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Comcast Working On 'Helpful' Copyright Violation Pop-ups
gregor-e writes "Comcast is said to be preparing to snoop on your internet browsing to detect when you attempt to download a copyright-protected item. On detection, Comcast will pop up a helpful window that contains information about where you can obtain a legal version of whatever you're downloading. 'While sources familiar with the new initiative emphasized that it is being seen as a complement to CAS [a.k.a. six strikes] and not a replacement, the very emergence of an alternative raises questions as to the viability of CAS, which has been criticized for myriad reasons ranging from the questionable strategic rationale of punishing subscribers to an implementation that has been characterized as scattershot. How the two systems would coexist is unclear.'"
Comcast will be inviting other ISPs to join its new system as well.
They are going to be modifying web pages with this popup crap? They will be actively scanning every page I go to to see if there is a link to something on some master lists somewhere, modify every HTML page I download to include some sort of script to create a pop-up?
Really?
I guess they could maybe just intercept all HTTP requests that go to specific hosts and URIs and supplant the destination with a replacement HTML page... much better
Buying more bandwidth is out of the question is too expensive, but dropping a fortune on the hardware to do deep packet inspection is no problem.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
My fancy new 'digital' tv wont work without comcasts boxes around. You can't even buy one. Rental only. Good thing they gave them out for free...
Oh Wait...'free' dta boxes are now costing every month. What the actual fuck... 'free' to comcast actually means until we start charging for it.
Forced to pay for 40 channels of pure shit to get 10 channels you might want to watch sometime. It's such a complete scam.
Every month its yet another problem with either the net or the tv or billing. And the bills keep going up. The service and quality keeps going down.
And habib over in india or wherever has no fucking clue how to fix anything without calling them at least 5 times.
$160 a month for this shit... It's about time to get rid of them for tv at least...
God i wish i had another choice for internet...
Save us google you're our only hope. Your worst half-assed attempts at anything are 5000% better than comcasts best effort.
We're worried about the NSA seeing everything that goes over our connections.
But how much worse is it to have your own ISP doing so? Previously, we at least had the illusion that they didn't know. (Yeah, right. Do you browse with HTTPS-everywhere? And if you do, do your search terms go to some search provider that reports to the government?)
But now we know that they'll be looking directly at what you download. It's no step at all to go from "looking for copyrighted material" to "looking for anything we are interested in". Al Qaida training materials? Anarchist cookbook? PETA protest schedules? Republican party caucus meeting schedule?
Remember that adhesion contract you agreed to when you signed up with your ISP? Where they can change the terms when they want? Care to guess whether those terms will change to assure that you "agree" to deep packet inspection and content filtering of your internet traffic?
This Six Strikes thing is both retarded and a horrible business practice. Why? Because they'll probably single out torrent traffic and assume that you must be pirating something. Hello Comcast: torrents != piracy. Ultimately that's what all these initiatives for piracy look at and they've declared war on P2P sharing because regardless of what it is, it must be "illegal." It also feeds right into the argument for traffic prioritization and filtering which is another horrible idea for the Internet. I can see some Comcast exec saying "We're going to be filtering torrent traffic because our friendly warnings have shown that 90% of the users involved in P2P are doing illegal activity." All the while they're pushing their own content services for substantial fees onto their users. I for one would be worried if I were a Comcast user and would seek out HTTPs connections everywhere I go on the net or look for another ISP.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
C'Cast did this just a few years back, but the topic was bandwidth, I think. So their sniffing isn't new at all, just their nanny-state attitude over in-your copyright nag.
Trivially, http never should have been created without full end to end, authenticated encryption. These technologies are subject to weird failure modes, slowing things down, added cost, hard to diagnose problems, and worse, once the infrastructure is in place, then the government can order them to do anything they want with the web. In the end, the customer pays for it all as an invisible tax on their connection. This is not what we want.
Cute, the captcha for this post was trapped.
When one of the major media conglomerates creates something, it's protected by copyright. If Joe the Plumber tries to download it without being allowed to do so, Comcast "warns" him that he isn't allowed to do so, potentially disconnects him from the Internet, and, if the Obama administration proposal mentioned on /. earlier today goes through, maybe calls the police.
When you or I create something, it's protected by copyright. But if Joe tries to download it without being allowed to do so, Comcast does jack shit.
I think this is an anti-competitive practice.
They are so happy to do this because they own companies that produce copyrighted content. This is not okay. In an effort to get broadband out to larger numbers of people Comcast has been granted monopolies, subsidies, easements, and other things in the public domain. They should not be able to use that public domain to make sure that they can distribute and protect their own content. As soon as they took handouts from the public they lost the right to be anything but a "dumb" connection. I can't understandy why the FCC allows Comcast to exist as it does today - with clear conflicts of interest between their obligation to fairly contribute to the public domain and their need to make as much money as they can from the production of copyrighted content (that they distribute on their infrastructure).
I think the EFF is outgunned here when you have former Senator Chris Dodd heading up the MPAA. There's a reason why the MPAA and RIAA have friends in DC and why we have laws like the DMCA and an abhorrent fear that the profits of the members of these organizations is at risk. John Doe suits have been their bread and butter attack method and now with more and more Federal Judges growing backbones it would appear that their tactic involves harassing the ISPs all the while greasing the palms of Congress. Let's not forget where the push for SOPA comes from, it's guys like old Chris there, pushing his contacts in DC.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
...when you get a Comcast warning, better start looking for another source of your content, 'cause this one has been found out and will probably become unavailable soon.
Nice of them to hand out an early warning.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Scanning my encrypted Usenet downloads, Comcast. Keep goin' after them evil torrentz!
Internet
Service
Provider.
Just forward the damn packets and take my money.
This is clearly creating an unlicensed derivative work from the original webpage.
Or, better, how will this work with an HTTPS connection?
Is it HTTP only? What about SFTP, FTP, and Torrent?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
that's already installed?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
THIS VERSION OF THE ONION ROUTER IS COPYRIGHTED.
