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MPAA Wants ISPs to Disconnect Persistent Pirates (torrentfreak.com)
Ernesto Van der Sar, reporting for TorrentFreak: The MPAA wants Internet providers and services to take stronger actions against persistent copyright infringers. Ideally, the most egregious pirates should lose their accounts permanently, the group says. To accomplish this ISPs should be required to track the number of notices they receive for each account. In recent weeks, many groups and individuals have voiced their opinions about the future of the DMCA, responding to a U.S. Copyright Office consultation. This includes the MPAA, which acts on behalf of the major Hollywood studios. In a 71-page submission the group outlines many problems with the current law, asking for drastic reforms. Ideally, the group would like search engines to enforce a "stay down" policy ensuring that content can't reappear under different URLs. In addition, it would like registrars to suspend domain names of pirate sites, such as The Pirate Bay.The problem is that ISPs don't necessarily see this abuse as a problem.
This doesn't make sense. Or maybe it does. Given that having access to Internet is considered basic human right nowadays it seems kinda like a powergrab, essentially they're seeking a power to disconnect any people they want from society.
Between the incredible amounts of money they hoard and the iron fist they exert for control, the MPAA strikes me as far closer to something resembling a pirate than the loner in his basement who downloads a movie on Friday nights. Honestly, I think the MPAA should be forced to prove their victim would have bought the material otherwise, if they didn't have the opportunity to pirate it. That's the say, I don't think it's illegal to pirate a movie that's unavailable legitimately, because then there's no loss or damage that occurs, and somebody who's on minimum wage wouldn't even be worth extorting by law anyway. Between the idiotic DMCA appeals in which they steal other people's money with no obligation to return it, this stupid game of trying to blackmail ISPs, and the outright moronic way they calculate damages and laws, I regard the MPAA as far more of a villain than the end users they're targeting, and I say this as both a content creator and as someone who dislikes piracy.
The internet is regarded as a utility in some places, and it's being considered as a possibility inside the United States; would the MPAA be interested in cutting off people's phone service next? Their electricity, perhaps?
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
The problem is with your statement that piracy causes no harm. I'd suggest that the level of piracy is low enough that it doesn't cause substantial harm. It's likely that piracy converts more customers into non-customers than it turns non-customers into customers. It seems illogical that piracy would cause an increase in revenue; I think that's highly unlikely. At higher levels, piracy probably would make a significant dent in the film industry. Perhaps it already has, though I don't have the data to make that claim.
I'm not defending the MPAA's tactics, but I also think you're wrong that piracy is harmless. I think piracy would be reduced if stupid anti-piracy measures like HDCP and CCI were eliminated. Make it convenient for people not to pirate and then go after the people who are intent on breaking the law at a large scale no matter what. Also, a disproportionate amount of money is spent on the cast of films when some of that should be put toward better writing and directing. That's really lacking from modern films and increasing the quality of those aspects would probably encourage more people to be paying customers.
MPAA - Your action will lead to another company losing revenue.
Using your maths, each customer lost thanks to your rule is a multiple of the actual loss.
So, again using your rules, how about you compensate the ISP for each customer you terminate to the tune of $250,000?
I mean that is the number you use right? And it is all about lost revenue so I am sure you can appreciate the revenue the ISP has lost and want to compensate them just as you expect to be compensated for your "losses".
MPAA don't do movies, the studios do.
What MPAA do is to act like basically norton anti virus and constantly keep the studios scared of the EVIL pirates, so they can keep grabbing cash off the studios to "combat" that EVIL thing.
Basically alarmist scammers of the highest degree.
If you don't want people to torrent your stuff, STOP PRODUCING it, assholes!
See? I can be unreasonable, too.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It causes no harm, and anything that causes no harm should not be illegal. If you don't like that, please point out the error in it.
It causes no harm as long as the work has already been created.
