Slashdot Mirror
Korea Kicking People Offline With One Strike
An anonymous reader writes "While there's lots of talk of 'three strikes' laws in places like France, it may be worth looking over at South Korea, which put in place a strict new copyright law, required by a 'free trade' agreement with the US (which was the basis for ACTA). It went into effect in the middle of 2009, and now there's some data about how the program is going. What's most troubling is that the Copyright Commission appears to be using its powers to 'recommend' ISPs suspend user accounts based on just one strike, with no notice and no warning. The system lets the Commission make recommendations, but in well over 99% of the cases, the ISPs follow the recommendations, and they've never refused to suspend a user's account."
Given the importance of online gaming and internet addiction in South Korea, this is actually bigger there than it would be here.
However, in the age of 3G internet access, roaming WiFi hotspots, anonymizer services, and the prevalance of internet cafes in South Korea, I think you'll find it difficult to nail individuals to specific IPs.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Dear USA,
if your corporate leaders had not sent all your manufacturing jobs to China and India, your whole future economy would not depend on media production.
Fuck ACTA, and fuck the RIAA and MPAA.
...in well over 99% of the cases, the ISPs follow the recommendations, and they've never refused to suspend a user's account.
So...what happens in the other 1%?
I bet they notice when they lose carrier.
In Korea being online is only for old people.
Lol kekekekekeke
can i haz teh internets
1 strike my ass.
Hey, it worked back then, crime rates were much lower. Come on, just be pragmatic.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I thought this was an article about the Koreans finding a way to make baseball watchable.
If I am reading an illegally-copied paper book by the warm glow of a 60-watt bulb, can the local electric utility be told to disconnect my service?
Isn't it odd that "free trade" agreements are never that? The more and more countries stop making their own laws with their elected officials and start offshoring lawmaking to para-governmental organizations with no oversight, the more and more countries slip into tyranny.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I know personally I have no idea, so I'll simply pose the question:
How much piracy is it estimated there is in South Korea?
How much effect do they think the law has?
It's very hard to judge a law based on only how many people are affected by it. If they estimate that there are millions of people using pirated software, then 30k banned isn't that much. If they think it's in the hundreds-of-thousands, it is.
How much a law is applied is only half the story; what's important is who it's applied against. If they're only using it against the most serious offenders, then 1 strike isn't that bad.
Not only did I read the article, I read the comments as well. The first one I read was a rather interesting quesiton: "Did sales of copyrighted materials go up as a result?" After all, in theory, with "reduced piracy" there should be an increase in sales.
But we all know that's not why they are doing this. There are no real losses. Fact is, like all other IP, there is an element of enforce it or forget it. While copyright doesn't actually "go away" when it is not enforced as in the case of trade marks, the more freely the infringement occurs, the less likely people are to respect it.
It would be nice if there were some middle ground, some safe area for file sharers. But there's not just yet. I am a file sharer of content that I don't fear sharing. But where U.S. content of any sort is concerned, I simply don't share. I might download and then disconnect on occasion, but rarely even that. Got too much to lose.
"but in well over 99% of the cases, the ISPs follow the recommendations, and they've never refused to suspend a user's account."
So, well over 99% while at the same time never refusing? Isn't that 100%?
They can cut off your electricity, as it's enabling you to use illegal content. They can garnish your wages, as it was earned applying knowledge aquired illegally. They can remove the blood in your veins and sell it, as that was produced using food you purchased with money from your job using knowledge acquired illegally. Next time, PAY for your pr0n, or don't be suggesting the use of use those positions you learned watching it on the job, just stick to whatever the client proposes.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
The next step is to use the fan in the offender's computer to administer a death penalty by fan death!
As my phone requires a data plan, and if that data plan is then cancelled due to a violation like this what happens to my contract? Although I realize you could possible face a lawsuit over the content, I'm more curious about the possibility to escape from cell phone contracts.
But we all know that's not why they are doing this. There are no real losses.
Actually, the funny thing is there are losses. Think about it, a serious criminal will just steal/hack/forge ID and get another connection. A normal consumer who just got caught torrenting a song, will be offline forever and UNABLE TO CONSUME DIGITAL MEDIA, lol. The media companies are slowly destroying people's ability to purchase digital goods from them...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
And I don't mean "we looked at the evidence for the defendant and concluded unilaterally that he should be disconnected." I mean the right of the accused to defend oneself in a fair hearing. Due process is a fundamental part of the rule of law, and because it protects the innocent and guilty alike, states absolutely hate its inconvenience and the fact that it lets some of the guilty go free.
South Korea is remarkably forward-thinking in many ways, but apparently this isn't one of them.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
I think you hit the nail on the head. They keep tossing this "free" word around as if it provided some kind of freedom. The only people getting anything for "free" or getting any "freedom" out of this are megacorps and the people who run them.
Freedom to write laws and have them rubberstamped by congress.
Freedom to destroy the livelihood of any citizen caught listening to music they weren't allowed to hear.
Freedom to never, ever change their business model and continue selling their products at ever-higher prices and have those prices protected by the government.
I have one word for the internet users of Korea and it is not plastics. The word they need to learn and understand is: SEEDBOX. Look it up on wikipedia and/or search on google.
OK, more than a slight irony, considering you can buy any media you want on the streets of Korea in convenient optical form, with no hassle, and for $1-2 apiece per disc. (depending on where the won stands vis a vis the dollar).
Also, while Korea has excellent bandwidth locally, getting streams and downloads in from remote sources (and nearly everything Western is remote, from Korea) can be difficult. Torrenting from the ROK is not pleasant in most cases.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Disclaimer: I'm just a paranoid stoner.