Get a legal copy from http://www.fbi.gov/tor_for_suckers.exe
[accept] [accept]
I feel bad for the programmers and sysadmins that are being asked to implement this. Surely, they must know that it won't work, but senior management probably insists that everyone can afford all the content they want, and that DRM is easy to deal with (and somehow beneficial) because senior management is completely lost.
The front line people responsible for setting this up are probably rolling their eyes in disgust, and looking for better jobs. If I were in their position, I would be. Have fun trying to enforce something that is unworkable and unrealistic. When you're not having fun anymore, hopefully you'll find a job that uses your skillset to do something that makes sense.
Facts have a liberal bias.
The crime is distribution, not receiving. Its perfectly legal to download any file off the internet.
If I owned a botnet, I would dedicate a tiny portion of the swarm's resources to simply doing an http get request for some arbitrary file from a list of know triggers, and doing everything in my power to both route the request over a comcast owned link, and suppress the popup on the zombie.
The goal? Create as much noise in the line as possible to make the effort futile. (As a botnet operator, I would have incentive to make deep packet inspection as undesirable as possible.)
It wouldn't take much. Just pull a few bytes of an MP3 here, poke an illegal video server there, and just discard the replied datagrams (occasionally pull a whole fle, just to make it hard to filter). Wait some configurable time variable, then do it again with a different random file. Make it look like piracy is radically out of control, and totally discredit any metrics they collect from deep packet snooping.
What kind of "helpful pointers" will they be giving when there is NO legal alternative? The few times I've ever used peer-to-peer is when the item in question is "out of print" and "currently unavailable" (Disney is notorious for doing this). Just try and get an original cut of Disney's live action/animated hybrid "Song of the South". It's not available in this country at any price. Oh you can get heavily censored versions, but not the original (supposedly it is "too racist" for Americans).
I realize this represents a very tiny fraction of online acquisition (I hesitate to call it piracy if it can't be purchased) but I mention it because a lot of companies (like Disney) deliberately take things off the market in order to trundle it out every ten years or so with a grossly inflated profit margin.
Lets not magically assume that we know the mistakes they will make before they make them. I doubt that p2p will be an issue. I am curious as to how they plan to allow movie-previews and other stuff that generally benefits the copyright holders. There is a lot of stuff on the websites like rottentomatoes and whatnot that might get flagged. Is there going to be a magic handshake from the website that says we are entitled to broadcast this? Or is the allowed content going to be watermarked.
I am certainly not adverse to going to the other carrier and paying half of what I am paying comcast right now. Esp if comcast breaks the web.
Wouldn't this violate their "safe harbor" protection? This would mean they would know about violations and they might even benefit from them by saying "get it legally FROM OUR STORE"
That should lose them their "common carrier" status. They may wish to rethink this idea.
As measured by a proprietary algorithm with no human review of its calculation or of fair use -- you will be judged.
Great, now they will tell me where I can legally pay to download the latest season of "game of thrones"
Does this mean they're going to start flagging the oodles of things on Youtube that "copyright violations"? And post links to Amazon or some such where you can pay for the music in them (of course ignoring the other content)?
This should get funny when they go up against Google for treading on their turf.
Not gonna mess with Google-tube, huh? Well, I guess like in Animal Farm, some are more equal than others.
Logic fail.
or to put it another way:
" You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
... would be quickly pushed a pop-up message with links to purchase or rent the same content
if you can sell or rent me an episode of show that just broadcast an hour ago in 720p without ads and is DRM free, i'll do it. otherwise, fuck off because what i'm getting is better than what you have to offer.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I am loving this stuff - six-strikes and traffic snooping. It so obviously sucks that it is driving the market for VPNs to levels of hyper competition. And I lurve me a VPN because it mixes all my traffic with everybody else on the same egress node which is just great for "hiding in the crowd" while you browse the web without cookies (and other trackers).
Thanks to six-strikes I'm paying less than $4/month for VPN access that gets me my choice of exit nodes in about 10 different countries and 5 simultaneous VPN'd devices - great for stopping verizon, et al from sniffing my cellphone web-browsing too.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Wow, that was hard to circumvent.
As usual the summary is terrible. There is no mention of snooping on internet browsing, only P2P. How would this work? Perhaps;
1. Comcast gets you to install a program or browser plugin as part of their ISP crapware.
2. Comcast detect an illegal download by passively joining P2P swarms and, since they know your IP, inject HTML popups into your next browsing request. Popups don't work with many modern browsers but even if this was in the page it would be bizarre for the user to head to their Gmail and see half the page flashing with a warning and click-to-buy links.
You guys here at Slashdot have spent the last 12 years fighting to legalize your pre-college, college-, post-college habit of spending all your leisure time downloading content from fold-tent-one-step-ahead-of-the-sheriff sites, 80 percent of which you'll never get around to listen to or watch.
So who won? You didn't win. Look around at pop music and what's being created today. Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber style music is all that anyone can make money doing nowadays. Tower Records and all of its bricks and mortar competitors went out of business long ago. So did Borders.
SOMEBODY will make big money from content, that's how capitalism works, and now we see the winners are big, ugly somebodies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, the owners of the pipes, along with the Chinese and South Koreans who manufacture the handsets and others gadgets. All you guys did was drive the individual artists out of business so these corporate bullies could step in and rake *all* the profits.
For some reason, if this goes live, I would expect people to set up honeypots to make material not violated by copyright protections to trigger a false alarm in their system, and the people distributing material that violates a copyright will find ways around it. When enough people do this, the Signal to Noise Ratio will be so bad they will have little choice but to discontinue it or spend TONS of cash on one of two solutions I see (maybe someone has a better way, but lets not give them ideas) One would be buying gobs of processors, storage, and hiring computer scientists that can compare data passing through their system against their own copies using some sort of fancy algorithm. Even if they have a O(n) algorithm, the volume of data the since of the constant and n are going to be rather large and still cost tons of money to operate and maintain. Another solution is an army of monkeys with a bunch of monitors watching/listening to any streaming media passing through their system, which is probably a ToS and copyright issue itself when legal streams are monitored by those not authorized by the copyright owner to view it that way.