It causes great harm if the deal between society and creators, as set out through copyright, is that the creators have to invest whatever is necessary to create a work that will benefit others, but then they have a mechanism to generate revenue in return by controlling distribution for a while. Allowing creators to create as part of this deal, but then failing to effectively enforce the copyright protections, is failing to hold up the other side of the bargain, pure and simple. The harm is then whatever it cost the creators to create and share the work in the first place plus the opportunity cost for them because they didn't invest their resources into something else useful instead.
If society feels that the current bargain is not appropriate for today's world, that's fine, it can change the laws. If society collectively wants to do away with copyright because "information wants to be free" or whatever, fine, do it. Some people will still create new content and no doubt some people will still find ways to do so commercially. But society shouldn't complain if it makes that change and then finds that, lacking the same incentive to create and share new works, hardly anyone is making big summer blockbusters or original AAA quality computer games or well-produced studio albums or high school math textbooks with thousands of carefully constructed exercises and matching answer books for teachers any more. Nor should it complain when other business models that are less reliant on simply paying for something you find valuable -- things like blatant product placement throughout TV shows and movies, or subscription-only on-line software -- become the norm, even though a lot of consumers don't like them.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
So, I buy a movie on DVD, copy it to my hard drive in violation of the license, thus piracy
Assuming you're in the United States, that's not piracy. The Betamax and the Diamond Rio cases set precedents for time and space shifting for personal use, which is what you described.
It is, however, a violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules. By making it illegal to break DRM, they made it illegal to record or copy anything that has even the most rudimentary DRM. If you circumvent the DRM on the DVD in order to copy it to your hard drive, you've violated those portions of the DMCA even though the act of copying is legal.
The MPAA isn't the judicial branch, they don't get to be a judge and jury in these cases, they are the plaintiff. Nor are they the legislative branch, if they want to write a law, they need to buy off their congressman like they always have before. And the ISP isn't a police force, they are a witness and vendor to the defendant. If the MPAA wants to enforce penalties like this, use the legal system that already exists rather than acting like the mafia and enforcing their own laws with their own judge and their own police force.
Regardless, I don't see what reason the ISPs would have to work with the MPAA, it's against their financial best interest to eliminate consumers. And it's against the better interest of society to have laws that permanently cut off individuals from the internet, this has become a basic necessity in modern life, not unlike electricity made its transition to necessity in the last century. Anyone that cannot legally use the internet would be much more likely to be unemployed, possibly homeless and a burden on the local society.
If an ISP chooses to enforce these policies, they should immediately lose any local monopoly on providing internet service, open up the area to competition, possibly municipal internet. And ISPs should become liable for denial of service for any reason that is not legally recognized and where an individual was never convicted of a crime. It would be nice if the government found a few laws that the MPAA violated just for attempting to get a policy like this through, discrimination against individuals, anti-trust, extortion, etc.
Unlike what seems like a large portion of Slashdot, I don't think there's an ethical defense for piracy.
How about piracy being an ethical offence against the industry slowly taking away your rights in the media, your product, your ability to watch something, to buy something, to have something come into public domain, rooting your computer, breaking a disc playback format, attempting to criminalise or prevent format shifting which is legal in most of the world...
The list of the ethical breaches of the movie / music industry just has no end.
I would happily pay for media, but no one seems to sell me what I want except for the pirate bay.
Pirates use the internet because it's currently the easiest way to do things.
But if it was impossible to spread "unapproved" media through the internet, people would just go back to sneaker-net.
I can buy 32 gig on portable media for under 10 bucks.
Swapping drives with just two people 5 days a week is yields a respectable 4.2 Mbps "sneaker-net a bandwidth".
You might have to wait a month for content to saturate the network, but everybody would have access to everything.
And that's close to the minimum a sneaker-net would be.
Most people have more than 2 friends they could swap with, and 128 gig drives are pretty cheap.
Things are going great, and it's only getting better - Moore's law FTW.