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Australian ISP's To Crack Down On Piracy
xav_jones writes "The ABC is reporting that 'Australia's five major ISPs have revealed their plans to crack down on online piracy by sending warning notices to suspected illegal downloaders while assisting rights holders to pursue serial offenders through the courts.' The idea is that '[d]uring an 18-month trial, rights holders would send copyright infringement notices, including evidence of copyright infringement and the IP address involved, to ISPs who would then send "educational notices" to the internet users concerned.' Further action would entail that '[u]sers who are suspected of further copyright breaches would then receive up to three warning notices before rights holders are able to pursue court action.' This seems a gentler approach than other countries. Will it prove more effective and/or cost efficient?"
(1) Will nothing happen to the alleged offender (i.e. no throttling/cut-off/etc.) unless and until a court has found against him?
(2) I don't understand how a group of ISPs in cooperation with "rights holders" could get to decide when "rights holders are able to pursue court action" unless there is some legislation behind it - ideas?
(3) Would the "rights holders" be paying for the admin involved in all of this?
You're acting like your rights matter.
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the Aussies are becoming more like the USA, where the corporations have more rights than the citizens?
Didn't we just get the latest round of analysis showing that MafiAA "evidence" isn't worth the tissue paper it's written on?
http://pirateparty.org.au/give-no-quarter: They recognise it is impractical, won't adequately protect privacy or due process and is just the ISPs trying to avoid regulation. That's my interpretation of their release, anyway.
I'm gonna need a spec.
The real issue is what evidence will be deemed acceptable, what proof will be required of uploading content. Nothing automated, who monitored it, what content was uploaded content was downloaded (file names not good enough as no one has copyright on file names). The period over which that IP address was monitored with at least one independent witness (can't have for profit people who get paid per copyright infringement notification).
Problem is this 'creative industry' has a history of being creative with lies, as such any accusation should be corroborated by independent people to ensure validity.
Regardless of the lies and bullshit, the whole industry is still parasitic by nature, it neither feed, clothes, houses or heals. It is a luxury and it's impact upon the necessities of life always needs to be limited.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Please not that this may sound reasonable but it is not. In the end it just comes down to the ISP giving information on its customers to third parties without a court order.
(2) I don't understand how a group of ISPs in cooperation with "rights holders" could get to decide when "rights holders are able to pursue court action" unless there is some legislation behind it - ideas?
It's called 'negotiation'.
No sig today...
Tell me if i am wrong, but ain't whole these warning letters ILLEGAL? If i am the one receiving them for example, and these letters says that i am guilty without prosecution, then why the heck we need judges and courts at all? Ok, ok, i am just trying to be ironic, but for me this is simply illegal, if not criminal attempt to scare me, which could cause me a lot of nightmares, and many other emotional discomforts.....if you still follow me, i would go in court, and sue them, for 1 million dollars. And if i lost work, or i don't have work, also would sue them for lost opportunities (here it is good idea to go to your lawyer and discuss all the little details).
although, I am just considering a whole bunch of proxies and Tor.
...and this is where their master plan breaks down.
If they squeeze too hard the piracy networks will just add another layer of obfuscation. Everybody's bandwidth requirements could double because they're all part of a network of proxies and the ISPs will lose out long term. I wonder if anybody's pointed this out to them yet...?
No sig today...
Maybe the hardcore pirates. That's not what companies care about, they care about the general public. Any obstacle or hardening of piracy is good, as it will make people think about twice of what they're doing ("is piracy bad if I need to use proxies to hide myself?"). This also why DRM doesn't need to provide 100% security - as long as it makes things harder for non-geeks.
Unfortunately these ISP's will almost certainly be interfering with the sharing of file's which have free license's (e.g. Creative Common's).
When will government's stop serving the interest's of corporation's and start serving the interest's of their citizen's?
Just to clarify, that's between ISPs and specific "rights holders" on the fate of users from the PoV of those specific "rights holders"?
If only other countries worried about copyright infringement would adopt this novel concept...
This approach means that if I read it correctly the file sharer gets four warnings (one "educational letter" and three formal warnings) before anything happens.