Another problem I can see is a large switch to https and other encrypted protocols to make their snooping useless. Pretty much they are going after the low skilled small fries of the copyright violators.
TLDR - I doubt this will work, I think they will only catch small timers, I think big timers will figure out a work around.
Different AC: Before widespread music piracy, there were plenty of bands on the radio.
After? We have Bieber, and predigested corporate rock bands, old bands... and nothing else. No new bands on the radio, no cool rockin' stuff. Just highly homogenized junk where the only thing singing is Autotune.
I already hear the thousands of complaints that come streaming in on day one. Just because you are downloading a copyrighted work doesn't mean you are doing something illegal or shady because I'm not downloading it from the "official" source. I've already fought with my cable provider over this when I was served a notice over a year ago and they admitted to being wrong.
All you guys did was drive the individual artists out of business so these corporate bullies could step in and rake *all* the profits.
Is that really why it ("it" refers to music you don't like being produced and many people buying it) happened, or is that what you wish the cause to be?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
How exactly will they "pop up" anything? Unless they transparent proxy an outgoing web request and send back a page with a pop-up, which would (in my opinion) be a gross violation of just being an internet provider and not fucking around with my packets?
Sigh. Why can't internet providers just provide internet, and stay the fuck out of this sort of thing? I just want my packets to make it to their destination, uninspected and un-fucked with, and I want the same for the packets coming back to me.
At this rate, the Internet is eventually going to become a glorified version of what AOL was in the 90s. Shudder.
"All you guys did was drive the individual artists out of business so these corporate bullies could step in and rake *all* the profits."
No, the same big corporations such as the RIAA and MPAA did that. Its because of their aggressive marketing, they've made sure there is no markett for anyone else. Justin Bieber is what you can listen to without being being labeled as "crazy", or something else where you inherently lack rights, such as being free from assault. This was going on even in the 1990s.
". All you guys did was drive the individual artists out of business so these corporate bullies could step in and rake *all* the profits."
First you complain about big chain stores, next your talking about artists going out of business. Now has never been a better time for live music. This is a bold face lie. None of those artists made a dime off record sales.
" Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber style music is all that anyone can make money doing nowadays."
Black Sabbath Just go back together and released a new album with all original content. Oh, it sounds sick too.
I think there is more live music going on now, and with the same computers, and even the same technology that is used to "pirate", such as CD Burners, MP3s, and audio tools, can easily be used by artists to produce music without the need for record labels.
The only people really bitching are record label owners. They've always been sleeze bags who've abused musicians. So take your corporation shill ass out of here. Don't wanna here it. The movie industry doesn't have to pay the same 10-20 shitty actors $30 million a movie for a blockbuster with a total budget of $100 million, then bitch about money.
Next you'll talk about how living wage drove blue collar jobs to china.
There are many services available that can keep Comcast from snooping on your usage. This also allows you to use region-locked services by selecting an end-point in one of many major cities worldwide.
Would be nice if they'd work on getting their service working instead.
Six months of having to use Google DNS because they can't run a goddamned DNS server.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Shit like this, along with the NSA shit, makes me want to just go back to a landline, answering machine and snail mail.
I found them helpful already just reading about them. Now I'm never going with Comcast ever.
This is worse than bad - not a single Copyright Enforcement Entity (CEE) or Copyright Troll (tm pending) as I like to call them has been able to correctly identify copyrighted works 1 time out of 50.
How many intentionally false (let's call them what they are - Malicious Lies) takedown notices have there been? How many takedown notices for a Copyright Trolls own works on their own websites?
What will happen is you will get hit with a popup when you go to download your own content from youtube, with a pointer to Viacom's website where they will sell you your own work (with their copyright on it) for only 100 bucks.
We need Copyright reform - revert copyrights back to their original 14 year period. Rescind the illegal DCMA (it's illegal because it intentionally, and maliciously extends copyright to infinity as it doesn't have any codified enforcement of decryption keys being put into escrow for the public to decrypt encrypted works after 14 years.
PAEs and CEEs are our nations worst Enemies, right after our own Government and the *AAs of this country that do nothing but steal from the artists and their customers just to pad their fat asses further.
How does "downloading content ... 80 percent of which you'll never get around to listen to or watch" produce the effect of "drive the individual artists out of business?"
The individual artists didn't pay for the bandwidth we used to download the crap we purportedly ignored. Or are you saying that the 20% we listened to drove them out of business because, obviously, we would have bought all of that content otherwise, and spending that money would have kept the artists in business?
Fact #1: reducing price increases consumption. At a price of zero, it is guaranteed that people are consuming quite a lot of content that they never would have paid a dime for. So that downloading (at no cost to the artist) would not have translated to pure profit if downloading were not an option, and in fact only a tiny portion of it would have translated to sales, and therefore it could not possibly have hit their sales as hard as you seem to think it did.
Fact #2: The labels habitually left their signed talent owing them money after their albums made the labels a fortune. THAT harmed the artist far more than the free exposure provided by downloading. Buying more albums would not have changed this *at all*.
Fact #3: The issue is not as polarized as you seem to think. Plenty of people on slashdot approve of copyright law, but disapprove of these means of enforcement. Your slippery-slope fallacy is falling on deaf ears.
So there you have it.
Don't these old media types understand that this just makes an opening for smaller more nimble ISPs to simply say, "We provide the bandwidth and what the hell you do with it is your business!"
I hope that these guys vomit their cheerios when they see how many previously complacent customers jump to the competition and never come back. Most people are barraged with better offers every day but ignore them thinking that it isn't worth the trouble. But when your ISP starts to threaten you then it does become worth the trouble.
But the funniest bit is that I suspect that people will get false positives all the time. I wonder what they would think of my scp transfers, and ssh sessions, not to mention the torrenting of things like Linux.
