US ISPs, Big Content Reaching Antipiracy Agreement

Chaonici writes "The word from CNet is that an antipiracy agreement between a number of ISPs (including Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast) and the RIAA & MPAA is nearing completion. Under the agreement, ISPs will step up their responses to copyright infringement complaints against subscribers. If a subscriber accumulates enough complaints, the ISP can throttle their bandwidth, limit their Web access to only the top 200 websites, and/or require participation in a 'copyright awareness' program that explains the rights of content creators. ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system. Ars Technica confirms the story with notes from an industry source, who mentions that the Obama administration is 'generally supportive' of the agreement."

Comments

What is this?

[GameboyRMH]

What is this, fascism week?

Re:What is this?

[jaymz666]

good luck finding one!

Re:What is this?

[Doctor_Jest]

That would be great if there was actual market competition in the broadband arena. It's pretty simply a monopoly, and if you factor in the government sanction that provides the monopoly... then yes... it is fascism.

This is vastly more sinister than the government adopting this stance officially.. because we can vote the bastards out who passed it. With the current state of broadband in the US, the only voting out we can do is canceling service in protest, something I suspect the Great Unwashed is unwilling to do.

This has nothing to do with actual infringement. All you need is to piss off the right people and zing! you're throttled and limited. There is no due process. If you get "enough complaints"... your ISP is going to screw you over withholding service that YOU paid for. How equitable is that? How is that not illegal? The EFF needs to sue.

Without competition, we are, to put it bluntly... fucked. And this sort of nonsense has made it more and more clear that the *AA's don't want my money. That's fine. I'll keep it. If only 20% of the people in the US did that, we'd be able to force change. As it stands now, about all we can do is shake our fists and shout insults as the *AA's burn down the orphanage and assrape the kids escaping the fire.

Re:What is this?

[Threni]

Isn't Pirate Bay in the top 200 sites?

The wording scares me

[Combatso]

"complaints" and "suspected pirate". From what I can tell, to the MPAA and RIAA everyone is a "suspected" pirate..... I wonder if ThePirateBay is in the top 200 website list?

Top 200 web sites?

[jd2112]

Good, I'll still be able to get to ThePirateBay

Re:Top 200 web sites?

[Intron]

What's the reasoning behind only allowing the top 200 web sites anyway?
Why are websites with less traffic bad?

This is wrong on so many levels.

Simple. The **AA want you kicked off the Internet, but your ISP still wants to collect their full monthly rate from you. So this way everybody is happy except you and you don't have a vote.

subject

[Legion303]

"ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system."

Ha ha! But seriously, customers will share the costs with other customers. RIAA might jack up member fees, but they were probably going to do that anyway.

CONSUMERS will burden the costs of the system

[jDeepbeep]

ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system

Naturally, the ISP will pass on the costs to the consumer, and the rights holders will find a way to pad the product price with their piece of the cost, but we all knew that.

Bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

If anything, this is going to push me into "pirating" more. Limit my freedom just because some asshole corporate fuck thinks it's "fair"? Fuck these mother fuckers. I'll advise EVERYONE I know to NEVER do business with Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon from here on out.

Just because of this, I refuse to buy a movie or song ever again. 100% piracy from now on.

It's seriously time for a pro-freedom ISP that encrypts everything, logs nothing, and is crazy fast. Anybody have access to some VC capital to make this happen?

Re:Bullshit.

[Anonymous Coward]

One more has finally seen the light.

I don't consider myself pro-piracy. I believe that receiving the benefit from something without the owner's permission is unethical (even if the owner still gets to benefit from it). I am an artist myself, and thus have a vested interest in copyright law. I believe that a reasonable copyright system is worthwhile, and those who try to avoid recompensing artists and authors under such a system should be punished.

