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Media Companies Create Copyright Enforcement Framework
An anonymous reader writes with an article in Ars Technica. From the article: "American Internet users, get ready for three strikes^W^W 'six strikes.' Major U.S. Internet providers — including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, and Time Warner Cable — have just signed on to a voluntary agreement with the movie and music businesses to crack down on online copyright infringers. But they will protect subscriber privacy and they won't filter or monitor their own networks for infringement. And after the sixth 'strike,' you won't necessarily be 'out.'"
It's not suspicious at all that most of the ISPs signing on for this are owned by or own media companies.
As long as you accurately detect those who are actually illegally downloading (i.e. no false positives). Therein lies the problem of course.
If this is the punishment that we get for copyright infringement instead of getting sued, then I'm all for it.
If this is what we get in addition to immorally expensive lawsuits, then I suspect that overseas torrent dropboxes will get even more popular.
So are we looking at some sort of private blacklisting? Like the one banks employ- figure out who is the 'good' customer and who ain't? And how lawful will it be for them to deny service to you on the grounds that 'it is statistically confirmed that you may use our services to support piracy, therefore we are forced to turn down your application'?
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
this violates HUMAN RIGHTS
It's not suspicious at all that most of the ISPs signing on for this are owned by or own media companies.
Since when does 2 out of 5 count as 'most'? Other than Comcast and Cablevision, which ones are owned by or own media companies?
"... are condemned to repeat it." -- George Santayana
This is precisely why historically, the FCC did not allow on company to be both a content creator and content provider or "carrier". There is a huge conflict of interest which is not in the best interest of either innovation or the citizenry in general.
Where were all the protests when Time-Warner became a cable operator? Where were all the protests when any of these providers acquired the creators, or vice versa?
Goddamned American public in recent years has acted like it has never read a newspaper or history book.
Have you ever gotten a copyright infringement letter? If not, then this probably won't apply to you.
Read the last two paragraphs of the article.
Essentially, after 6 notifications where they contact you about your infringing activities, they will throttle your internet, and possibly disconnect you until you contact them and have a chat about copyright laws.
While I don't like the thought of being disconnected, I really don't like the thought of the government getting involved. (Protect IP Act, anyone?)
The article mentions a dispute procedure that costs $35. I imagine that if one copyright owner establishes a pattern of getting disputes filed against its infringement notices, the ISP can ignore the copyright owner's later notices on grounds of unclean hands.
Between AT&T and the various cable companies those are your only option for low latency high bandwidth consumer internet in a lot of the country. I do not suspect that the FCC will do it's job and squish this or the local regulatory bodies.
No sir I dont like it.
Where were all the protests when Time-Warner became a cable operator?
They must have worked; Time Warner spun out TWC two years ago according to Wikipedia.
BUT, there has to be some type of appeals process.
From the article: "An appeals process does at least exist."
How many customers will they be forced to ban before they realize how much this hurts them and helps their competition?
A boycott like this doesn't work unless you get every ISP to join in because 1 service isn't significantly different than another. Nobody says, 'Oh man, I couldn't live if I had to switch to Sprint instead of Time Warner!'
Also, I wonder if there are any laws against this already? It seems to me that banding together to deny service to a certain list of people has got to have some anti-trust laws or something.
And, could this be a major nail in the IP coffin? Judges aren't going to have much respect for them if they do really crazy things in the name of protecting their IP. The tide is already turning on that front and this is pretty desperate.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
false positives have been a issues in the past does this do any thing to fix that?
Let's say some without HSI but has cable some how get some HBO VOD data flagged? or just that they flag the wrong subscriber.
Bad clams
The bank's have done foreclosure on loans they don't even own so what stopping someone from makeing a clam on stuff they don't own or that may be free but some how they thing they own the rights to? What if a game is free but someone flags it based on in game music?
fake clams
One business may just make clams just to DOS a other business.
What about places with FREE WIFI or hotels? (A lot of hotels use cable HSI)
What about if you HAVE the rights to that Copyright and the right to download it and you still get flaged?