Plus you get mission creep. Will they start warning people about downloading VLC or even the torrent programs themselves. Or programs critical of the movie industry. Why not start blocking videos made by dissident groups? What about a warning for downloading Snowden's stuff from Wikileaks?
You also have grey areas like Aereo which the courts have greenlighted but the big media companies are saying will cause the end of civilization.
Then you get people not liking being watched. And lastly I really don't want the ISP to ever alter or change the data that I send or receive. To have a popup it means that they have injected something into my data stream. My potentially mission critical data stream.
How are they going to know what I'm downloading via https://..../ websites and magnet: links? I'm pretty sure bittorrent won't display any of their popups.
They're also running in to the problem that altering the content delivered to the browser is creating a derivative work of someone elses content, potentially violating their copyright.
We're worried about the NSA seeing everything that goes over our connections.
Exactly. Clearly the NSA should be part of this scheme and provide popups to let you know when you are engaging in behaviour they deem questionable. So next time you click on an https connection to a non-US company you can get a helpful popup: "Using encrypted internet connections to foreign entities puts you on an NSA watch list, are you sure you wish to continue? If you so have you considered using an NSA-approved proxy server that will ensure we can protect your connection - available for free at: https://notthekgb.gov/".
It looks like you are trying to pirate a movie. Would you like help?
No one is going to install this software on their computer and COMCAST can't force it on people. If they try, customers will leave. This is nothing more than further proof that the entertainment industry doesn't understand technology or the internet and, they are also complete idiots. A far more productive approach would be to bang their heads against the wall and if it doesn't work, bang some more. It will achieve just as much and won't bother anyone else.
... the rate of use of HTTPS and VPNs is going up.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The pop music industry I grew up with (as a fan, not musician) was almost totally dependent on record sales to people aged 15-30, particularly males who have free time and disposable income but often no family responsibilities. Take those away and the industry withers and dies. That's the way it's been for the past 95 years, since RCA released the first really good record player (the Victrola around 1917 I think). But these were the ones who were most attracted to P2P and now, by googling (!) for pirate sites. If enough of these young people adopt the doctrine that "I will never again pay for recorded music, except maybe one in a blue moon because of some extraordinary circumstance" then it's not surprising that Tower Records, HMV, Virgin Records, Sam Goody, etc. all went out of business within a few years of one another.
Your Fact #1 sounds like a rehash from Techdirt. That Mike guy is a moron, just because he somehow got a bachelor's degree in economics long ago doesn't mean he has a clue. Products given away for free are at best lost leaders, they only make sense as door openers to substantial sales of other products and services, and no, I don't mean t-shirts and baseball caps with the band's logo.
Fact #2 ignores the ability to create new record labels at will. *EVERY* record label is corrupt and run by assholes? That's an easy cynical play in a forum like this, just like a similar statement regarding politicians, but anybody can start a new record label and if it was a musician or promoter with a substantial track record in the industry and reputation for honesty and straight dealing then s/he could attract a following. In fact, this has happened over and over again across the decades.
Yes/No.
Almost certain the common carrier provisions that allow these guys to avoid being sued for content should be reliant on them not touching (or looking at in a meaningful way, as we all should know what that entails at a trunk level) afforementioned content.
You don't seem to understand anything outside of a human context. I don't think you even know what constitutes a win for us.
Why is Commiecast getting involved with this? What the h-e-double toothpicks do they gain? All they do is provide a service. Why do they even care what people do with it?
DO you have any idea how the music business works? Artists make money of off venues not from record sells. Record companies and there neo-communist monopolies are what drove the music industry out of business.
Your lack of knowledge, and your rush just to mouthing off shows you nothing about how it works. There is no link to piracy to loss of revenue this has been proven with some great investigative work, by some (very few) journalists. And the record companies paid for the studies only to find out they shot themselves in the foot, and then tried to cover up or bury the studies.
Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber, these type of people have been around for years, it is called teen pop, and the record companies have been doing this since the 50's, exploiting looks, over talent. They did it with "hair bands", any band they came across they would dress up, control there music and throw on a stage to make a buck. We saw this again with the Seattle sound, even going to great lengths to sell flannel shirts, and torn jeans.
Don't get mad because you have no talent or think your some type of great fuckin messiah for music, you seem like every other musician that thinks they are great or are the next great thing but cannot accept the fact they aren't good.
Son, do you realize TPB has been around longer than Facebook?
That's complete bullshit. There's a community of artists here in my town who are making decent middle-class livings as musicians without having to be like any of those people. With health insurance and homes and everything.
Maybe you need a refresher course in what capitalism really means. You can find several very good syllabi and reading lists online. You will learn that "SOMEBODY will make big money from content" doesn't have anything to do with "capitalism", when capitalism is actually working. Corporatism is not capitalism.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I mean, if this prevent having to deal with the RIAA or the MFAA and all the legal expenses, wouldn't it be better to be warned and go "My bad." and move along?
If we set aside the whole "monitoring your connection" issues (privacy issues, who watches the watchers, etc) and pretend thats not a problem... and if this were them "sending you a friendly warning letter", maybe thered be some room for discussion.
But the only way to accomplish what Comcast is suggesting here is by MITMing all of your connections and injecting content into the middle. Thats great in company environment, and "less than great" on a home ISP connection where you have a high expectation of privacy. Off the top of my head, some major concerns here:
I am not one to rail at the RIAA / MPAA without acknowledging that there is an issue with piracy (or whatever you want to call it). But 95% of the time the issue is that the response-- whether by MPAA, RIAA, or the ISPs -- is that the response is completely over the top. This is a golden example-- Comcast here suggests completely undermining the expectation of privacy and integrity of the connection they provide.
Why do you think the Sandvine / bittorrent issue a few years ago was such a big deal? Its because "somebody" randomly inserting bogus traffic into your connection represents a MASSIVE threat.