We do not have such a system. We have a system where a person can be punished on the mere accusation of wrongdoing (DMCA takedown notice); where the online equivalent of jaywalking is punishable by fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (Jammie Thomas); where so-called "limited-time" copyright keeps getting extended so that nothing will ever go public domain again; where companies can lock up their works so that even when they do go public domain they still can't be accessed (DRM); where the force of law backs this up so you're not allowed to bypass such locks even for legitimate use (DMCA); where copyright infringement is equated to terrorism by assigning it to the organization created specifically to go after terrorists (DHS); where anti-piracy international agreements are made in secret and all we get is a name that equates piracy with one of the most severe crimes of a civilized society (Anti-COUNTERFEITING Trade Agreement); where companies can get away with spamming letters threatening lawsuits without even a hint of accuracy checking so that even people who don't have a computer get threatened without any legal recourse; where giant companies can convince the government to do practically anything just by complaining about how much they're being harmed by piracy even when they're making record-breaking profits; where the whole idea of copyright, which was originally meant "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" now keeps every possible idea locked up so tightly that the law hinders the progress of science and the useful arts, all so that a handful of executives of big companies can each buy a third yacht.

I'm not pro-piracy. I'm anti-broken-copyright-system. It's gotten to the point where I consider it more unethical to give money to those who support such a system than to copy or share something that does not belong to me.

Don't blame me. I'm just a product of the system. The system has declared war on me, as it has on everyone who has ever read a book, watched a movie, or listened to a song and wanted a copy of it for ourselves, but not at the price nor in the format that is on the market. And when you declare war on that many people, don't be surprised if some of them fight back.

Internet Access Is a Basic Human Right

[ALeavitt]

The UN recently declared internet access to be a basic human right. I wonder what they would have to say about the government colluding with corporations to curtail the basic human rights of citizens of the United States.
Oh, who am I kidding. They probably won't have anything to say about it at all.

Fighting back?

[CelticWhisper]

Okay, I'll ask the obvious question: How do we fight this? We know that there's little choice between ISPs in many rural (and even some sub/urban) areas, so threatening to switch isn't always practical. It's not a bill being proposed so we can't direct elected officials to vote against it - do we demand our legislators draft a bill to stop it? Is this FCC territory? FTC? Who do we talk to, who do we demand answers from, who do we petition, and how do we get the message across?

Cats out of the bag

[SmallFurryCreature]

Really, it is out. Look, it is there, sitting on the windowsill licking its... well, that is just rude... but it is out of the bag in any case. No you can't put it back in the back. Or the case.

Whenever now some new story breaks about the latest means of illegal filesharing and the industry moving against it, I am near instantly asked by non-techies how to do it themselves.

Educate them? What, that artists like Britney Spear would starve to death without your hard earned money? Yeah, I am sure most of the people I know, some of who have trouble making end meet month to month give a shit.

Content production has always relied on the artificial limitation of availability (we only print X amount) to keep the price up. With digital reproduction, this limit has gone. Worse, the cost of distribution is approaching trivial. I can share a movie for a couple of cents. How in the world are you going to persuade me to pay MORE for a SINGLE movie then I pay for my internet connection that can give me hundreds of them?

And yet, movie ticket sales are on the increase. Gaga earns millions. Clearly all this piracy isn't actually affecting anyone. Where are the starving artists, where are the movies that should have been made that are not made (no, the ones that should not have been made but were made do NOT count instead).

It reminds me of the anti-piracy messages in shows like Futurama. Yeah, you sold me, I felt very bad for downloading the entire series... oh wait, I didn't. The cost of purchasing series is just to high, i am not going to pay that much for a piece of plastic. As for watching it on TV, the commercials are just to long, not just the ones that make money, WHY one EARTH do TV stations struggling to keep viewers watching commercial breaks ADD to the length of the breaks by advertising their own station I am WATCHING?

Talk about oversell.

The content industry either re-invents itself or has to just accept the year after year profit increases they been suffering at the hands of pirates (oh, you thought they were making a loss? Nope, in fact investing in music back catalogs is now considered a risk free investment for pension funds).

Educating me? I am educated thank you very much, I know the costs of printing a plastic disc and the cost me of funding the superstar lifestyle of an artist versus the cost of me not funding it.

