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

Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[Ckwop]

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.

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.

At some point, their revenues will become so small that they start to lose credibility. A case in point, where are the blacksmiths' guilds today? This whole issue with trundle on for some time to come but the inevitable will eventually happen. Time is on our sides, my friends.

Simon

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:Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[kdemetter]

parasites ? How is that possible when we pay for traffic like everyone else . and please tell me why i'm not allowed to download a new Linux distro via Bittorent ?

Re:Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[miskatonic alumnus]

If it came to that the labels would love it. You probably only have a few friends with whom you'd go to the time and trouble of sharing in this fashion.

Ahh. But, they share with a friend, who shares with a friend. Before you know it, Kevin Bacon has a copy, and then the world!

Re:Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[Eivind]

Dunno about that. The thing is, it's the product of how many you swap with and how much you swap. Disc-sizes are growing exponentially to the point where atleast when it's about music (which it is in this article) you're going to be able to trivially storing huge libraries -- just on the hunch that you may be interested in a small fraction of it.

We already see this. There's a clear trend from sharing a single song by a single artist, then to sharing a complete album by a single artist, and then onwards to sharing complete discographies of artists, aslong as discs keep growing this trend will continue. I can easily see "every-album-that-was-in-the-charts-this-year.zip" and it's not even that much of a stretch to imagine "every-album-that-was-in-the-charts-this-decade"

For that matter, hard-disc-sizes only need to keep growing like they do for a few more years to make "every CD released in USA in the 1990ies" a completely practical thing to store and swap around.

At 200kbps (more or less the needed bandwith for indistinguishalbe-from-cd sound for most people) one hour of music takes up 90MB. An average song perhaphs 7MB. Which means that, for example, the complete content of iTunes (the store, not the program), will take up around 7MB times 3.5 million, which is about 25TB.

Today that's nontrivial, common discs today hold only half a TB or so, so you'd need 50 discs. But discs double in capacity (for the same price) about every 2 years, so that means it's about a dozen years until that entire library, 3.5 million songs, fit on a single standard consumer hard-disc. (yeah yeah, we don't know that the future will play out like that, but it seems a reasonable guess, even if it slowed down it's hard to imagine it'd take more than double that or so)

If RIAA et al think they have a hard time with simple copying now, wait and see what happens when 25TB is a trivial amount of disc-space. They are *so* fucked. I'm not saying its rigth or wrong. I'm just saying it IS so.

so, let's fight this with illegal tactics?

[yagu]

Maybe this is okay and/or legal in AU. Is this legal in the US? What about due process? What about overdue process?

Anecdotally, as an aside, I had on my mind about three artists (new artists, e.g., Paolo Nutini), and hence, three cds I set out to find and purchase. Circuit City, no dice (didn't really plan on buying there what with their recent employee abuse program) -- they had about 1/4 the number of racked cds than last time I'd looked there. Best Buy, sorry. And the local CD store, nope! No selection, nothing. I don't know which came first the chicken or the egg, I don't even know which is which, but my thirst for new music is about the same as before -- but recently I'm finding I can't buy cds as before.

I'm not buying the "pirates decrease sales" spiel. My cause and effect for buying fewer cds is strictly the continued unavailability of cds on display. It used to be a smörgåsbord, now the stores look like the cutout bins of years past. This (the RIAA, and others) is an industry that rather than weather a business model storm and changing business dynamics to adapt continues to insist on taking their ball home with them (hey, it isn't even their ball!) so we can't play. And somehow, they still want to demand we pay them. Please, please, please!, just let them become irrelevant quickly so we can get on with our music!

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

[symbolic]

Ah, the ongoing saga of how to sustain a failing business model. Accuse everyone of stealing and demand a cut of the sales of other products that you *insist* are cutting into your profits. It's brilliant in a way - you never really have to be accountable for the quality of the stuff that you claim people are stealing. I wonder if the downward slide (that they claim exists anyway) might be due to the fact that it's very easy for people to gauge the quality of what's being offered *before* actually forking over their money.

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.

How...

[monkaduck]

How could they determine what is "illegal" and what is bought from a reputable online store? Or if a band offers a download from their website, would that be flagged as well? I don't see how there couldn't be any false positives with this agenda.

Scare tactics as usual

[redelm]

Sounds mostly like a "trial balloon", an idea floated up without any real expectation it will be implemented. Perhaps for scare value. The logic is quite erronious: labels have been losing sales not due to competition/substitution from downloads, but from a lack of new, fresh product to sell. They've cut their A&R budgets and are milking their catalogs. Sales would drop even with zero downloading.

In any case, the implementation is sure to be a nightmare: families with shared accounts, botnets, and false-positive identification will make enforcement difficult, even if the ISPs actually wanted to comply. Which I doubt they do. Do ISPs have "common carrier" status is *.au? If so, they will be loathe to jeopardize it.

