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In Defense of Six Strikes
Deathspawner writes with a view on Six Strikes we don't normally see around here: "It's been well-established all over the Web that the just-implemented 'Six Strikes' system is bad... horrible, worthy of death to those who created it. But let's take a deep breath for a moment. Can Six Strikes actually be a good thing for consumers? While the scheme isn't perfect (far from it), one of the biggest benefits from this system is that it introduces a proxy, and any persecution you might have easily faced prior to Six Strikes is delayed under the new program. Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
A couple of days ago, someone sent Torrentfreak an actual alert they received from Comcast (the alert itself is a few screens down). Noteworthy is that there is zero mention of the appeals process.
The $35-for-an-appeal fee which they call a "due process" fee makes a mockery of the concept of due process and innocent-until-proven-guilty. Reverse that and it would be a tractably horrible idea, but it would be significantly less interesting to the people who are running it.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Why do I have to choose between six strikes vs. RIAA/MPAA legal threat?
It's not about supporting arts. It's about supporting a dead business model that rewards little to the artists themselves, and which now has the right to spy on what you do online.
It only costs $35 to appeal, but it will cost your ISP more than that to go through the appeals process. If everyone appeals, the system will be unworkable, and therefore everyone should appeal.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
... and any persecution you might have easily faced prior to Six Strikes is delayed under the new program. Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
"Delayed." Very funny. You must be joking. Before, you got a legal threat, which you could pretty much ignore. An IP address != an individual. Now, "$moran" accuses you, and you have to pay to contest the accusation, or find another provider, and in the US, that's often not possible.
Six Strikes is evil incarnate. You pay for net access, and now who you're paying for that access is working for imbeciles against you. CAPITALISM!!!111
"Tongue tied and twisted, just an Earth bound misfit
No. It can, at best, be a marginally better than the alternative.
Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
Yes, but I would also rather have my kneecaps broken than shot in the face. It doesn't make either option actually palatable.
I sell you this dumb phone at $1000, and tell you that at retail is selling at 5000, would you buy it? Putting that your only choices are punishment and strong punishment means that you take out of your mind that you couldn't be doing anything wrong. So you have to accept the lesser evil because could be a worse one, instead of considering that should not be any or that are more alternatives.
But probably is ok in US, after all they choose Obama instead of Romney because the very same reasoning, so they explicitely wanted all that is coming after, including this.
rewards little to the artists themselves,
I'm sick of seeing this argument. If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so. I'm free to take my skill and try to launch a grand software project on my own. Sure, if I'm successful I'll make a lot more money than I do at work, but I don't think "my product was unsuccessful" will garner much sympathy from the folks that own my mortgage.
The RIAA/MPAA is doing an end run around the court system and attacking the ISPs. Let's just toss this on the stack of things this private industry is doing to ruin the lives of the people who would ordinarily want to pay them money:
They have copyright terms that last two centuries.
They have the incredibly overbearing Digital Millenium Copyright Act that ensures that anything you do to copyrighted material which you own is illegal.
They have the ability to take down any content on the internet they feel infringes on said copyright without having to prove they hold the copyright in question, that the infringing activity actually infringes, or that they have the right to make the claim under the DMCA. (Oh, and this process is completely automated in many cases, while appeals are not only grounds for lawsuits but must be evaluated by a human being on a case by case basis... Does anyone remember the mortgage foreclosure robosigning scandal? Because I sure do.)
They have been making great strides in persuading countries around the world to make copyright infringement a criminal, rather than civil offense so they can get the law enforcement agencies to do their dirty work. (Oh wait, the FBI raided Dotcom and ICE seizes websites at the behest of private industry without due process... nevermind.)
What really confuses me is that in the big picture the RIAA/MPAA is small potatoes compared to the other things that make money via digital distribution. They wield rather disproportionate influence over the activities of third parties that have nothing to do with them or those they claim to represent.
If I could pay $30 or even $50 per month to get access to every movie and TV show ever made on demand within minutes I would happily pay that. Even though my family would probably only spend 5-10 hours per month using it. But that's not available. And don't tell me Netflix or Hulu. Those services are great, and I am a Netflix subscriber, but it's not complete.
The industry needs to change it's business model...
There was an AC post in another /. article about this I liked. It said something like create a crappy copyrighted work (in paint, sndrec of you singing, whatever). Host it free somewhere. Now create another page that says you do not have permission to download this file, with a link to the hosted file. Spam out the link to the page that says DO NOT DOWNLOAD everywhere you can. Not just one or two places, but thousands. Hell, post it through 10,000 forum backlinks free scams.