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This will be the beginning of the end of the Internet as we know it. Once these corporations have the power to control what we see, how much we see, and even IF we are allowed online... I guess I'm not going to want any part of that anyway.
giggity
"I'm fine with a way for copyright owners to shutdown pirates after repeated offenses."
Please stop helping the media companies to spread misinformation. Downloaders are not pirates. "Pirates" are defined as people who make and sell copies of copyrighted works commercially, for a profit. Equating your typical downloader with "pirates" is a gross injustice. And which is something the media companies want everybody to do, in their minds.
I wonder what the education will consist of. I have read several books on Copyright Law. Also books on the pros / cons of the current law. Plus other books on the legal interpretations of copyright law. All of the books seems to go around in circles and generally leave you more confused than you were when you started. they all say something like "if the item was published between 196x and 197x then it may be copyrighted, unless it was published without a copyright notice. then it's not copyrighted. Unless it was refiled before 1979 and then published again with a copyright notice before 1982 .... etc, etc, etc."
I would be very curious how they will explain what can be downloaded and what cannot. I would also be interested to see if you were to follow the rules listed in the "education" package, and were to download something that did not meet the requirements for copyrighted work. Could they still sue you for it. Or would the blame be on them for not properly documenting the scenario in which it would be illegal to download the content.
"I'm fine with a way for copyright owners to shutdown pirates after repeated offenses."
Please stop helping the media companies to spread misinformation. Downloaders are not pirates. "Pirates" are defined as people who make and sell copies of copyrighted works commercially, for a profit. Equating your typical downloader with "pirates" is a gross injustice. And which is something the media companies want everybody to do, in their minds.
The correct term is GNU/Pirates.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
So now that you can afford to be ripped off, you don't want others to pirate the way you did. Lovely. Do as I say, don't do as I do. It's like those politicians who know the taste of a joint first-hand but still want zero-tolerance enforcement. Hypocrite.
We've had the internet for around 43 years. I understand in the early days protocols were not defined with encryption - it was too expensive.
But today.. why isn't every single damn byte transfered over ANY protocol end-to-end encrypted? It seems like that's really the way things must move. Not just for reasons like this story, but basic freedoms, e.g, Arab Spring people or dissident in China wanting to communicate freely.
Warning: I'm guessing this is a goatse link, given the domain.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
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ISP's won't let the MPAA or RIAA abuse their customers. The ISP's will have discretion on how to enforce these copyright claims and won't do anything that will cause them to lose significant profits. If the MPAA abuses its power, the ISP will ignore the request because the agreement is voluntary.
Dear {ISP company}:
The notice from {MAFIAA member} claiming that I was participating in copyright infringement must be some kind of mistake. To the best of my knowledge, nobody in my household has engaged in such practices.
I suggest that perhaps their methodology is at fault, or that someone may be spoofing my IP address, or accessing my router in an unauthorized manner.
In any case, I assure you that I have no knowledge of copyright piracy occurring at my residence.
Sincerely,
{my signature}
(Since downloading is not "piracy", this letter would be 100% truthful, and use the industry's own misinformation campaign against them.)
Can we get something like this for government except instead of copyright infringement it is applicable to 3 (or 6 in this case) infringements of individual rights? Now instead of being cut off from the internet they are forced out of office, never allowed to hold office again, lose their pensions, and have to pay back all money and benefits earned while in office.
Time to offend someone
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I think the RIAA/MPAA's rampant lawsuits against citizens shows that they would rather have false positives than false negatives. They're not concerned with your "end user experience." They would rather you have to fight to get the service you paid for* than for them to fight to prove you wrong. In essence, it's "guilty before proven innocent" except not in a court of law -- just on their say-so.
* So the ISP can kick you off and still keep your money. This also means they'll be more inclined to kick users off than to improve their network and add bandwidth.
