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ISPs To Filter Traffic For Copyright Holders?
Dr. Zarkov writes "At a CES forum, representatives of AT&T and other ISPs discussed the need to filter traffic at the network level, to stop the transfer of copyrighted material. An AT&T spokesman said they 'would have to handle such network filtering delicately, and do more than just stop an upload dead in its tracks, or send a legalistic cease and desist form letter to a customer. "We've got to figure out a friendly way to do it, there's no doubt about it," he said.'"
The friendly way about it is not to mess with people's traffic in the first place. Once you have filtering equipment in place it can easily be misused to filter out anything any power with enough money might wish to black out.
You do not want to open that box...
Anybody home? More and more p2p apps are including encrypted p2p sessions at the application layer. Did anybody think about that?
Everybody, flip off the cable/adsl and get a mobile broadband contract. It's cheaper, you're not constrained by wires, and (believe it or not) it's quicker. I went the whole hog, partly because I can't get a SIM on contract, and used a Sierra Aircard 720 with a T-Mobile SIM on pay-as-you-go. I pay £10/mo for 40kbps always-on, don't miss broadband one iota because I can get online anywhere on the planet on an unmetered cellular connection.
Also, don't ever underestimate the bandwidth potential of a pack of blank DVDs and a parcel post.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
AT&T will only be filtering stuff copyrighted by "big media". Your stuff, or Slashdot, will not be affected. AT&T obviously has an agenda here, and it's not about protecting everybody's copyrighted material, just copyrighted material that's owned by their "partners". Of course, you could become AT&T's partner, if you would like to pay them some large amount of money...
If I had to guess, I'd say this is about AT&T not getting sued by the big media companies. They seem to be bending over backwards, but hey, they're already forwarding all your traffic to the NSA, so maybe they've figured out a way to reuse the same equipment to filter media files?
"Piracy" (copyright infringement) is only allowed to continue because it makes ISPs more money than the alternative.
;)
ISPs know too well that without piracy, there would be little demand for expensive broadband connections. Of course, on the other hand, it has to be kept under control, lest it starts costing ISPs too much money.
Once legal alternatives become more profitable to ISPs, pirate networks will dry up overnight. The recent assault on net neutrality is an attempt to get there... making legal download service pay for "protection".
Yet, there is a more sensible way: the universal hosting marketplace. Imagine a P2P network where anyone can host files, and is guaranteed to be paid for each upload. ISPs could provide a large chunk of the capacity (à la Usenet), and make a bundle from that.
Give financial value to uploads, and the most active file sharers will view illegal file sharing as a financial loss. Similarly, piracy will become an observable, tangible loss to ISPs.
Until now, piracy was producers' problem. Give value to bandwidth, and it becomes everyone's problem.
Disclaimer: I am currently working on an open-source solution to achieve just that (see sig). Feel free to join us.
One thing Freenet has in common with Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection is friend codes. In both Freenet and Nintendo WFC, you need to add the other user, and the other user needs to add you. So how does one find other trusted users' friend codes in order to connect to the network?
But I noticed that since the last time I checked freenetproject.org, the page Connecting to Freenet has added a few sentences discussing an "insecure mode". Is this any better than just using a system built around eMule, Gnutella, or BitTorrent?
The page also states that it takes a couple days for a Freenet node to get up to speed. Do the developers plan to make Freenet compatible with dial-up or with broadband providers that use PPP over Ethernet, where IP addresses change every 24 hours or so?
Also, there is little-to-no cost, aside from time, to downloading flashy, animated ads. The incentive to use adblock, no flash (or flashblock), noscript (or its equivalent), and refresh blocker all greatly increase once consumers pay per bit.
Can you cite what "Net Neutrality" law you believe they are violating?
A lot of people don't understand what the internet is. It is a network of networks. There is no entity that oversees the entire internet. This is something that is hard for many people to comprehend because in meatspace everything is controlled by "the government". Local (e.g. city/state/country) governmental laws only apply to the networks in that locality. Most internet traffic crosses one or more of these locality boundaries which makes it next-to-impossible to determine whose laws should apply to any given "infraction". In meatspace we have import/export laws, customs, tariffs, treaties, etc. There is no system to make any of those work on packets sent over the internet. This is why spam is so hard to stop - the spammer lives in one place, uses computers in another place, to send messages to people in yet a third place. Whose laws apply? It is extremely difficult to craft a law that works in real life.