Now collect the IPs of everyone who clicks the link and vies the file. Spam the six strike system with those IPs.
If they ignore legitimate notices from you and do not issue alerts, sue, as they are using what is supposed to be a fair arbitration system to only police for content/companies they deem worthy. Keep flooding them with -legitimate- requests until they cannot handle it.
Silence is a state of mime.
1. "Six Strikes" it NOT a _LAW_.
2. Not all copyright holders are participating and none are _bound_ to it.
Because of that, there is no guarantee that you will receive a "strike" before receiving a settlement demand for infringement or before being named in a federal copyright infringement lawsuit!
Example: Let's say you go download the latest LA porn producer's newest amateur flick via a public BitTorrent tracker. This producer is not participating in six strikes. The porn producer is monitoring the torrent, and logs your IP. They are teamed with a lawyer, and sue you as a John Doe in a lawsuit. You find out when the lawsuit reaches discovery.
What will your defense be? "I never got a first strike, let alone a sixth!" Yeah, tell _THAT_ to the judge. They won't care. You're still getting sued. Copyright trolls will continue extorting innocent victims.
What we really have here is a huge anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen - a situation where the large record & movie companies have banded together to collectively negotiate away our privacy with all of the large ISP's, who themselves have banded together and negotiated it away. Its completely anti-competitive in that, if I had any sort of option to get high speed Internet Access where I live from a company who wouldn't wave the white flag and offer up my information based on an IP address at the first hint of displeasure from the copyright industry, and I'd dump Time Warner immediately, almost entirely without regard for the cost or other aspects of whatever the alternative company might be offering.
Any argument about supporting the artists crumbles in the face of studio accounting practices where no movie is ever profitable if the studios must share the profits, and where music artists basically never see a dime from the music that they record.
Understanding is a three edged sword. - Ambassador Kosh Naranek, Babylon 5
And the best way to not support that business model is to buy alternatives and boycott protected media. Stealing Argo doesn't make a statement, it's a way of justifying obtaining something you want enough to download but not enough to pay the asking price for.
May I recommend Libraries (many, including the one in my city are partnered with digital distributors offering free music and e-books) , NetFlix, Rdio, as new business model alternatives that aren't illegal.
Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
No.
This is a form of the prisoner's dilemma.
Individually, it makes sense for each of us to take the easy way out, but collectively, this is bad public policy.
Private accusations of crime, followed by private punishments, is odious to our system of justice.
More and more court cases are ending up like this one, where minimal evidence gets turned away as insufficient.
The real truth is that the copyright industry doesn't want to prosecute these cases, because lawyers and discovery and expert witnesses are expensive.
Even Hollywood can't afford 10,000 cases at a time.
I am not unsympathetic to their problem, but the solution needs to balance the due process rights of the people with the interests of big business.
That hasn't happened since the copyright owners discovered the scale of infringement couldn't be cheaply addressed by the existing legal system.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
You don't. Don't worry, it's both. The "six strikes" are to build a case against the owner of the connection and after the owner "strikes out," they can expect a summons.
That's why they ask for confirmation: "Click the button below to confirm you received this Copyright Alert"
In court they'll say, "but your Honor, they acknowledge six times that copyright infringement was occurring and did nothing about it - exactly how many warnings do they need?!"
The program they're using has a ton of false positives. It was removing stuff from NASA's youtube channel that NASA uploaded because news programs decided to use the footage.
You realize these 'strikes' aren't for infringements, but for 'claims' of infringements, right? The RIAA has misidentified users before, and it will continue to do so. Not infringing is not a perfect solution.
I just have one question... did the RIAA pay for this submission or the MPAA?
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
I support the arts, in a large number of cases where I feel confident that any of the money I give to the supporting will actually go to the people creating the art in question. Live music, live drama, books, even recorded music from less mainstream musicians. But mainstream musicians signed to RIAA labels can suck it, and so can the whole broken tv-on-a-tv system.
Which leads to a question- Would it be possible to set up a shell company, and claim infringement on every possible IP address? Then repeat 5 more times?
This is a lot of IP addresses, but it could probably be done. I haven't read the entire actual law but the Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about punishments for false infringement claims.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
This whole thing sounds to me a lot like "Hey, sorry you got raped; look on the bright side, at least he used lube".
If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so.
Many do just that, and a fair number who do make enough to support themselves well enough or even do quite well for themselves performing live and selling CDs on their own. You've probably never heard of them unless they're local to you, though, because they get no radio airplay and basically no distribution. The media conglomerates enforce that with contracts (or in some cases overlapping ownership), so that any retailer that will carry, say, the latest Taylor Swift album will not be allowed to carry independent musician's albums.