Twinstiq, game news
One day big media will understand that they need us more than we need them. Take away my movies, video games and music (that part would suck) and I wouldn't be too happy but I would eventually find something else to do. Occasionally I come across someone that doesn't watch tv and they seem happy. My friend Chris told me that he couldn't imagine being glued to the tv again. Fuck big media.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
false positives have been a issues in the past does this do any thing to fix that? Let's say some without HSI but has cable some how get some HBO VOD data flagged? or just that they flag the wrong subscriber.
Bad clams The bank's have done foreclosure on loans they don't even own so what stopping someone from makeing a clam on stuff they don't own or that may be free but some how they thing they own the rights to? What if a game is free but someone flags it based on in game music?
fake clams
One business may just make clams just to DOS a other business.
What about places with FREE WIFI or hotels? (A lot of hotels use cable HSI)
What about if you HAVE the rights to that Copyright and the right to download it and you still get flaged?
Mmmm...clams.
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The article mentions:
But notably absent is any mention of a filing fee copyright holders need to pay to prevent them from abusing the accusation process.
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A good chunk of these ISPs are owned by copyright owners, and will likely take a default position on their side. [...] no court is actually involved in this.
From the article: "In addition, subscribers can always still sue their ISP in court."
Besides, in the case where the copyright owner outright owns the ISP
Comcast "outright owns the ISP" only for works published by NBCUniversal. The other eight MAFIAA members (Sony, WMG, Vivendi, EMI, Viacom, Disney, Fox, and Warner) still have to follow the procedure.
Anybody who isn't an ISP or a media company gets fucked in this arrangement.
And any organization that makes and self-publishes works is technically a "media company".
Keep up the pressure you copyright fascists. Bittorrent and file sharing in general will just become more distributed and encrypted. Here is an idea guys, feel free to use it, give the public what it wants, now and at a reasonable price and you wont have to worry about piracy. Duh.
riiiiiiiiight, what Orwellian utopian society are you living in? 4/5 of those ISPs are the media companies that also make up the MPAA or have incredibly vested interests in them. The ISP can pass the cost (re: losses) off onto customers and to the media company filing the claim.
As I've gotten older (and now have money to buy stuff), I'm fine with a way for copyright owners to shutdown pirates after repeated offenses. (When I first got a cable modem in 1997 or so, I got internet shutoff due to some involvement in pirating. A call to my ISP got my internet turned back on.)
The court system.
That answer should be sufficient in and of itself, but to further elaborate; do you want your neighborhood covenant to have the power to shut off your water if you plant the wrong kinds of things in your yard? The power to turn off your electricity if they don't like your christmas lights or loud music? Do you want other drivers on the road to be able to disable your engine if they think you cut them off? Law and order is important. Allowing the media companies to control Internet connections is the very definition of vigilantism.
While I must admit, how to execute a DoS attack using clams is a little beyond me, I think the issue of false positives is going to be a lot less funny.
If these companies are doing so little as just checking if an IP address is in a torrent swarm, then I would think just about anyone could be flagged. So even assuming they get the right IP address associated to who had it at that point in time, there is still not even a guarantee the file was being seeded by that IP at that moment. I see connections being made for a torrent long after I've shut it down. And if DHCP were to reassign that address, whoever else got it would probably be seeing a load of incoming traffic that makes no sense to them.
Traffic inspection for specific media is probably damn near pointless since a lot of torrent traffic is already encrypted anyway. In fact, the paranoid probably have legacy connections disabled and only used encrypted traffic.
And I'm also curious about how reliable DHT is in all of this, and if it is possible to poison DHT with IPs not really in the swarm.
I don't really expect any due diligence on the ISPs part, so hopefully the penalties stay mild enough their lack of investigation doesn't cause too many problems.
Fear is the mind killer.
What about if you HAVE the rights to that Copyright and the right to download it and you still get flaged?
Then you're PROBABLY downloading it directly from the content creator and not via bittorrent.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
One business may just make clams just to DOS a other business.
Now sounds like a fishing boat flooding a market with cheap clams...
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
What is your source for this definition? All the definitions I can find say piracy is robbery on the high seas, or 'use or reproduction without permission'. Nowhere do I see that 'commercial' requirement.