That means that smart file sharers will take action after the first letter, to cover their tracks. E.g. starting to use encryption, or other methods that hide to the ISP what you're up to. And after that there are three warning letters that allow fine tuning of their methods. Receiving such a letter basically means "you're doing something wrong, we can still see what you're doing!".
And the end result: the ISP happy as there is not much for them to do; the recording industry happy because they don't see any file sharing taking place any more; and the user happy because they can continue what they've been doing over the last decade but now they're safe.
Bob the angry flower to crack down on ignorant use of apostophes
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yes it is! Look on the map, it's just to the right of Germany...
That's Australia! People always get those two countries confused.
Summation 2
No means to counter 'piracy' will avail. Today's piracy is no different from spanish colonies smuggling despite iron hand of spanish monarchy - if you force your prices, people will smuggle/pirate at the cost of their lives.
if you totally prevent online piracy, people will copy cds/dvds in between each other and still pirate.
the only solution to piracy/smuggling is how it was ended back in early 18th century - abolition of monopolies and oligopolies, in whatever form they may be - and no, 4 major companies 'seeming' not to be monopoly/oligopoly doesnt remove the existence of that monopoly.
Read radical news here
Re: (2) ISPs in cooperation with rights holders can decide between themselves when they're able to pursue court action because that's the due process of the courts. An aggrieved party begins court proceedings against those they accuse. You know... You think someone has committed a crime against you, so you tell the police / sue them. Nothing untoward here!
Just replying to your question; Not read the article myself.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I'm sure even the "general public" can follow simple instructions.
This also why DRM doesn't need to provide 100% security - as long as it makes things harder for non-geeks.
Who are we talking about here? People that don't know how to use a computer at all? As far as I've seen, installing cracks is very, very easy. They often provide instructions if you seriously don't know how, even.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Yep.
I assume the ISPs have seen a downside to handing all their customer's asses over to the MAFIAA so they're negotiated the terms of the deal.
No legislation is needed for this sort of thing. I don't know about you but for most people and corporations, negotiation is part of everyday life.
No sig today...
Remember Napster? And what happened after that? Yep, it is called progress, read BitTorrent. I wonder what would be the next protocol...
Maybe the hardcore pirates. That's not what companies care about, they care about the general public.
Then the general public will just go to the hardcore pirates to get their shit for them, and sneakernet will return as the dominant form of file sharing once again.
Back in the early Napster days, I made a pretty good amount of spending money just downloading music for people and making mix discs for them. When nobody knew how to download music or burn CD's I was able to get $5-10 a piece for them, and with our cable connection (most everyone else was still on dial-up) I was downloading hundreds of songs at a time, they would be finishing faster than I could add new songs to the list. And it wasn't limited to us pesky kids, either; parents and teachers were actually my biggest customers.
It was seriously like the movie Blow, I was pretty much the go-to guy for anyone that didn't want to spend $20 buying a CD at Tower Records. Until the war on Napster started ramping up and people started having to name songs all sorts of weird shit to get around the filters they put on towards the end due to Metallica's lawsuit, I was cleaning up. Once it started becoming more of a pain in the ass to find the right files without digging (greatly increasing the time it took to assemble a mix disc) I stopped doing it, plus I was getting ready to graduate so I just didn't have time for it anymore.
Still, it was pretty lucrative for a while there, and the harder they make it for laypeople to download, the more lucrative they make it for us again. Hell, I'll make even more money, due to not needing to buy spindles of CD's anymore.
People want to test drive before they buy. The people that download and don't buy were never going to buy in the first place, there is not a single lost sale there.
Yes, it's pretty clear that the 'rights-holder' is not you. You have no rights as an individual other than the right to be screwed by the system in whatever manner they deem to be the most efficient and effective for the 'rights-holder'.
Right now, VPNs are being used by this purpose, but when more people get disconnected, VPN use will become more common, just because people will actually start caring who is listening in.
