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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"
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"
Internet
Service
Provider.
Just forward the damn packets and take my money.
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.
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.
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"
As measured by a proprietary algorithm with no human review of its calculation or of fair use -- you will be judged.
Sorry, but your own link contradicts your statement.
Please cite for us one (and preferably more) cases where someone was sued and received a judgement against in a court of law for DOWNLOADING a file.
Your own link says:
"Most downloading over the Internet of commercially available copyrighted works, such as music or movies, through file sharing systems is illegal. In a widely followed case, a federal Court of Appeals held that users of Napster were infringing copyright when they shared MP3 files of copyrighted music."
As far as I am aware, every single case that has ever existed has hinged on the act of distribution. That is, uploading the file. People have found themselves in hot water because they downloaded content and left it in an accessible folder that is shared back to the other users, publically, of the download program - like Napster or used bittorrent, where you usually have to also upload content back (though you are of course only ever uploading small snippets and never an actual entire file).
Yes, people go around saying "oh noes, downloading a copyrighted file is infringement and somehow now days an instance of copyright infringement is a criminal offense punishable by a decade in prison or forfeiting your life into indentured servitude!", but the fact is (last I checked and I would be glad to know if this has since changed in the States if someone knows of legitimate examples) it is only uploaders/distributors of said content that are cornered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It looks like you are trying to pirate a movie. Would you like help?
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.
... 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...
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.
I was there. The term "corporate rock" was invented in the 1980s for a reason.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
*What* smaller more nimble ISPs? I haven't seen any of those in like 10 years. They still exist? I'd love to get off Verizon internet, but our only other choice is Charter, which is even frelling worse. Yes, we're barraged with "better" offers every day... from Charter...