IIRC, Adelphia had a three strikes for copyright infringements during its days before it died.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
It's not suspicious at all that most of the ISPs signing on for this are owned by or own media companies.
Why would it be? You would have to be absolutely retarded to think they wouldn't look out for their own best interests. Do you think it would be a good idea for your mother to say 'I'm protecting the privacy of your father by not telling the cops' while he rapes you repeatedly?
Why the fuck would they not want to cooperate with their own internal groups? Do you not treat your family differently than some random stranger?
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
ISPs and the MPAA's goal is not to be the biggest dick possible. Their goal is to make money. Record companies thought they could make more money issuing DRM with their CDs and MP3s to prevent piracy, but it backfired so now they sell DRM free MP3s and CDs.
Whatever system that is implemented will have a balance between preventing piracy while not pissing off its customers. If they make the policy too strict, then they will lose customers and lose money. Their anti-piracy policy is purposely lax to prevent most of these issues. It won't prevent all piracy, but it could be a deterrent to causal piracy which could translate in better movie/record sales, while not pissing off their ISP subscribers.
The answer to your question is: if a protocol is supposed to be (effectively) a broadcast protocol, it cannot simultaneously be a private protocol. Most current P2P protocols are (at least partially) broadcast protocols. Future P2P protocols may involve only exchanging sensitive information with a trusted subset of other P2P users.
I once got an infringement notice that I was sharing the movie "Stepmom". Given that I've never even heard of the movie, much less seen it, I just ignored it and went on with my life.
Right now ISPs typically just forward infringement notices to their users and don't actually penalize anyone for it. If they start penalizing people, it could become a problem. Dynamic IPs change all the time, trackers can hold onto client IP lists for quite some time, and false positives will happen.
The movie/TV industry COULD do things to make piracy less attractive. Like, sell high quality versions of films and TV shows, DRM-free at reasonable prices. The music industry already figured it out; I used to pirate music all the time when it was DRM-encumbered, but ever since the DRM went away I've pirated almost nothing. Same goes with many of my friends.
It's not hard. But they refuse to do it.
It's a good indication that society has dropped off the deep end if we start referring to Orwellian societies as "utopian".
I'm really a low 5-digit Slashdotter, but this ID is where I am now.
Media goods can be priced at a level appropriate for disposable income when labor values do not allow for discretionary spending on real goods. "glued to the tv", how about "glued to the internet"? Media companies don't need all of us, even just most of us is enough.
- The only way the RIAA/MPAA know what you are doing on bittorrent with an illegal wiretapping operation. Why no criminal prosecutions?
- For your ISP to interfere with your connection, absent a Federal court order, they are probably criminally interfering in interstate commerce. Again, where are the criminal prosecutions?
- If your ISP is throttling your connection, absent a Federal court order, they are defrauding you of the service your are paying for - in collusion with the RIAA and MPAA, and doing it across State lines. Serious Federal crimes.
- The inevitable class-action lawsuits filed on behalf of ISP 'customers', will prevail - costing ISPs billions (passed onto their remaining customers, of course).
In a perfect world, the RIAA and MPAA criminals, and their ISP accomplices, would all go to prison for an extended period - shit, they should all be there now.
yeah, it's me. as i said before, there is a great convergence in the force. one day your ISP will be your cable/satellite company. this is the first step that provides evidence of that symbiotic relationship between ISPs and media companies.
however, to quell the panic resulting from this announcement, i have read other articles on this topic that state that your internet access will never be turned off. it will just be throttled down after so many warnings. there is no policy after that. i suspect they will try to handle it on an individual basis after that (they don't expect very many offenses past six throttlings). the few that do will probably be big enough fish to fry with a lawsuit.
Name one big one that isnt ?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Dear Anonymous/lolzsec whoever...
Please do something useful for a change and crush this "Copyright enforcement system." I've worked for at least half of the companies mentioned here and most of them can't even communicate well enough internally to get a customer billed correctly, much less communicate between themselves to organize a proper system to penalize customers for supposedly violating copyrights they have no vested interest in maintaining for companies that are likely competitors. To this very day, large infrastructure projects between the various carriers are still ordered and built via email and spreadsheets.
