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Comcast Warns Infringing Customers Of Abuse
tm writes "Comcast recently sent out letters to DMCA-infringing customers, informing them of their illegal downloading transgressions. The notice clearly states that Comcast has been asked by the copyright owner, MGM, to notify the individual of their actions and demand that the downloaded file(s) be immediately removed. In addition, the individual must write a return letter, which consists of an explanation and an apology. It appears that if a valid explanation is given, such as 'I don't know how to secure my access point and my neighbors run wild on my connection,' then both Comcast and MGM will be happy. If the explanation is not satisfactory however, they may proceed with fines, termination of service, ect. It will be interesting to see how this plays out and if this will influence other ISPs to go after customers at Hollywood's request."
Hello Verizon.
They seem to be the only one standing up for their customers' rights.
So, the moral of the story is, if I'm pirating media online, I should leave my access point totall unguarded, with no encryption, or passwords, or logging. That way, I can just blame evil phantom wireless hackers and never get in trouble.
Viruses? Fine by us.
Spam? Sure, go right ahead...
Non-DRMed p2p filetransfers? STOP IN THE NAME OF THE LAW
I guess this means I'd better clear out my queues/start encrypting things.
http://siokaos.org/
This is a much more sane response than just filing a lawsuit. It at least gives the users the chance to do the right thing rather than bring the hammer down on their head like the RIAA has been doing.
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
That's not what the letter says at all. The letter is based on the allegation of offering the file for download (which you do, when you use bittorrent).
You only need to counter-notify if you believe you've received this notice based on a non-infringing file. No mention of any letter of explanation/apology is made in the linked document, so unless the poster has a different letter that he didn't post he's entirely misunderstood this notice. Otherwise, turn off your torrent and let them know that it's no longer there. If you feel the obligation to make up an excuse when you do that, go ahead.
IANAL, but I don't think I'd offer any explanation besides "Thanks for the notice. I have ensured that no such file is available." unless pressed into it by further action from the copyright holder. Like talking to the police, ISTM that the less you say, the better.
.sig: file not found
What do they really expect Comcast to do? They simply abided by the law, and informed customers of their rights.
Note Comcast didn't assume guilt, they made it clear they are passing on information, and provide options of remedy as per DMCA.
Seems pretty clean to me. What is comcast to do? Just take a lawsuit and pass off the cost to all the subscribers?
If they can hassle people over downloading illegal files surely they could spend their time better and track all the people who have accessed child pornography.
I guess the RIAA and similar organisations mean more to Comcast then some little girl being abused..
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Is this not just a sneaky way of getting ISP's to give them user information? Rather than going through the courts and doing it legally (and facing the risk of failure), recording associations sneakily do it like this - they get the info they want, and the desired effect- bit more fear, and less file trading.
I refuse to apologize for something I may or may not have done. I plead the 5th.
Seriously, I have 3 or 4 options right now for broadband. If comcast is going to monitor my usage then I'll decide to go elsewhere for service. The only way they'll stop this kind of activity is if they lose customers by doing it.
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
If more ISPs just assigned a dynamic IP address, privacy would be increased substantially since record companies would have to force ISPs to figure out who leased the IP address during the time of the infraction. Frankly, I think ISPs should not be held responsible nor accountable for the actions of their users, and in fact, there should be a strong sense of privacy protection among ISPs. Sure, you can isolate your traffic to specific ports and encrppt using things like secure-tunnel.com, but ISPs should not be listening in on you nor identifying you to ANY company. That'd be like your telephone company mentioning that you call 1-900 numbers just because your employer asked them. Our rights mustn't be trampled by these organizations for any reason. These companies should not be able to control DIGITAL / ELECTRONIC impulses that are shared, nor identify who is sharing what series of 0s and 1s. We need to grow up as a society and mind our own business. If what you're doing isn't working anymore, find something else. Taking away civil liberties to protect yourself is a gross affront to the greater good.
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
Keep in mind, Comcast is also trying to sell you premium cable channels and video on demand. Any MGM movies obtained through p2p is potentially revenue lost to Comcast as well. I don't believe this would be a factor with Verizon, since they're not doing the cable thing.
"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." -- G. K. Chesterton
As it stands right now, IPS aren't expected to enforce the legality of stuff traveling across their networks.
It seems like a major bad idea to start doing that, just for the hell of it. They open themselves up to the same charge as all the p2p filesharing apps---that it is they who should be held responsible, as enablers, rather than the individual who is actually breaking the law.
I mean really, if you were the RIAA, who would you rather sue? Some joker who has 50 cents in his bank account and 11k on his credit card, or Comcast?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Comcast has been sending these notices to people for a year now. I don't see why this is news.
Well basically its the same thing we have known all along. This isn't about "downlading" as the blog and topic states. Its about sharing or uploading files via P2P and Bittorrent. If you don't want to get caught be a leecher. Now you may have some misguided notion that its "only right" that you should be giving if your taking, but that's the suckers play. Don't fall for it. All of those people who will give you flack and try to blame you for the eventual downfall of P2P for not sharing are not going to be there to pay your $10,000 fine when you busted.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
I would guess this must be a very common response to illegal file trading charges. It's also about the worst, logically. The trading of child pornography is probably the best argument out there to encourage service provider cooperation to monitor file sharing.