I know I do this if I'm using a local wireless network. This way, someone listening in or using a FireSheep type of utility isn't going to be able to get far. Enabling a VPN means that I don't have to worry about a lot of local attacks, be it DNS poisoning, Phorm-like ad intrusions, or other man in the middle stuff. And none of this is for covering illegal/criminal activity -- it is to keep someone from interfering/eavesdropping with my network connectivity.
What is happening is that this is only going to shoot ISPs in their own foot. People move to VPNs, and now instead of being able to catch the serious criminals (the child pornography guys), all lines will go dark. Of course, governments and ISPs can go after VPNs, but that turns the "game" from passively sniffing traffic into an active cat and mouse play in both the legal and technical aspects.
Of course, the next step from VPNs are offshore VPNs, and this will mean that a routine shakedown for IP violations will turn into an international incident, and there are plenty of countries out there who will be more than happy to give the US the middle finger when it comes to hunting someone who pirated the latest Justin Beiber CD.
ISPs need to be smart and just sit back and only go after users who commit the more heinous crimes. If they go after every Joe who copies a MP3 file, then everyone will start using encryption.
I recommend a offshore seedbox. Download your files to your seedbox and then obtain them from the box via a secure connection.
Instead of Sneakernet, I can see the possibility of a more regional darknet based file-sharing items take place, using products like MUTE with private networks. Then people will swap from network on a regional basis, perhaps via an international proxy. Eventually a cell system will evolve, where if someone wants content, they can find a way to get a membership (such as like with Demonoid), and then after a while, be let in. If someone rats any IP they have access to out, only that group of people are affected, nobody else.
Of course, this cat and mouse game will evolve, but one thing I look at is the drug "war". Prohibition never works, so the IP issue needs to be addressed by a different means. (I'm partial to the idea of a clearinghouse paid for with tax money, but there are a lot of things that would need to be hammered out before it can be considered a fair system.)
You do understand that is selling warez for money, right?
If it were me I would drop any provider participating in this scheme.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
If you'e trying to imply that BT as a protocol will be banned, you're dead wrong, its already used for many legitimate distributions, and im not just talking about the WoW Patchers.
Even if they somehow succeeded, we can hope the next protocol is created in a tor like manner when you never even get to find out where the data your sending and receiving is coming and going from.
People want to test drive before they buy. The people that download and don't buy were never going to buy in the first place, there is not a single lost sale there.
And on top of that, going this route could save a lot of other people a lot of cash, when you can intelligently inform them that the product is crap and not worth considering for purchase.
This space unintentionally left blank.
As far as I've followed the news about it last week, the answers are:
1) Nothing happens (except for the received notices), though your information will be given out after repeated offences, to allow for court action. Since the evidence is included with the notices, it should be easy to defend against incorrect claims.
2) You can't have court action without a defendant, so the right holders will need to obtain evidence and request the information from the ISP. After that, there can be a normal court case.
3) I assume this will be paid by them and the ISPs (since the ISPs are sending, and both parties save money by not going to court for every IP address).
I'm not really sure what to think of this. If three notices have a minimum time between them (eg. 1 or 2 weeks) and real evidence is required, this could work in a fair way.
Interestingly, this sort of thing was trialled in the UK by the BPI back in 2008 and it was abandoned quickly. It was completely ineffective, very expensive, and resulting in some bad press due to lots of false accusations. It did lead to some very profitable (at least in t A couple of years later they had it put into law, making it much easier and cheaper for them (ISPs didn't want to pay) but a couple of years on from that and implementing it is still some way away.
All this sort of scheme does is make money for lobbyists, monitoring companies and lawyers, at the expense of actual creators, ISPs and the general public.
I think you are dead right - and in preperation for this I (and a few other security-savvy friends) are trying to build a distributed collection of media - one friend is collating and collecting movies, another software, myself music. I'm already up to about 9TB of music alone, all full albums, id3 tagged, named and all above 256 quality - most of it stuff I would never listen to by choice. This way when the ISP's/corps get all trigger happy at least we have a great basis for a useful sneakernet/darknet.
Never fight naked, unless you're in prison...
If you make it hard for non-geeks they will just wait until its on TV for free.
Media industry still doesnt seem understand the time-value of their product.