Re:Monopolies prevent this

[owlnation]

That works both ways. If you cut off a (probably large) section of your customer base, you open the flood gates for competition in the longer term. Oh, as well as seriously damaging your brand.

I don't see why ISP's would agree to do this. It's right up there with... Load gun -> aim at foot -> Fire!

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.

I almost hope something like this succeeds

[koreth]

(Almost.) If a system like this were put in place and rigorously enforced, and after a year the Australian music industry still saw declining sales, it would put a pretty big nail in the coffin of the "our industry is dying because of you filthy pirates" argument. The industry goons will not stop bleating that until it becomes such a ridiculous claim that any reasonable person reacts to it with derisive laughter instead of seriously considering it.

If, on the other hand -- unlikely though I think it is -- their sales shot up all of a sudden, then people like me would be forced to admit we were wrong. Which honestly I'll be happy to do if there are convincing hard numbers that contradict my point of view.

On the other hand, it's not worth causing so much trouble to so many people just to test a theory, which is why I'm only "almost" in favor of this.

fine if...

[nanosquid]

That's fine... if ISPs are held financially responsible for the losses they cause when they disconnect someone groundlessly. Losses includes lost productivity, time spent on trying to get the service reconnected, lost business, distress, etc.

"...more than one billion songs..."

[fuego451]

So, each Internet user in Australia is down loading more than 100 songs a year? Sounds like the usual hype, smoke, mirrors and bs the riaa uses in the US.

Re:Monopolies prevent this

[Original Replica]

"If they cut you off, you're done."

In the States that's the fastest way to bring on an anti-monoploy suit. What are the legal ramifications of a non-government organization that could "cut you off" form a significant section of society? Will the ISP hold a "trial" to allow the customer to deny or defend the charges?

The ISP response

[russotto]

According to TFA: "We had a meeting a few weeks ago with the Internet Industry Association (about the new guidelines) but we're yet to hear back.

Yeah. The IIA is probably still working on getting "Sod off, wankers!" translated into legalese.

over one billion severed?

[morethanapapercert]

Let's see here, ARIA is claiming >1,000,000,000 songs downloaded every year by Australians. According to Wikipedia, .au has a population of 20,788,357. This results in 48 songs for every man, woman and child in Australia every year* (I can't be bothered to RTFA, how long have they been doing this?) I dunno about you, but to me that looks more like an unexploited potential market. This is even more true when you consider that not every person in Australia has an Internet connection and of those who *do* have a connection, not all choose to infringe on corporately owned copyrights by downloading music without ARIA's blessing. Based on hearsay and such, I'll make a wild guess and say it's more like ten million Aussies downloading >150 songs each per year. That's only roughly 600MB per person/account but I've heard that Australia has poor long haul connections to the rest of the world, so downloading that much from other people around the world shows a great deal of interest. Ten million music fans, all heavy consumers and the **IA can't figure out a working micro-pay/pay-as-you-go music download system?

*For the sake of simplicity, I ignore Tasmania and the other islands, although I'm sure ARIA is counting them. I also round off the decimals

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*

Re:Monopolies prevent this

[KeensMustard]

You typically only have one service provider in a given area. Really? In rural/regional areas I suppose you might be stuck with Telstra, but I wouldn't describe that as typical. In metropolitan areas you can choose from numerous carriers - Telstra may own the hardware (mostly) but that doesn't entitle them to say who uses it.

Re:What if I own the CD's with the songs I'm DL'in

[cpt kangarooski]

No they don't. They may argue that it's not a fair use (though I haven't heard that one for a while) with regard to format shifting, but that's all. Virtually no works other than computer software and internet-downloaded media are even claimed to be licensed routinely. And in fact, they aren't. I've never even heard of a regular CD in a record store where the copyright holder claimed that it was being licensed, not sold. So don't assume that everything works like software, and better yet, don't assume that anything should: EULAs are anachronistic and provide no benefit to anyone, really. The only reason they're still around, (other than to allow abuses by licensors that no one should be tolerant of) seems to be inertia.

You forgot one:

[Penguinisto]

Common Carrier Status.

If an ISP starts doing any company (or cartel's) bidding, they no longer can claim to be neutral for content. This means that if so much as one child porn images streaks across an ISP's wires or servers, they can be credibly liable. After all, they actively prohibit copyright infringement, so why can't they stop or prevent the commission of a real criminal (or even tortious) act? While I doubt that criminal prosecutors would take that to heart, I do know that it would very likely leave a participating ISP quite defenseless to any civil suit that comes along naming them as a defendant...

/P

Declining sales?

[Chuck Chunder]

If a system like this were put in place and rigorously enforced, and after a year the Australian music industry still saw declining sales

What do you mean "still"? 2006 saw an increase in sales.