This system will be no different than the old system which consists of nothing more than an email address at the ISP, likely called copyright@att.net or infringement@att.net or in verizons case it's 1 guy: patrick.m.flaherty@verizon.com... amazing. They might change this to some super secret email for the new and improved system but I doubt that would be a problem for the likes of you to figure out. Then you need to get a sample of the complaint. They will all be in the same format so the various ISPs scripts can handle them.
Look up the ISPs registered IP ranges
write a script that looks up recent movies/music, randomly picks a title
Ping an IP address in the Target ISPs list, if it returns the ping fire a fake infringement complaint for the randomly chosen title
repeat for the ISPs entire IP range once a week
The system will collapse almost immediately. If the system costs the ISPs ANY money at all they will drop it like a hot potato. I doubt any of them have more than 5 people working in infringement. The most I've ever seen were 3 and they were swamped when the complaints spiked at 50 per day.
Having the ISP's censor service based on 'content' of what you are downloading.
Imaging if you were talking to uncle joe, and he was hearing a baseball game -- that was not available in your area. Are you downloading it? What if you record it? Can you imaging the phone companies agreeing to cut off your phone service for such?
How about getting some DVD's in the mail from *whereever*...that are 'rips', can you imagine the post office stopping your mail service?
It seems this totally violates the safe harbor clause that protects ISPs from copyright suits -- of course the fact that they are less likely to be sued for helping .... But the whole point of the safe harbor clause was to keep ISP's non-liable for infringement -- by taking enforcement action, aren't they creating liability (either for not disconnecting, someone who is, or disconnecting someone who isn't)....?
Somehow this doesn't seem legal...it would seem to violate due process, among other things...
I think the question is "common single minded control [CSMC] " without regard to ownership? Millions own shares in public companies but that does not mean the individual owners are in control?
A secondary question is does that CSMC disenfranchise mass audiences that should be and would be concerned if but they only knew the facts"
In other words, freedom is a function of understanding and understanding is based in the access to facts,and the understandings of their meaning in relevant situations. Many slaves when freed were disturbed on being freed because all they knew was a life for the master and it was the master that told them how good their lives were.
If there is no accurate reliable and through news, timely reported, adequate in coverage of sufficient details, which reaches the audience mass that the details of the message actually concerns, then those people have been disenfranchised by the method of knowledge exclusion or by the method of propaganda [knowledge re-purposing and mind-set remodeling].
If the facts fails to raise concern or to stir controversy "among the mass of persons who have opposing concerns or different reasons to know" then freedom does not exist. It is this competition between interests that invites competition between media.
Tyranny is a mind set established by propaganda, information access denial and punishment induced threat.
If the server wanted it could absolutely poison the IP list with fake IPs and it wouldn't make one difference to the clients. The client would get the IP try to connect and fail then move on to the next IP. If your just mining IP from the torrent server then your completely screwed because you have no idea which ones are real and which are false. A client could poison the list as well by saying they are connected to IPs that they aren't really. Again an IP that isn't even part of the swarm is being reported as part of the swarm. There are lots of ways to screw people looking at just IPs that wouldn't bother one bit the clients that actually are connecting but would completely hose those just looking at IP lists. I wouldn't be surprised if someone was already doing that, given the kind of screw with the bittorrent system programs that I have seen out there. Programs that download but report to everyone that they have nothing downloaded yet. Programs that report they uploaded tons but never actually did. Programs that connect to the bittorrent server and just monitor reported traffic and IPs. So I could see someone writing a program to poison the IP lists no problem. I even once saw a bittorrent client written/hacked that refused all incoming initiated request and only allowed outbound ones it made. So if you got that IP and tried to connect to it, the program would not respond, but it would connect with whoever it tried to connect with. I have no idea why someone would want that, but someone made/hacked it. So nothing would surprise me about what someone would/could write to mess with the torrent systems out there.
Even if the situation is caused by government, the company DOES NOT HAVE TO do this. They are, however. Therefore it IS the company's fault.