Typically, the way the RIAA recording contracts work, the musician gets an advance that seems like a lot to a starving artist. The advance typically amounts to something like $30-50K per musician in the band, and thanks to Hollywood accounting, that's all that musician will typically see. After that point, the signed musician is basically a debt slave to their label.
If you want to support music and musicians financially, by far the best way to do that is to go to live shows in local venues and buy CDs or recordings directly from the bands.
I am officially gone from
You still have legal threats under the six strikes system.
Palm trees and 8
He fell on his face with point #2.
The entire argument depends upon the above quotation being logically well-founded. Take the error probability, raise it to the sixth power, and you get a small enough fraction that you can blow it off. On the face of it, it's not stupid... until you realize that the system actually adds the fractions to each other, rather than multiplying them. Oy. We're off to a good start here, aren't we? And that's if we accept that the errors will really just be random noise, rather than possibly arise from systematic failures and patterns.
If you disagree with that founding assertion (and you will, if you have observed what has happened so far), then nothing else he says is going to make sense.
IMHO, nobody knows how Six Strikes works, or what its false positive rate is. If someone knew, they would have stepped forward by now. This is getting to become something like both the evidence which suggests Intelligent Design as a hypothesis, and the secret idea for an experiment to falsify it, together which would make it be a theory. At some point, when no one comes forth with either or them (let alone both), it starts to become reasonable to assume the theory probably doesn't yet exist.
Similarly, we have no reason to suspect Six Strikes' detection and identification tech is accurate. It might be, it's just that nothing leads us to that conclusion except faith. And it's not that it can't be done (within certain limitations); it's that we have past records (anyone remember the RIAA lawsuits?) of it being done by totally incompetent people, who went to work for the "MAFIAA" because that was the only job they could get. MAFIAA, show us your methodology, because your reputation is that you're crooks who just make shit up.
And because of the how-it-works problem, his last sentence
is exactly wrong. It will be taken less seriously, because when you get one of these notices, your first thought isn't going to be "who in the house shared the Megadeth song?" It's going to be "which now-dead neighbor, who DHCP leased my current address for a couple weeks back in 2006, downloaded a file named peace_time_economics_in_the_rust_belt.pdf which matched some Megadeth keywords?"
Oh, they might be taken seriously as threats, but seriously not as being related to anything which may have happened on your ISP connection.
If you have seen how the MPAA has DMCAed some Google results in recent times, you will know (it's not even speculative) that false positives are extremely common in this industry's robot's actions, right now. Once I saw one of these false positives happen to me, it became apparent how easy it would be to accrue six Google-censored-results in a year, just by having truly innocent web pages which say certain words on them. (Tip: use HBO's show names. Haven't tried Showtime yet.) We're supposed to believe that your Six Strikes p2p tech is vastly better than your web tech? Why? What's your excuse? Please. [sits back, opens popcorn] This'll be good.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Well, first of all, you don't need to copy anything to get a notice. All it takes is a mixup in IP addresses and you get one, nobody bothers to check those claims against reality. But let's move on to your second part, how to efficiently "combat pirating".
The *AAs are no longer needed for distribution. That's a thing of the past, when they pretty much controlled the only way how you, artist, could get into a store. You couldn't run around and find a place to record, then someone to press it on a record or CD and then try to find stores that would sell them. That's where they came in. They were the ones with the distribution method. The internet made that all but obsolete. Nothing's easier today than getting music. Evidently, because that's the pickle they're in, I could probably easily, with a few searches in a search engine, come up with a few places that point me towards whatever I want to have.
But, and here is their market niche they fit in, how do I even know what I'm looking for? Their expertise, their place of excellence, is marketing. They have top notch ties with all the places that can make you known. They know how to present someone, they know how to make someone big. Unless you're one in a million viral YouTube hits, you can crank out thousands of music numbers and videos and once in a blue moon someone might stumble upon you and you actually get a viewer and maybe if it's your lucky day he might even think about buying something from you.
They on the other hand know how to reach millions easily. And this is where they can survive in today's market. For this, they'd first of all have to consider changing their business model. From the owner of music to the supporter for artists.
For this they'd first of all have to accept that they no longer own artists but are their partners. And since that won't ever happen, I guess they'll have to die.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's a tort called vexatious litigation. It's common law.
There is also a possible penalty under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 11, for signing your name to a legal declaration that you have not investigated and, thus, do not have good reason to believe that it is true. The judge, essentially, gets to make up any penalty they think is appropriate (within reason).
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