The brick and mortars going out of business was something that was going to happen regardless. When you can make distribution more or less instantaneous from the comfort of your own home, folks will take the convenient option most of the time. I for one do not miss having to haul around a mess of CD's in my car, which has a six-changer that's never been used, nor do I miss lugging around a huge library of technical books when my tablet can essentially hold a full reference library for a fraction of the weight.
The next thing to go will be movie theaters. Sooner or later, some enterprising company is going to try offering movies on demand at release instead of waiting out the normal theater release period. It'll cost something like $50, but that will still be cheaper than hauling the family into the theater, paying marked up ticket prices, marked up concession prices, and having to deal with some idiots crying kid.
Whether or not it's right or contributes to the degradation of our society's ability to actually socialize is a whole other discussion, but there is no stopping the march of technology and it's use to feed the public's ever growing demand for instant gratification.
People have been saying the same thing about radio since before you were born. You really think that, for instance, the 80s was a time when people didn't complain about the mainstream radio stations all sounding the same?
Good luck getting every site, even personal blogs hosted on dinky little shared hosts, to switch to HTTPS. Android Browser on Android 2.x and Internet Explorer on Windows XP don't support SNI, an extension to HTTPS that makes name-based virtual hosting possible.
I hope that these guys vomit their cheerios when they see how many previously complacent customers jump to the competition and never come back.
Hence all the commercials about "slow DSL". Comcast has power because in a lot of areas, the competition can't even deliver 2 Mbps.
Will they start warning people about downloading VLC
That depends on whether the MPEG-LA is willing to get into bed with Comcast the way the MPAA has.
What about a warning for downloading Snowden's stuff from Wikileaks?
Worse yet: a warning even for downloading information about a plush snowman sold by Target.
My fancy new 'digital' tv wont work without comcasts boxes around.
Really? My fancy old 'digital' tv http://store.sony.com/p/KDL-V40XBR1/en/p/KDLV40XBR1 has no trouble displaying even Encore movie channels without a Comcast box. Of course it did cost me a few hundred dollars extra but it also has great picture quality.
without comcasts boxes around. You can't even buy one. Rental only.
But you *can* buy a TiVo box that does everything the Comcast box does, and more.
Sigh. People like you who will only consider a solution if it comes from one specific vendor are the cause of the problem, not any part of the solution.
COMCAST can't force it on people. If they try, customers will leave.
Leave for whom? Dial-up?
... Look around at pop music and what's being created today. Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber style music is all that anyone can make money doing nowadays. ...
This is why you aren't taken serious. Only a few musicians actually get rich making music. Their record companies though get very rich off them and other musicians they sign. It has always been this way, and they are fighting hard as hell to keep it that way.
Be seeing you...
80%!my Fucking sides... Give them back
Srsly, you think most people download shit and don't sit there and wait for it to finish for a reason? Even the porn I've torrented I have viewed (albeit in 20-30 minute sessions)
My ISP once swore up and down that I had illegally downloaded Final Destination 4. I used to think all of this whining about people getting in trouble for downloading movies and music was total BS. My mind was changed once I had been falsely accused as no amount of discussion would get any consideration from my ISP.
You do realize that the DMCA is illegal right? It illegally extends copyright to infinity as there is no provision for escrowing the decryption keys of the encrypted content after copyright expires.
the MPAA / RIAA are what's wrong with copyright, copyrights aren't for corporate profits, they are to get material into the public domain.
That's why the original copyright laws declared a 14 year copyright term limit. That needs to be returned, and all those movies, all that music that is 14+ years old becomes free, public-domain. Just as it was supposed to be.
Right now all these corporate ass-rapers are doing is stealing what rightfully belongs to us. People who download are only taking what's theirs back.
I was there. The term "corporate rock" was invented in the 1980s for a reason.
According to the title, "Comcast Working On 'Helpful' Copyright Violation Pop-ups," the Comcast pop-ups are going to help violate copyright.
Guess what - before the internet, there were tape swaps, vinyl to tape recorders, 8-track recorders, reel to reel recorders - off air recorders.
Nothing has changed since the advent of the first music reproduction system that consumers could record with, aside from quality and ease of reproduction/distribution.
People who download were never going to buy the product - that means NO LOST PROFITS. NONE. ZILCH. ZIPPO.
Hell, people who download end up BUYING more product than those that don't as they get exposed to more variety. It actually IMPROVES sales.
It's the MPAA/RIAA fucktards that think they lose out on every download - that's sheer stupidity - we're talking hyper-ultra-mega-special-olympic stupidity here folks, and these are the people that end up migrating into the political arena after they've ruined 1000s of people's lives raiding corporate profits for short term stock gains, they move on to ruin millions of peoples lives by giving away tax money to the worst corporate offenders and pocketing it for themselves.
I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. I think you know what the problem is. The mission is profit, and it's far too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Comcast is actually trying to do you a great favor. They are forcing you to inspect the value of the content they offer and the price you paid to let them consolidate all those little local legal monopolies into a corporate behemoth. It's the biggest fox ever to be thrown into a briar patch. How's it all workin' out for ya?
There's gotta be some way to get idiots to stop using that term. Really, what the fuck is an "illegal download"?!
At the end of the day, they'll more then likely earn commissions on referring people to the sites to get the "legal" version of the items, so it's in their interest to get this done and fast, it'll mean more profits for them in the long run.
In the end, it'll mean their earnings per customer will go up
So who won? You didn't win. Look around at pop music and what's being created today. Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber style music is all that anyone can make money doing nowadays. Tower Records and all of its bricks and mortar competitors went out of business long ago. So did Borders.
Oh really? Actually there is as much or more music being made today than before the big bad Internet 'destroyed' the music industry. You may not know this if you only listen to terrestrial radio but there is a lot of music being made, of every genre imaginable.
Few artists today can sell a million records. Those than can you find on the radio. The rest you have to search out. For those artists the Internet is their friend.
