Internet Blackout Threat for Music Thieves in AU

An anonymous reader writes "News.com.au is reporting that the ARIA [Australia's Version of the RIAA] is making plans to have ISPs cancel or terminate the accounts of those who download music illegally. If the user is on dialup, that's not a problem: their telephone line will be disconnected. 'Fed up with falling sales, the industry — which claims Australians download more than one billion songs illegally each year — has been discussing tough new guidelines with internet service providers (ISPs) since late last year. The music industry is lobbying for a three strikes and you're out policy to enforce their copyright. Under this system, people who illegally download songs would be given three written warnings by their Internet service provider. If they continued to illegally download songs, their internet account would be suspended or terminated.'"

Comments

Luckily, the alternatives aren't that bad

[pembo13]

Ignore the RIAA and their clones, and their artists. Stay with old music exclusively, or take the money that you would have spent otherwise, and support a local band, there must be at least one in fair distance who you like.

The portrayal of women in music videos

[Scrameustache]

I think that the decline of music sales coincides with the rise in internet usage not because of the terrible pirates of music, but because of porn. Bear with me, it makes sense if you think about it:

I used to watch videos for very mediocre music, because the chicks were hot, scantily dressed, and fed this former teenager's fantasies. But today's kids don't need to buy a CD to have fap-fudder, they can get free porn with ease.

I theorize that the so-called decline of the music industry isn't because of music pirates, as they claim, or because their music suddenly sucks (the monkeys sucked, sucking isn't new), but because they were NOT in the music of selling music, but in the business of selling sexually suggestive material.

Re:Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[PPH]

Why would ISPs agree to this? I can imagine it now, a group of ISPs implement this and then customers flock to the small ISPs who aren't big enough to warrent attention from the ARIA. Faced with a slump in revenue the ISPs reverse course and try to win customers back.

I'm not familiar with Australian law. Perhaps there are no 'safe haven' provisions w.r.t. copyright enforcement and its either play netkop or be sued by the copyright owners.

Let's not get started on SSL encrypted DCC transfers on IRC channels or private FTP servers! That's going to be almost impossible to track. These kind of darknets (as I've seen them called) or going to be very hard to shut-down!

Does this even matter anyway? My friend from Canada brought over his personal collection on a 320Gig drive when he visited this week. This is getting more and more common, people now have so much portable storage that it's often easier to swap collections and cherry pick the songs you like (or take the whole collection if you prefer). Compared to downloading, this is a far safer way to pirate on a huge quantity of music.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a package of DVDs going down the highway in a FedEx truck

The copyright folks are shooting themselves in the foot with this ISP nonsense. Its far easier to detect on-line IP theft (if transfers aren't cloaked in some way) than it is to intercept other means of transfers. This makes me think that the service termination threat might be a scare tactic. As with most intelligence gathering efforts, you don't advertise your methods to your target so they can employ countermeasures. Perhaps a few people will get their access discontinued because their kid downloaded a few songs. No doubt, it will be for a relative ly minor infraction, since that enhances the fear factor more so than going after the major violators. The event will be highly publicized, with sobbing parents on TV and the smaller violators will be discouraged. The bigger ones have more vested in their opreration and will be more likely to employ countermeasures.

Re:so, let's fight this with illegal tactics?

[tomz16]

Those only apply to the govt - Comcast doesn't have to provide service to you at all (unless there is another regulation that requires them to, such as some of the "common carrier" stuff). Same thing with things like "freedom of speech" - it is *not* a violation of it for clear channel to self censor any group for whatever reason they want, it puts limits on the govt, not people or businesses. Snip... In my opinion that only held true until a buttload of my tax dollars went to subsidizing their local cable monopolies and telecom buildouts. In most markets in the US, there are exactly zero, one, or two high speed internet service providers, and all others are effectively precluded from competing for my dollar. The internet is becoming an increasingly important part of modern life, and is essential to many jobs (including mine). In lieu of the fact that this is not truly a free market, and that OUR PUBLIC money was used to secure their private business model, I believe that it is the mandate of the government to either :

1) Allow the monopoly, but ensure that they HAVE to provide service to everyone capable of paying for it at a reasonable rate. Audit their profits to ensure that they aren't fleecing the public.

2) Take away their monopolies. Force cable companies and telcos to fully open up access to their lines to competitors akin to telephone service. (e.g. so that I could use comcast's cable lines to get Google Internet service, and comcast gets only a small cut to cover the actual cable maintenance fees). Currently, if you want something like Earthlink cable/dsl internet, or AOL highspeed, the costs exceed that of the local cable/tel company because the base IP service is still provided by them. This is NOT competition.

Re:Slash-egos prevent this

[phulegart]

Have you ever been in an internet cafe where the girl two seats over has got 12 tabs open in her copy of Firefox, and each one is a different YouTube video loading up? What do you think that does to the bandwidth? How about downloading music videos from Yahoo Music? Think that is nice and kind to your bandwidth?

Have you ever legally downloaded television episodes before? You know, it's just one of the many completely legitimate uses for BitTorrenting. Guess what? You can get yourself distros of Linux with Torrents too. But, they should just be lumped in with Pirate Useage of bittorents, right? HELL, since all this pirating is being done via Downloading, why don't we eliminate downloading alltogether? No more updates, patches, fixes, no more digital distribution of Movies or iTunes, that way we KNOW all those nasty software pirates can't get their booty, aarr, matey.

The fact of the matter is that downloading large files is NOT illegal, nor is it a violation of your contract with your ISP. The size of the file has nothing to do with whether or not the contents of those files are pirated. A little FYI, does the name Angelfire ring a bell? You know a free web host that limits the amount of space and bandwidth their free customers get? Do you know how Angelfire (and other hosts like them) was used to promote Piracy? Pirates would sign up with multiple accounts, and break their large files into a ton of small, 2 to 3 meg zip files, then put one little zip file on each account. So how do you monitor for that? People are loading larger files (than those) in rapid succession (the same way) from legitimate sources.

How do you stop me from pirating software while I am at an internet cafe or coffee shop with free WiFi? Especially if I am using my bandwidth throttle so I DON'T eat up all the bandwidth from everyone around me. Face it. Pirates are actually much more accomodating, far more civil, and much more aware of exactly what they are doing, as opposed to you. You still think that all those bandwidth hoggers must be downloading illegal software or porn.

*shudder*