as cheap as P2P can do from my home PC? Add that it be non centralized and searchable for everyone to use freely and participate. Sure I can search around with Google and find stuff on web pages here and there, some on usenet and very little on IRC but all of these combined are many orders below what I can find on P2P.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I've been reading Lawrence Lessig's _The Future of Ideas_ and he talked about this and made it clear why it would happen and the inevitability of it. Cable is the closed network of our time. There are far too many controls on it. I wonder how it is that the network providers are so short-sighted that they believe that this model is the way to go.
As for peer-to-peer and that it trades only illegal stuff, well that's hogwash. Yes, p2p is being used for a lot of file sharing right now and most of it is still protected by (an outrageous system of) copyrights. But p2p is an infant and there is no way to tell what it will be used for in even one year's time. I bet that p2p users will outwit the cable companies, bypass them and, unless they open their networks, make them irrelevant.
What will come in the place of cable. Hell, I don't know, but the cable industries stands of today feel a lot like aol's work of yesterday. Aol's dying. Cable will be next. Something else will take its place.
Until then, if you've got access to dsl and you value openness, call Verizon or whoever. The phone companies are the only ones who have to leave things open. Though, that might change. Things are getting creepy under the Generalisimo Bush. Egad.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
We recieve a list of copyright materials that were sucessfully downloaded from the individual.
That's kind of surprising, because that could be illegal, for whoever's doing the downloading. But I wouldn't put it past anyone...
As the law currently stands, we have to uphold the request of the copyright holder, and if we don't do this then we can have legal action brought against us.
ROFL. You don't have to uphold the request in this case. (And you can have legal action brought against you either way; the DMCA can't prevent that.) I think you're confused about the infringement liability exemptions. You might want to take a look at this.
But to summarize:
Yes, an ISP only has DMCA immunity from liability for infringement of copyright involving content stored on their servers if they designate an agent, comply with notice & counter-notice time limits, etc. That's probably what you're thinking of. See USC 17 Ch. 5 S 512(c).
But that's irrelevant, because we're not talking about content stored on the ISP's servers.
The ISP has blanket immunity for content that passes through their network but isn't stored there more than transiently. This is covered a couple of paragraphs up in S 512(a). (Notices could be involved, but only if a proxy is maintaining content that has been removed at the source; and we're not likely to find an inward transparent proxy on a network with an AUP that prohibits servers. =)
If you don't like the law, I would suggest contacting your senator.
Heh. And if my ISP constantly tries to cover their ass at my expense (but can't even get that right, since they don't seem to know where their ass it), then who do I contact? Their shareholders? =)
Um, why in the world would a songwriter get $0.08 for distribution of a song by US law ?!?
:
I can understand if the RIAA, or some guild or union has a rule or a bylaw to that effect. But that doesn't make sense to me for two reasons.
1) What reason would the Government of the United States of America have to get involved with something stupid like this. Not only paying songwriters, but setting a specific price by law? WTF? In 50 years when inflation makes that worth even less than it is now, will congress change the law to 20 cents?
2) Define a songwriter. If I write a stupid song about my trip to Walmart (let's call it Ode to Church Road), and then I perform it with my PC's mic, and share it via Gnutella. Does that make me a songwriter? If someone then downloads it, am I then automatically entitled to 8 cents? If I write a stupid song and then perform it, can I share the file loaded with keywords for porn and movies and other artists, so that unsuspecting people download it, and then rake in the money 8 cents at a time? Sure, by US law any time anyone writes a note on a napkin, that is automatically copyrighted, but that's a little different. That's just saying "you created this, so you own it". It's not saying "you created it, now someone got a copy you are owed $0.08."
This just doesn't make sense to me. You could be right, but can you provide any links or anything to back up this claim?
I did find a few links that say US law has a *CAP* on what a songwriter can charge in royalties of 8 cents per song. But that's not the same thing. That doesn't mean that a songwriter has to get paid at all. It just says that 8 cents is the most he or she can charge.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm not defending copyright violation. If I rip my copy of Dr. Dre's The Chronic to MP3 and "share" it. Then that's illegal. Regardless of songwriter fees or not. Dre (or his record label at the time, or someone who is not me) owns the copyright on that album. I have received no licensee in writing, verbal, or implied to redistribute his works.
But, your example with the indy bands is flawed. Many indy bands write their own music. In which case, they don't have to charge anything for it. If they want to distribute it for free, they can do so, since the $0.08 figure is a maximum, not a minimum (unless you know something I don't, which I haven't completely discounted). What happens if My indy band (let's call them "Don't Throw Knives At Me", I like that name) wants to do a punk cover of The Unknown Stunt Man (theme to the TV show, The Fall Guy, written by David Somerville, Gail Jensen & Glen Larson and originally performed by Lee Majors)? Does my shitty indy band have to contact Somerville & company, or pay up to $0.08 for every song pressed? Well, as far as I can tell, yes. But my knowledge in this area it limited.
So where am I going with this rant? If someone breaks the law, you go after them. Simple. If Don't Throw Knives At Me records a punk cover of The Unknown Stuntman, we either owe the songwriter up to $0.08 per physical copy that gets distributed, or we have to work out a special deal with them. But if *I* write "Ode To Church Road", and perform it with Don't Throw Knives At Me, then I don't owe myself any money unless I say I do, which is stupid, because then I'd have to pay income tax on what I paid myself and I'd wind up loosing money (
As to how one verifies that I didn't unconsciously plagiarize another song, that's stupid too. In this case, the burden of proof is on any accuser. The artist doesn't have to prove that each and every work they ever write is original. That's like having to prove documentation to prove that something I'm selling on ebay isn't stolen. It may or may not be a good idea, but it's not required. It can't be unless someone makes an accusation. And even then, I believe the burden of proof is on the accuser, is it not?
One last tangent:
I find this 8 cent law interesting. Until I read your post and did some digging, I was not previously aware of it. What I find interesting it the fact that it only applies to physical media, yet it applies to MP3s and other digital file based media. I'm assuming this is because unlike a radio broadcast (to which this statute does not apply) when you share via MP3, a new, permanent copy is made. But how is this different from me tape recording the song off of the radio (which is legal, I believe because of time shifting rulings, please correct me if I'm wrong)? Does a songwriter technically have to get a royalty off of that too?
Again, I'm not 100% sure on any of these points, this is just how it appears to me, based on the information I was able to gather and my ability to interpret it. Any lawyers in the house with relevant experience care to chime in?
Sources:
Texas Tech University
House.gov
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.