I have discovered a lot of new music listening to Pandora and Slacker that I would never have heard listening to the radio. Hell I've discovered entire genres that I hadn't heard of. I've watched their videos on Youtube and learned about the artists on Facebook. If you aren't a top-tier pop, hip-hop or country act the record companies are willing to put marketing muscle behind the Internet provides a way for artists to take promotion into their own hands.
In some cases the Internet even provides artists with the means to bypass the labels altogether, allowing them to be in control over their own destiny. Sure, they won't have any platinum records on the wall but for true artists it is more important than selling out your artistic vision to get a big-label record contract.
Music isn't dying. Slowly but surely the big record labels are, at least in their current form.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Agreed. It had little to do with piracy and much to do with the rise of only a few companies owning the radios stations in multiple markets. They decided that focusing on the most popular music and playing the same thing in every market was the way to go. That made it much harder for new bands that didn't fit the mold to make it.
I'm not up to speed with current hipster talk. Does that mean good or bad?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Dude. You just got old.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Please do not track every move I make, Im no criminal, I have so far done nothing wrong.
When you start tracking me, and pointing it out so clear to me, I will find the first bad-ass-ftp and download all of it.
That is what people do, when exposed to distrust.
Step on my toes and I will step on yours.
So dear Music, Movie and "Think of the children" industry: Step of my lawn, leave me alone!
slashdot: land of liberal niggerlovers who think it's SO VERY HORRIBLY TERRIBLE for me to say nigger. because they never lived near a bunch of niggers, had anything not nailed down go missing, seen them congregate in packs of 20-30 all of them thugged out and most of them armed, blasting loudass rap music into the wee hours of the morning, aggressively yelling at anyone on the public road, vandalizing everything with gangsta graffiti, destroying property values, causing cop cars to show up weekly, letting their undisciplined bastard kids run around causing trouble, parking junk cars in the yard and leaving them on blocks, and generally acting like the goddamned vermin they are.
Sounds exactly like the rednecks I grew up with. Swap the rap for country and its a dead ringer. Now, would you kindly go fuck off and die?
well the warning shows that they know what you're going to download - that is bad, next up riaa is suing them for the information. ..and they want other isp's to submit the information for them as well.
every fucking file you download they'll know.
(well, http anyways. want to bet that every tpb proxy goes on the list instantly and it will not check which torrent it is.. it will just say that it's probably illegal to scare).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Don't know about the movie theather one. All my friends already know how to download prescreeners for free before the movie is launched, and not living in US we get the launches late anyways. We still go to movies together. I don't think any of us would pay $50 for early release of some movie. There are so many unseen mevies anyway that are out in netflix or other services. I've noticed the same abotut games. All the new big ones are just sequels to old FPSses, and so I don't buy AAA games anymore. Also I kinda missed more than 10 years of gaming when everything seemed to go 3D FPSers (I did pirate some, didn't feel like they were worth paying for), and finding the alternatives was way too hard. Now I have Steam, and Steam and multiple indie game studios have my money. I'd buy boxed copies of the games I've downloaded from steam, but can't because they aren't available. Only boxed stuff for PC I find nowdays is SIMS, latest 3D shooters, and new versions of EAs sports games. All boring as hell.
I'm not up to speed with current hipster talk. Does that mean good or bad?
Yes.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
If you want an ebook and you are not from usa, you can't buy because "It is not available in your region".
Yes, right... a digital file is not available... are they trying to kidding who?
And then they complain about people resorting to go to other sources...
Make the bloody things available worldwide!
... It'll presumably advise: "HAH! Psyche! There are no legal options! This product is not available to you foreign scum! Not even if you pay! Your only option is to continue with your criminal ways or to wait like a good 2nd class human until we feel good and ready to sell it to you."
Correlation is not causation.
Let me put it this way -
I have 3 kids and a wife. Counting myself, that means 5 people. Prices in my area run ~10 for an adult, ~8 for a child. So I'm already up to $44 just to get into the door. Then for concessions, figure about 7.50 a head, and that's being conservative. So add another $38ish, and I've already got a pretty expensive night out for the family. Since we traditionally eat out when we go to the movies, that generally adds another 40 bucks or so.
Now, I'm also a technically savvy geek, who likes his toys. I have a fairly nice home theater system. Have to watch Star Wars in style, you know.
Now let's say my tv provider was offering the same movie I'd go see in the theater as an on demand option, at the same time it's in the theater, for $50. A quick run to the store to buy some soda and microwave popcorn and order out for a pizza for dinner instead, and I've got some fairly substantial savings, can watch the movie in the comfort of my own home on my nice equipment, and I don't have to drive anywhere and deal with a crowd. I'd leap at that.
One thing that the MAFIAA has right about "stealing profits"
Money is a finite resource, and you can only spend so much of it before you're broke.
So in a sense, when you pirate something instead of buying it, you are getting your cake for free, and money you could have spent on the media you "stole" instead goes to someone else. Whereas if you didn't pirate, you'd have to make a choice as to where you spend your finite money. Everyone having goods or services to sell you is competing for your money, and if you pirate something instead of paying for it, you cheat the producer out of his chance to win your dollars by satisfying you as a customer. In that sense, it's just like shoplifting. The common factor isn't deprivation of physical goods, but in cheating the producer out of compensation they are due for providing the good or service.
Don't get me wrong, the MAFIAA is a pack of greedy fucks. And everyone knows that marginal costs should reduce to zero becuase media is so cheap to reproduce, so I would very much like capitalism to flush out the rent seeking and economic profits.
They are however right that pirating deprives them of money that went to someone else when you still get your cake and eat it too, because the money you could have spent on their goods instead goes to someone else.
If you think media is overpriced for its quality, don't buy it. Boycott it. Making sacrifices because of a finite budget is just part of being a consumer, and providers of goods and services have to fight over your spending dollars just like everything else.
In one sense, piracy is not theft, because you're not taking anything physical. However, as far as cheating the producer out of compensation, it's no different from shoplifting. If it's valuable enough to pirate, it's valuable enough to pay for. If we don't like the price, we simply do without and hope that the producer plays ball and lowers the price.
