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Why the 'Six Strikes' Copyright Alert System Needs Antitrust Scrutiny
suraj.sun sends this quote from an op-ed at Ars Technica:
"Eight months ago, content owners and Internet service providers agreed to the Copyright Alert System, a 'six-strike' plan to reduce copyright infringement by Internet users. Under the system, ISPs will soon send educational alerts, hijack browsers, and perhaps even slow/temporarily block the Internet service of users accused of online infringement (as identified by content owners). At the time it was announced, some speculated that the proposed system might not be legal under the antitrust laws. ... If I had to explain antitrust in a single word, it would not be 'competition' — it would be 'power.' The power to raise prices above a competitive level; the power to punish people who break your rules. Such power is something society usually vests in government. Antitrust law is in part concerned with private industry attempting to assert government-like power. ... The Copyright Alert System represents a raw exercise of concerted private power. Content owners as a group have control over their product. They have leveraged this control to forge this agreement with ISPs, who need to work with content owners in order to offer content to their own users. ISPs, in turn, have power over us as users."
because it's not like a content provider every misidentified something like a bird song as it's own copyrighted material.
From the **AA's, who brought you lawsuits against the dead, comes this latest greatest solution to the problem of not wanting to adapt!
We got a buncha companies owned by our buddies to sign onto a program to screw the consumer.
Our super secret tech, which no one can be allowed to challenge or examine, is never wrong! Except that one time it identified the woman who didn't own a computer.
This great plan will raise the prices for consumers, all to protect our "rights".
The plan is 50/50 funded by the ISPs and the **AA's, both of which will just extract those costs from you by passing them on.
The system lacks any real fairness, and even if you can prove we were high as a kite when we blamed you... it costs $35 to challenge us.
The main goal of this system is to give us the powers of SOPA, without having to waste money on Congresscritters.
Even ISPs who aren't part of this plan now, well we are going to apply pressure and make them cave in.
We might not terminate your service, but it'll work just as well at 1 step above Dialup speeds.
You might want to move to a different ISP, well fuck you we have monopolies in most areas of the country.
Once this plan is moving along perfectly, we plan on adding a requirement for deep packet inspection... we want to make sure you can't "steal" a cent from us by even discussing the plots of our shows. Dare to quote the lyrics of a new song? We'll send you a bill.
It might be time to look into ripping the public funds out of the ISPs, making them purchase the rights to have poles and wires. Remove their monopoly control over communities, and demand actual competition. This is a service provider deciding a 3rd party has a right to control how you use the service your paying for. If someone claimed they saw you speeding, would you expect the car maker to come and make your car slower based on that claim? But your ISP thinks its a great idea.
Its time to get the FCC, FTC, and a bunch of other acronyms to get off their asses and protect the public from this massive overreach.
I think we have seen more than our share of false assertions of copyright by parties who professionally act "on behalf of copyright holders." They operate on assumption and without proof. These systems which do not require proof, but instead operate on "good faith" and "...under penalty of perjury" are rife with abuse.
Current systems in place are experiencing an epidemic of abuse by rights holders at the expense of many innocents. The harm this kind of thing causes the many outweighs the convenience and consideration of the many.
And when you've gotten booted off of every single ISP, they will use that data to lobby for even worse Big Brother legislation to monitor every single communication. The antitrust label is very apt here, because the copyright lobby is basically arguing that their profits are more important than human rights and freedoms, so important that the whole world must bow to their demands.
All I want to say is "Or else WHAT?"
It is truly shameful that what we consider a democratic political system is so nearsighted that it can be trivially manipulated by valueless profiteers. They don't even have an actual product, they're only selling contrived litigation.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Let's kill off the beast once and for all and eliminate most forms of intellectual property. The copyright term was so long originally because of slow distribution and printing channels. Now we have high speed internet (until they take it) and fast printing of media. If anything, copyright should be reduced to ten years and nothing more. Once copyright is reduced to a short term, the **AA's of the world will be forced to continually innovate and compete (which was ironically the original purpose of copyright).
We've already had people get slapped for birdsong as copyrighted work. An acquaintance of mine is already wrestling with YouTube because he recorded classical music on his guitar, and he's getting slapped because someone else identified it as a copy of their recording, and YouTube has already jammed advertisements into his video to compensate the accuser, as if he already agreed to a plea-bargain.
Too many false positives, and it costs much less for the people who are already wealthy to make false claims than it does for private citizens to defend themselves against the false claims. This stinks to high heaven.