The spidering/monitoring technology that MPAA develops today to take their movies off the net will eventually be used to cut off the streams of exploitive material. It's not like law enforcement has the budget to independently develop technology tools to do this stuff. Honestly, I would happily trade my ability to anonymously download theater-filmed "Walking Tall" files today, if it helps stop the exploitation of children in the future. That's a great trade-off.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Exactly. Anyone who answers this is as dumb as people who participated in the RIAA's "Clean Slate" program. For those who don't know, this was where you would admit guilt -- to criminal charges -- to the RIAA, and they would grant you "amnesty" if you promised not to do it again and signed some sort of contract. Small problem with this is that private entities can't immunize someone against criminal charges; a prosecutor is free to bring charges if he so desires, and all you've accomplished is creating a signed admission of guilt.
If you're a Comcast customer and get threatened, I'd suggest just switching to another company and ignoring their threats. If you're going to respond to them, write them a letter explaining that one of their paying customers is cancelling their service and going with one of their competitors because of their threats. It wouldn't hurt to let them know you'll be recommending Verizon or SpeakEasy or someone else to your friends and family from now on, instead of Comcast. When they eventually connect the dots that "threatening our customers on behalf of the IP cartel = less customers = less money," maybe they'll take a stand like Verizon did and protect their customers.
This also sounds like another good reason to switch to an encrypted P2P architecture like Freenet.
Liberty in your lifetime
But, with BitTorrent, downloaders are also uploaders, that's how it works. And there's a nice central server for tracking, and therefore catching people. Using BitTorrent for illegal stuff isn't really that good an idea.
In fact, I'm quite glad there's a P2P technology that's easy to police. The mediacorps no doubt want to make the technologies themselves illegal. The fact that it's much easier to shut down a dodgy tracker site than stop a file over a decentralised P2P system may well save it from the almost inevitable axe.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Parent poster is absolutely right. What's posted on Slashdot is egregiously misleading.
The Slashdot article states (emphasis mine):
Please note I am not a Comcast customer and I have no relationship of any sort with Comcast.
Ok, point by point:
Let me emphasize my last point: there is nothing new here. Comcast is doing what it must do under the DMCA, and it's doing what every other ISP has to do. Your complaint is with the DMCA, not Comcast.
My complaint is with the article submitter and, even more so, the Slashdot editor who submitted this: neither apparently took the time to read the linked Comcast letter (even though, to their credit, they did link it.
It's important that Slashdot and its readers rail against the all too common erosion of our rights, and I applaud Slashdot for doing so. But it only harms our cause when we waste time and hemorrhage credibility raging against straw men with no basis in reality. Let's salvage some credibility by Slashdot readers -- and editors -- admitting that, with this "article", we simply screwed up.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Comcast outsources their news service to Giganews now, they don't have a NNTP server anymore AFAIK. Giganews puts a nice cap on what you can D/L a month also.
You don't need a full copy to be infringing copyright. It just has to be long enough to not be fair use, and the DMCA has no provision for fair use, so maybe not even that.
Dont forget also that the story says "downloading" when they aren't monitoring what you are downloading, only what you are seeding with bittorrent...
There is a difference here between downloading it and sharing it. I wish people would get stuff right on these stories.
It's almost like what SCO is doing with their lawsuits now...
When is this point going to be leveraged?
I can name my fuckyouRIAA.txt file to The_Matrix.dvix and have my service disconnected. This is
a ridiculous position. Does a file name now constitute proof?
[Devil's advocate] ...do I need to be graphic?
1. Mr Pedo chats up young girl nearby. Maybe even gets a picture.
2. Mr Pedo makes a frivolous subpoena request, claiming that girl's IP was sharing his copyrighted something, using a fake ID.
3. ISP can only comply.
4. Mr Pedo never files a lawsuit.
5.
[/Devil's advocate]
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Rights? The right to trade a copy of "Walking Tall" recorded in theater with a camera (judging by the filename)?
Your insulated view may not allow you the perspective necessary for objectivity, but trust me, it is disputable whether or not an individual has the right to record "Walking Tall" in a theater with a camera and then distribute it. It is not a clear case as you would like to present it.
Would it be acceptable for someone to take an audio-only recording device to record the sound track for the movie? What if it was just a legal pad, and a pencil? Assume they know shorthand and could storyboard and transcribe it precisely. Is it immoral and/or illegal to transcribe, and describe the goings-on of the movie with a notepad and pencil? What if it was just someone's mind? What if Mr. Joe Hypothetical had eidetic memory and some expensive renderware on his PC at home. If he sees a Pixar movie and his mind, and software at home, enables him to recreate the movie exactly, should it be illegal?
What if you didn't have superhuman memory, or fancy software, but instead were just a great story-teller. Say you remembered the movie well and related all the details to your friends in an entertaining fashion. Is this copyright infringement too? Or what if you're not even a great story teller, but you remember the high points of the movie. Should it be illegal to divulge spoilers to those who have not paid? Are spoilers copyright infringement, do you think?
Humans already have the capacity to store, retrieve and relate information, you can't get around that fact! So the issue must be one of quality, right? The Valenti argument, that the "real problem" is that digital copies don't degrade. Well, what is the problem with recording from a theater? If you start with a degraded copy, isn't that great for the MPAA using that logic? If the issue isn't one of quality, it must be one of control. But where is the line drawn, when humans themselves have I/O and computational ability and when this is the direct root of human civilization?
If you pay for access to an idea, must you therefore relinquish control of your mind? That is what the argument reduces to.
Ponder TJ's words:
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the mora
Part of the reason that Comcast is playing ball is that they were ASKED, vs. VERIZON who was given a 'writ' and a demand for customer info. Comcast has been asked to notify SPECIFIC customers of violations or potential violations. Honestly I think that is the way the system is SUPOSSED to work, and if you ARE trading in illegagl copies you SHOULD get busted. If you own a copy of the source material, then they should be going after the people who downloaded it without proper legal right.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?