As someone involved with that habit and lifestyle, it's easy to notice the government's quite profitable agenda of socially marginalizing and exploiting parts of the population. Incentivize "proper" social conduct with the various perks of society with tools like credit scores and background checks, using jail as the stick when carrots fail to sufficiently motivate.
The x-strike laws strike me as a particularly transparent attempt to maintain this status quo. The internet has lead to the creation of online communities for just about every "unsavory" hobby, habit, or problem you could think of. The "wrong" people are no longer socially isolated; Legalization movements are making record progress; Government is losing control.
Somewhere at the top, someone finally realized the decentralized nature of the internet means standard models of exercising authority fall short. How to reassert control? Convince society of the necessity of elevating the internet to the level of the "gated community home, SUV, and health insurance," you know, out of the hands of those filthy subhumans who live outside the walls.
Copyright makes sense as the first step. Everyone already agrees on the vital role companies like the RIAA play in our economy, so we must take the privilege of internet from those who dare jeopardize its profits. Then, once it's socially acceptable to deny someone "the internet" for copyright violations, the floodgates are opened to deny it to anyone who displeases the powers that be. Internet privilege denial will become as standard a punishment as revoking a teen's driver's license is for almost any infraction these days.
"But Spazntwich," you say,"The internet is ubiquitous! You can't possibly prevent someone from getting on the internet!"
Of course you can't. Just like the government can't even keep drugs out of its own prisons. Ineffectiveness of a law has never been a reason to overturn one.
The internet's universal nature plays right into their hands. Any infraction, intentional or otherwise (remember citizen, ignorance is never an excuse!), will be a violation of probation/parole and place one back at the mercy of the authorities. Right where they want you.
How about simple blind spew of trigger packets/seqs with spoofed IPsrc (set to easily guessable RAP home/biz addrs)? Botnet optional. Social DoS. After a few dozen of these, the ISPs might get a clue. Or maybe not, I think a a metric clue-by-four is somewhat larger.
This is the modern day equivalent of banning a person from using books for life, for making a photocopy. What about giving a friend a mixtape?
You said South Korea, right?
Once the ISPs start losing a significant portion of their revenue stream, they'll think twice about arbitrarily banning paying customers from their service.
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." - Aristotle
Instead of doing a step forward, force all the others do a step backward
In Singapore, each "strike" is from a cane.
So SOUTH not so different from NORTH. It's the model that ACTA woudl like to force onto the whole world. ACTA is evil and should be put to the sword!
It's vital that one specifies. How else do we know if it's the Fascist State or the Socialist State?
Usually doesn't make the news, but most things don't. Search around for it, you'll find some news on it.
Absolutely nothing. Well except microprocessors for pretty much every computer out there. Both Intel and AMD have R&D in the US, and Intel has many fabs. If you buy a current 45nm or 32nm chip it comes courtesy of Arizona or Oregon. But that's it! Oh, well except for aircraft. The US also produces those, and is in fact one of only two large commercial airline producers in the world (Boeing is US, Airbus is EU) though Embarer (Brazil) is slowly edging up from small jets. But that's it! Ummm except for Toyota Tundras. Toyota, despite being Japanese, makes cars everyone and some in the US. The Tundra is ONLY built in the US, it is shipped elsewhere.
Getting the point? The US makes lots of stuff. In fact not only is saying the US makes no manufactured goods wrong, it is the opposite of right. The US makes more manufactured goods than any other nations. China is on track to overtake that spot in 2020, but because China's manufacturing is growing, not because the US's is shrinking. The US makes tons and tons of shit, not just media.
If you don't see that it just means you haven't done research, or just look at the "made in" label and don't consider what that means. That is just the country of final assembly. Says nothing of where the parts were made. If you buy a mid-range Denon receiver it will be "made in China" (the high end ones are made in Japan). However all that means is a plant there assembled it as per the specs given from D&M in Japan. Open it up and you find parts form all over. The DSP is an Analog Devices unit, produced in the US. The capacitors are Japanese in make. The D/A converters are again American. You find stuff from all over in there, it just gets shipped to China for final assembly.
Same deal for many American products. A Ford GT500 is an American super car... In that they get assembled there, but the parts come from all over. Ford bought parts from many European supercar makers to make it happen. Nothing wrong at all with that, it is just how things are done. In some cases, one country is really good at things. Like if you want an LCD panel, good chance it comes from Korea. The LCD monitor itself may be assembled in China or Taiwan or elsewhere, but the panel was probably built in Korea. They build almost all of them, just a market Korea is very good at.
So please, if you want to attack the bad laws like ACTA, do so based on what is in them. Stop with the silly "The US doesn't make anything!" argument. That shows nothing but that you haven't done your homework. You don't even have to do much homework. Like I said there are some really obvious ones like Boeing.
While you are right that the Real Bad Folks are those making money hand over fist and buying out the legislative, please fucking do what's in your hands to change that.
And refusing to buy at Wal-Mart counts, as doing political work. Just being a smart-ass and pouring irony on those who actually do something doesn't.
Korea has been moving slowly but surely to remove the rights of its citizens, blackout the media and increase the powers of the incumbent president. As such, this comes as no surprise.. is what I want to say but more likely than not it is just an extension of Korea's horrible record of customer service within the country.
I never want to be kicked off for any reason but when someone downloads copyrighted material, 99.9% of the time they know they're doing wrong. There's no reason to give a warning when they know right from wrong.