How low they can go before they quit selling? Depends on how much it costs them to produce it. The free market can sort it out.
So when I'm downloading the latest episode of some tv-show, I'll get a popup that tells me where to buy this episode? Nice! I'd love to pay for the shows I love but have been unable to find places where I can buy the episodes as they air... For this popup system to make sense, there must be a legal alternative to all illegal downloads, and I haven't been able to find one so it'll be nice with a pointer...
But then... I doubt it. It'll probably be a box saying: "You are downloading material illegally. This material is as yet unavailable legally so you'll just have to do without until further notice. Too bad - but life is hard and then you die. Have a nice day."
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
The blame lies on the record companies.
However, the musicians who sell their souls to them aren't completely blameless.
Artists need to be braver about reaching out to their fans, and need to start filing anti-trust lawsuits against record companies who sabotage indie marketing.
If the copyright expires, it's no longer infringement or circumvention.
And returning copyright to sane terms won't help. SCOTUS just proved it's possible to retroactively take stuff out of the public domain even after its copyright expired.
Just about all the content that you receive through a web browser is copyrighted material. The distinction is that you have license to receive and view it. What mechanism is Comcast going to use to determine whether or not you have proper license to view the material? Oh yeah - none.
Valid argument. One problem: people (common people that aren't your regular slashdot user) are already paying for the content. So, to reduce prices/increase quality (I'm more willing to pay for FLACs), we would have to convince the regular music buyer that doesn't really care about the things I care because they find that the offerings are cheap enough for them and good enough for them.
In my case, I try to buy as much as I can. Which is little, but I try to. My steam account usually grows during holiday/sales seasons because I buy things I've been waiting to buy for a long time and they are finally at a price I can justify spending on my budget (which is admittedly pretty much non-existent). I don't remember the last time I obtained music from bandcamp that wasn't either free or I paid for it (and some of the music I want to pay for I'm willing to spend twice the minimum price). But there are things I am not going to pay for that I may get from other sources. They mostly fall into the category of: I should play/listen/see this to grow in what I consider is culture of the medium (kind of like never playing half-life, or doom1/2; or never listening to the beatles or some other important musician) and this is slowly reducing itself thanks to offering like spotify (which let me listen to some things I won't pay for but want to listen to, or can't pay for but want to listen to).
Books are the lucky medium, I suppose. I have a high tendency to buy one of those, and I barely ever obtain through other methods a book/book series.
I don't care if I'm wrong. I only care about everyone obtaining something from the discussion.
With a government, they will get the government's army of men with guns and cages to lock you in to do it.
Without a government, they will be able to get their own army of men with guns and cages to lock you in.
Hipster? You're a few decades out of date with popular culture too.
Why?
Therefore there's the ABILITY to vote them out.
There is no possibility to do so for a corporation.
I hope this includes a feedback system:
"Hi, we notice you are pirating Song Foo from artist Bar. This song is not legally available in your region. Would you like to notify the publisher of this fact?"
Here's to hoping. It would quickly flood the publisher with these messages ;)
Comcast is an ISP not a fucking nanny
So Comcast; what does your filter suggest when there is no legal option. See: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
K Man
Musician here. Spot on, at least as to the record labels having historically horribly abused & cheated the artists.
To get some idea how this works and how bad it typically is for the majority of artists who are, or are trying to become, "signed" with a label, check out this piece by Steve Albini on negativeland.com
"This oft-referenced article is from the early â(TM)90s, and originally appeared in Maximum Rock ânâ(TM) Roll magazine. While some of the information and figures listed here are dated, it is still a useful and informative article."
http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17.
One of the record labels' top priorities is controlling the means of distribution. That's the actual, underlying reason they are pushing DRM and copyright-related laws/regulations, particularly those that involve the internet and digital (copyable) media formats, streaming, etc. It's aimed ultimately at erecting barriers to entry for independent artists in both marketing & distribution channels using the internet as a vehicle.
Once it becomes commonplace for artists in the top-100 to be independents without a mainstream "label" contract, the old recording labels and their associated parasites will be truly doomed. They know this. That's the reason for the war on sharing, various forms of independent distribution/marketing channels, and internet radio.
Want to support artists? Go to shows. Buy CDs & merch. Share their music with those who haven't heard of them. Encourage those friends to do the same. Tell the bar/club/venue owner when you like the band, and that you'd come back and bring friends when they play there next time.
There are tons of amazingly-talented and hard-working artists & bands playing in bars/clubs/festivals/etc all over. Simply not buying cookie-cutter record-label music is not enough. You need to support the bands and artists you would rather see take their place.
Keep in mind that even the members in most above-average-talent bar/club bands could make more money working part-time at McD's or Walmart. A modest-but-decent used bar-gigging-quality guitar can easily cost over $500. Used modest-but-decent amp easily over $1,000. Let's not even talk drum sets.
That's also not counting the PA and lights that many small/medium bars/clubs do not provide, and then a vehicle/trailer to haul all that crap around with and all the costs associated with that.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
See, if they're looking at everything for content, they lose some of their common carrier provisions.
If they're looking at what's in your traffic, then they will also need to be looking for child pornography, drug deals, terrorism, cyberbullying, and everything else. They won't be able to claim that they're just a network connection and not responsible for what's going over it. They will, in fact, become responsible for what goes over the wire for everything.
Of course, the main problem I have with this is that the entire world seems to have become subservient to copyright law. The asshats in the MPAA et all won't be happy until we can't do anything with technology without their permission, and making sure they get paid for it.
This is just more in the slow decline to where corporations run the world, and we're just there to do the manual labor and give them money.