No more music? I could care less. If all the artists of the world want things to change, let them strike. Every single one of them against me not paying for their work. STRIKE. See if anyone gives a shit. Do you?

Re:What does it take to become an ISP?

[hairyfeet]

Won't work sadly, as ALL of the backbone is owned by....dum dum dum...assholes like AT&T! I know because a friend had a business just outside the area where cable and DSL end (and good luck EVER getting them bastards to expand, in my area they haven't moved an inch in 20 years) so he paid a crazy amount of money to have a T-1 run out there and started his own ISP. All well and good, American capitalism right?

Nope, because AT&T got wind and cut off his backbone access, some bullshit excuse about "number of connections" or some shit, made a few phone calls and made sure nobody else would sell to him either. Their answer was a bald faced "try to sue us, we're fucking AT&T!" and his lawyer said "Sure you'll win, but it'll take anywhere from 10 to 15 YEARS and cost...ohhh...about 3 MILLION dollars in lawyers fees". So he closed up his business and moved away, and those people that had a decent Internet were forced back onto AT&Ts $75 a month dialup.

You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism. The corps OWN the courts, they OWN the congress, they OWN the lines, they OWN the media. So download all you can while you can friends, because until we have our own Arab Spring this country is gonna have its very own little dark age, with more and more draconian laws designed to royally fuck you in the ass, and there is nothing you can do about it. Vote? you tried that, how's that "Hope & Change" working out? Vote with your dollars? More than 70% last I checked of the population is under monopolies when it comes to the net and ALL are under the same backbone providers, which guess what? Are listed above.

So snatch every damned thing that ain't nailed down, slam the shit out of the ISPs. pretty much all the Internet will be in less than 3 years is the Home Shopping Network and that's the way big business/government wants it because it is easier to control the population if they can't organize, and easier to shut down any "troublemakers" if you make sure they can't be heard. That way they can control the "spin" and make anyone who doesn't go "America Fuck yeah!" into an evil socialist pedo/terrorist. Think I'm crazy? They already got Valenti's dream of "forever minus a single day" copyrights, and with the above they'll kill the net. The party is over folks, the dream is dying. Enjoy as much as you can while you can, because our kids are gonna look back from their dreary media controlled lives and consider this a mythical "golden age" where people could actually converse freely and share ideas. Those days are sadly about to end. Don't forget to hit the lights on your way out.

How will this impact hardcore infringers?

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Answer: It won't.

Most people who are hardcore infringers are already using things like seedboxes for uploading & downloading torrents. How do these idiot lawyers expect these agreements to impact VPS's hosted in countries like India? Rent 100gig of disk space & bandwidth from another country for $20/month or so, run all your torrents there, then use rsync via ssh, scp, etc. to do an encrypted transfer to/from your home. Even with deep packet inspection the ISP couldn't possibly know that you're copying copyrighted material to/from your seedbox.

The future is here!

[mmcuh]

Punishment without trial. Lovely.

consumer is powerless

[mschaffer]

When all of the business are in collusion, the consumer has no power.

Re:What does it take to become an ISP?

[DavidTC]

You are entirely right, except:

You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism.

That's what 'fascism' is, dude. The corporations and the government, working together. The corporations do what the 'government isn't allow to' (Like find people guilty of crimes without due process), and the government makes sure the corporations stay well feed, and invulnerable to any sort of lawsuits or prosecutions.

Don't go around inventing another word. It already exists, it's 'fascism'.

I pointed this out back when the government asserted the right to immunize the telecoms for the telecoms' illegal spying at the government's request. In short, the government hired corporations to commit felonies, and then forgave those felonies, and classified their end of it so they couldn't be prosecuted either.

We're not in some hypothetical hysteria people making up stuff...we're in actual, literal, dictionary-definition fascism. Sadly, people seem to think fascism requires concentration camps or something....it doesn't, ask the Italians.

We are also, I feel I should point out, in a dictionary-definition police state. Because of Gitmo. The executive claiming the power to imprison and hold people without charging them with crimes is the definition of a police state.