Commercial VPN, port 22 is always open because banks and Gov uses it.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
group of ISPs in cooperation with "rights holders"
in the USA, they are normally one in the same.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What would be interesting to see is an distributed rsync utility that uses this type of encrypted P2P architecture. This can be handled in many different ways. From a drive appearing for each public key in the system that is unique, to a decentralized system of permissions combined with deduplication on the backend. This way, if Alice wants to share Bob her PDF collection, it would take a few signed requests to propagate permissions, and then the peers will allow Bob access either by permitting him to access the file, or by sending encrypted data that is decrypted by his key. A well constructed system could have each file encrypted, and permissions handled by the master file key encrypted with each person's personal key, with additional metadata to add group structures, etc. Revoking access would be hard, as to do it right, it would require generation of a new master file key, re-encrypting file or files and destroying/blocking access to the old ones.
Essentially a combination of aspects of PGP's WoT, Hushmail, DC-nets, et. al.
(1) Will nothing happen to the alleged offender (i.e. no throttling/cut-off/etc.) unless and until a court has found against him?
This,
Nothing can happen until there is a court ruling. I highly doubt this will make it to court. They've been sending out "infringement notices" for years but haven't sued anyone. The minute any judge with an once of intelligence (we have them in Oz) sees a US style extortion scheme, it'll be over with a huge payout for the lucky bugger who gets this judge. Also due to our libel laws, they'll be up for the same kind of inflated payments as they demand for every single false accusation.
(2) I don't understand how a group of ISPs in cooperation with "rights holders" could get to decide when "rights holders are able to pursue court action" unless there is some legislation behind it - ideas?
They haven't. What they've decided on is a notification scheme, it's up to the rights holders _alone_ to decide on what happens after that.
(3) Would the "rights holders" be paying for the admin involved in all of this?
Strongly doubt it.
This system is unenforceable and wont last long. Realistically it's at best, a ruse by ISP's to get the "rights holders" legal wolves off the back of ISP's. Under the Australian legal system, the rights holders have more to lose then all the people they could sue.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The recording industry will never be happy. They'll see stuff being downloaded but won't be able to identify who.
This.
I already route 'certain protocols' of traffic over a persistent 10Mbit/sec OpenVPN tunnel to an Anonymous service in sweden. It's not terribly difficult to setup for someone with even an associate level understanding of networking.
The most they can hope for is pushing pirating back to the geek underground.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
The plan has been rejected by all the major Australian content organizations. They're still waiting for the iiNet v AFACT High Court judgment, since it will have a significant impact on the playing field.
http://delimiter.com.au/2011/11/29/bugger-off-content-industry-tells-isps-on-piracy/ (There are some more related articles on the site)
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
The idea of hiding is that the downloads are hidden. So the recording industry can't see it either. Just the ISP sees a lot of traffic coming through.
If I am reading this correctly, the offender gets three warning (strikes) before any legitimate action is taken. May that should be extended to where the first to felony offenses are not counted against an individual. Show it be inferred that a burglar has two free attempts to ransack my home before I can call the police? Seriously, what moron conceived this idea?
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
In this context, there is no possibility of reading ISPs as being anything other than the plural of ISP. Therefore, the apostrophe is unnecessary. What's worse, every superfluous apostrophe such as this re-wires the minds of many of those who see it, permanently ablating the apostrophe regulation regulation of their brains such that they will never again in their life properly use an apostrophe.
Victims of the apostrophe plague, once infected, pluralize with apostrophes, form contractions by joining words without delineation, form possessives by trailing an apostrophe or omitting it altogether, and misuse "it's" and "its" without regard for the damage they cause.
That bacon and burning hair smell you detect was emitted by part of your mind dying. You are now one of the stupids, forever. Welcome to Slashdot'apostrophe.
Sensible approach, requires checks and balances, so big media's sketchy evidence won't pass. It's also makes it too hard for them to squash the little guys like in the states. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/australian-it/isps-anti-piracy-proposal-rejected-by-entertainment-sector/story-e6frgakx-1226208551936
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!