FTW, let's go all "Tyler Durden" on them. Corporations have just become rent-seeking douchebags who tell the government what to do (like extending copyright to obscene periods on works they nicked from the public domain) -- and I'm pretty sure none of us got to vote for them.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
This exactly. In fact, payola was going on before the corporations took over the radio stations, although there were still independent hold outs until the late 90s. MTV, back when it played music in the early 80s, was the source for the major renaissance and new music, because all the owned, err, signed bands wouldn't send videos, and the ones that did were all relative unknowns, exposing the public to an entire wave of new artists. The early 80s were good, then MTV started showing game shows and corporations took over again. I was hopeful that the internet would break the hold corporations had on music, but apparently they've managed to Disneyfy the entire industry with the aforementioned crap.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
The distribution industry relied on record sales, not the artists. They relied on ticket sales and ACAP royalties, with a few select exceptions.
Being able to create new labels at will doesn't do much for you - you have to have connections to get into the distribution channel, one that has been owned and crapped away by what's now the big 4, IIRC.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Dude. You just got old.
That may be true, but THIS generation, music has gotten OBJECTIVELY worse. And that's not even touching the whole subject of no-talent autotune jockeys.
harumph!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
And this what I think, when I think of their 'help'.
I am John Hurt.
Black Sabbath Just go back together and released a new album with all original content. Oh, it sounds sick too
Black Sabbath was big in the seventies. Those guys must be in their sixties. Maybe you can plug new albums from Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, and Aerosmith while you're at it.
Where's the music from your generation?
Wow, this came out of nowhere.
I think this is a good thing... it's much better, at least, than "6 strikes".
Am I insane? An MPAA shill?
Neither. Well, definitely not the latter and I don't think I'm the former, either. Let me explain.
Although they're saying this isn't a replacement for "6 strikes", it is. Because this warning would presumably pop up before you downloaded the infringing content, so you would choose not to do it, meaning you'll never accrue any strikes. Now, I'm assuming this popup will come up in exactly the same circumstances that you'd get tagged with a strike, which effectively makes this a "strike alert". Sure the popup will point you to legal avenues, but its real value is in pointing out when you're downloading infringing content in a way that will be visible to Comcast.
The obvious solution for pirates: If you get a popup, find another source that doesn't trigger the popup, and download it from there. Find a sharing site that uses SSL, or use an SSL proxy, or TOR, or... whatever. Some mechanism that isn't or can't be monitored by Comcast, and is therefore safe from strikes.
Effectively, this allows Comcast to placate the content industry, "See, look how hard we're working to protect your content!", while at the same time removing the risk that they'll have to cut off paying customers who accumulate too many strikes.
As for the "Oh, noes, they're watching my connection!" bit, meh. They can do that all they want without notifying people with a popup. In my opinion as a professional security engineer, that's another GOOD thing about this. It will occasionally remind people that anything you do online that isn't encrypted is visible to your ISP and to whoever else happens to lie upon the path between your browser and the endpoint. It doesn't decrease security or privacy, it reminds you that you are operating in a context where you don't have much, if any, security or privacy. Knowing is better than not knowing.
So... yay for Comcast! I hope all the other ISPs jump on board.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Well, I think people like The Piano Guys (on YouTube) and Tiffany Alvord(on YouTube) and numerous others that have followed suit would beg to differ. They all do quite well - and probably better than they would through RIAA.
And in the case of the two mentioned above - both do versions of existing music (thus existing artists/authors get paid), as well as their own original music; and quite honestly, their stuff is usually a lot better than the Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Justin Bieber stuffs out there.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
So what happens when you're not actually breaking the law at all and you keep getting popups on unrelated sites (including potentially work related sites) claiming you're a crook?
What happens if you're trying to debug the HTML in a website and you can't because they keep injecting crap that isn't actually there into your browser?
Do I get to force a pop-up onto their CEO's browser that says quit falsely accusing me of a crime? Quit snooping on me? Quit making people think it's me and my website behaving like a flaming ass?
Pop music has always been shit.
Safety Dance, Walk Like An Egyptian, And I Ran, Der Kommisar. The 80s were shit. MTV was shit.
I have shelled out ~$140 to legally watch the first few seasons of a Showtime series which is currently in its last season. I would *gladly* pay to legally obtain access to the current season. Unfortunately, it is not available for me to do so. Therefore, I have to comb the internet every single week to find the new episode. This is becoming more and more time consuming and complex.
I'm curious about where the link to the legally available episode would point to? I assume that it would point to Showtime.com where I would be advised to contact my local cable company to purchase service and subsequently subscribe to Showtime. Suddenly legally purchasing one episode of a tv show becomes a several-hundred-dollar affair.
This seems wrong. Having cut the cable several years ago, this is the kind of punishment that I have been subject to repeatedly.
"Sick" has been used in popular culture since at least the early 90s (I think 80s too). Popular portrayals of skaters, punks, metalheads, stoners, etc. Not a new thing with the current concept of what a hipster is today (nor really were the aforementioned ever considered hipster types in the heights of their respective popularities).
Dude, Love Steve Albini. Big Black is one my favorite bands of all time. =)
Be seeing you...
I prefer Solid Rock.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Now let's say my tv provider was offering the same movie I'd go see in the theater as an on demand option, at the same time it's in the theater, for $50.....and I've got some fairly substantial savings, can watch the movie in the comfort of my own home on my nice equipment, and I don't have to drive anywhere and deal with a crowd. I'd leap at that.
May as well capture the A/V signal (if you can) and burn it on a DVD to watch again later until the OFFICIAL DVD comes out (if you want to buy it).
Then there is/should be increased safety so you don't wind up dead/injured like these unfortunate souls....
This incident was the last straw for me...I'll wait for the DVD of a movie I want to see come out then I'll buy it and watch it in relative safety at my place of residence.
It's a shame that human life on planet Earth has gotten so cheap that people COMMIT and subsequently other people become somewhat desensitized to random acts of mass violence that occur all over the globe....
Your ISP either screwed up somewhere, someone there (or elsewhere) 'had it in for you' to get you in trouble, or your PC had bittorrent-style malware on it and dl/ed the movie behind your back without your knowledge or consent. In the court of law, money, not facts or justice, talk the loudest and sways decisions against those who don't have the finances to defend themselves properly. It shouldn't be this way but that's how it usually is....