As a result of how the internet is laid out and the lack of governance and laws, any given network (e.g. ISP X) CAN block any traffic they want. On any given network, the rule is my network, my rules. They don't answer to anyone except the other networks they exchange traffic with (their upstream providers, or their peers if they are a Tier 1 network with no upstream provider). If you don't like it, don't use that network: Get another ISP.
Comcast is in hot water not because they block file sharing traffic but because they accomplish this by sending forged packets. The FORGERY part is against the law - the blocking is not.
Networks routinely block traffic. Over 90% of all email traffic is spam - if they didn't block it your inbox would be flooded and email would be unusable.
Copyright law is going to be fundamentally changed by the internet - and there is simply nothing that the major "rights holders" (music and movie industry companies) can do about it. Look at the math - we have hundreds of millions of people who want the copyright laws eased, people who are thumbing their noses at existing copyright laws. And we have what - maybe 1 million people (copyright holders - people who are paid royalties from their copyright works) involved in the production of those copyright protected works? How do the copyright laws benefit the "average person"? Ultimately, the people's desire to have less restrictive copyright laws WILL be reflected in the law.
Copyright laws were enacted in a time when such laws were necessary to provide benefit to people who would not otherwise create these works and share them with others. The marketplace has changed. YouTube shows how readily people create content and share it freely with others without needing to be paid to produce these works, paid for their creativity.
The movie and music industry needs to come up with a new business model. The present model, that they can prevent people from copying and sharing movies and music is not, and will not, work in the future. No amount of agitating for new laws, no amount of trying to get internet companies to block file sharing, no amount of suing people is going to put this genie back in the bottle. The old system worked because they could control the distribution medium (the physical media such as the CD or DVD or video tape). Now they no longer control the media. In order for the movie or music to be played on a computerized system, it can be copied. Copy protection systems simply do not work.
My predictions:
jc
p.s. I've worked at ISPs and have an in-depth understanding of how the i
"I'd much rather be mistaken as a lesbian by a bigot than be mistaken as a bigot by a lesbian."
Also, if ISP's start "sniffing" for copyrighted traffic, wouldn't that nullify their Common Carrier status? IANAL, but wouldn't this then make them liable for the content of *all* the traffic that flows over their network?
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
To a certain degree, there already is substantial punitive cost to short-term profit seeking on the markets. Every transaction on the stock markets involves a series of middlemen. Someone's gotta pay for the stock broker's Porsche, after all. The tax that you want already exists: It's called capital gains tax. In the end, all of the fees and taxes soak up any profits you make in short-term trading, and you trail behind the major indexes. Unfortunately, the modern emphasis on long-term investing through index funds hasn't quenched the market's demand for the quick buck.
Unfortunately, the market doesn't seem particularly well-suited to long-term infrastructure investment, across the board in general. Power plants, oil refineries, telecommunications infrastructure, etc., all require enormous amounts of capital investment. Outside of government projects, these kinds of things just aren't being built. The return on that investment, if there is any at all, won't happen for years or decades. Within those years and decades, there is a substantial risk that your competitors might find a better/faster way to do it, or that something incredible might happen that renders your investment completely obsolete. In order for the investment to be worthwhile, it has to be produce a greater return than alternative investments (e.g., buying a bunch of an S&P 500 index fund), and/or more reliable.
Eventually, the market will correct itself. People will collectively realize that companies lacking significant R&D or infrastructure improvements won't do well in the long term. Once investors understand that, that knowledge should affect stock price in the short term. We already went to one extreme of the pendulum during the dot-com boom, when money was senselessly thrown into R&D with no focus on business needs. The pendulum has now swung back and is approaching the other extreme. It may take awhile for investors to collectively realize that long-term greed is better than short-term greed, in the long term.
Ive had this exact plan for 3 years now. FYI its $33NZD for the plan with $1NZD per GB after that. The ISP even provides a tool bar app to monitor the recorded usage in real time. The usage the ISP reports is so very close to my actual usage that I don't think there is any unwanted traffic coming from anywhere. NZ has terrible net options, but the pay as you go option is really the most sensible way for most
If ISPs start editing and controlling content then they become responsible for the content carried on their systems. This wipes out the common carrier status they fought so hard for and won.
If they do this what I'm saying is there must be a huge financial incentive for them to take on such a huge risk. Where's the money?
This does bring up another problem with volume pricing; it would flat out _kill_ internet radio and internet TV, reverting audio and video media control back to the cable and radio networks. It would be yet another in a series of steps backwards in american communications and technology. We're already rated as a tech backwater in comparison to Europe, let's not allow our greedy corporatemongers to turn us into a tech fossil.
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