Movie Studios Want Automated BitTorrent Warnings

daria42 writes "The lawsuit filed by movie and TV studios against Australian Internet service provider iiNet appears to have taken a new twist, with the studios using early judgments in the case to attempt to push other ISPs towards what it has described as a 'standardized automated processing system' for BitTorrent copyright infringement notices that would integrate with the ISPs' networks and automatically forward messages to customers when they were sent by the studios."

Comments

"We want to spam all your customers at will..."

[Chris Mattern]

"...but it's too much trouble to do it ourselves. You do it for us."

Re:"We want to spam all your customers at will..."

[causality]

"...but it's too much trouble to do it ourselves. You do it for us."

If they keep pushing this, the result will be predictable enough.

It will eventually result in a new distributed peer-to-peer protocol. This new protocol will have mandatory strong encryption, will be obfuscated, will likely not have central trackers of any kind (perhaps it will rely on something like DHT), and will generally make it much more difficult to identify individual users. In turn, the pirates, who already feel quite bold, will likely share even more copyrighted material as a result of the reduced risk.

If they really want to drive it even more underground, they can, but they will regret the results. Meanwhile, the more unreasonable they become the more likely it is that Joe Sixpack will start to see them as little more than greedy thugs. Right now a lot of people who don't keep up with these developments have at least some sympathy for them. There are still many who will entertain arguments claiming that infringement of copyright is exactly the same thing as theft of tangible goods (which it is not) and the like, but the copyright cartels are on a certain path towards changing that.

Unreasonable asshats with control complexes who have politicians in their back pockets are a recipe for lawlessness, both of the unprincipled type that just wants a new movie/game/mp3 and of the civil-disobedience type who promote and support what the cartels are trying to stop as an act of protest. Exactly how many thousands of examples are needed for this to become something obvious that "everybody knows" and no longer wants to try?

Re:"We want to spam all your customers at will..."

[aaaaaaargh!]

What about this: What counts is trust. You need to make a network where everybody connects directly with trustworthy friends ONLY---talking real friends, not "Facebook friends." These are connected with other trustworthy friends, but friendship is not transitive, and so you cannot connect with the friends of your friends unless they are already your friends. On top of this, add an onion-routing based mechanism to request things from friends, and their friends if they don't have it, and so on, until the requested entity is found and onion-routed back.

Assuming it's technically implemented in the right way, a node in such a network can only be compromised when a friend betrays you. As long as you add only real friends, the network is pretty safe and very hard to subvert. I wanted to implement this myself but the NAT traversal without central servers needed for this to work turned out to be a tough nut to crack. Of course, using a broadcast/flooding search the network is also not very efficient. But perhaps someone finds the idea interesting...?

Re:"We want to spam all your customers at will..."

[TheGratefulNet]

welcome back to the rise of sneakernet.

I have not been in college for decades and decades; but I *assume* that that many kids together will have drive sharing parties. no intertubes THERE to get in the way.

Re:"We want to spam all your customers at will..."

[maugle]

You just described Freenet.

Another warning proposal

[Pieroxy]

Can we also have a warning for *AA affiliates exec? It should be triggered everytime they approach a public statement, it should say "If you're about to talk about piracy, please consider the fact that you're about to make a fool of yourself. Again."

Rent it and Rip it

[realityimpaired]

Seriously.... between tools like MakeMKV and Handbrake, it is trivial to rip a DVD these days. And on the crappy connections that they want to sell us (I'm on a 5mbit DSL with torrent traffic shaping turned on so I'm lucky to pull more than 100kbit), it's faster to simply rip the DVD to your local hard drive. Since I've already paid for the privilege, where's the incentive to actually go out and buy a DVD, now?

These people do realize that pirates are actually their best customers, right? The whole try before you buy thing? Yes, some folks will do it simply because they can, but I simply won't buy a DVD unless I've seen the movie, because I want to make sure I'm not paying for a crappy movie. That either means I download the movie, or I've seen it in theatre. If they don't want my business, that's their call; I'll just give the money to the local rental store, instead.

ISP response: sure, studios - here's the BILL

[Anonymous Coward]

The ideal ISP response to this would be to agree and then send the studios a bill at, say, $10000 per notification to cover "costs". Hollywood accounting works both ways...

Yep. This is not a free country.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just notify EVERYONE. They're all dirty pirates, right?

Yeah. That's how America works these days.

Treat everyone as a terrorist - search them at airports, train stations, on the road, etc - ever been for radiation therapy? Look out!

Everyone is a potential meth addict - gotta show your driver's license to get 10 pills of Sudafed!

Everyone is a drunk driver - that's why there are road blocks where they stop everyone to see if they're drunk - sucks when you're working weekend nights and you're automatically considered a drunk!

On the internet? Well, you're pirating and downloading child porn unless proven innocent!