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Hollywood Wants Hosting Providers To Block Referral Traffic From Pirate Sites (torrentfreak.com)
The US Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator is working hard to update his copyright enforcement plans. In a written submission, Hollywood's MPAA shared a few notable ideas. The group calls for more cooperation from Internet services, including hosting providers, who should filter infringing content and block referral traffic from pirate sites, among other things. From a report: Besides processing takedown notices and terminating repeat infringers, as they are required to do by law, the MPAA also wants hosting companies to use automated piracy filters on their servers. "Hosting providers should filter using automated content recognition technology; forward DMCA notices to users, terminate repeat infringers after receipt of a reasonable number of notices, and prevent re-registration by terminated users," the MPAA suggests.
In addition, hosting providers should not challenge suspension court orders, when copyright holders go up against pirate sites. Going a step further, hosts should keep an eye on high traffic volumes which may be infringing, and ban referral traffic from pirate sites outright. The MPAA wants these companies to "implement download bandwidth or frequency limitations to prevent high volume traffic for particular files" to "remove files expeditiously" and "block referral traffic from known piracy sites."
In addition, hosting providers should not challenge suspension court orders, when copyright holders go up against pirate sites. Going a step further, hosts should keep an eye on high traffic volumes which may be infringing, and ban referral traffic from pirate sites outright. The MPAA wants these companies to "implement download bandwidth or frequency limitations to prevent high volume traffic for particular files" to "remove files expeditiously" and "block referral traffic from known piracy sites."
And they want a pony too.
Just find the head of the MPAA and shoot him in the head. Repeat until they disband.
Try the "Earned" column, see what you can still find there, or die
We'll see an upsurge in browser extensions which strip referrer from affected sites and life will go on.
Also pirate sites will just link to referrer-stripping services instead of direct linking. It'll just turn into a different type of whack-a-mole game.
What could also be a pirate site?
Germany to remove all talk of German history?
Spain? All that independence and Catalonia content?
France? No more funny art about funny French politicians.
A cult? Don't share copyright content related to their faith.
A faith? No blasphemy and quoting out of context.
A big US company that designs computer parts? No more importing counterfeit spare "parts" online.
A wealthy person who appeared in a newspaper a decade ago. No more investigative journalism to be hosted.
A movie studio that wants the bad reviews of its failed political script to not be found.
Anything that breaks DRM. A failed OS patch. A lock company and its new product.
Once hosting providers have to remove content for one special group, everyone will have a legal reason to remove more content.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Personally, I think the whole point is moot. We've reached the point where the powers-that-be have pretty much succeeded in disrupting The Pirate Bay off of the web. And it doesn't matter to the minority: they use Tor browser to visit the site, and once they have the magnet link, VPN to download the torrents.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTLZ5LTix3Q
Seagulls, "Finding Dory" (10 hours)
Behind some of these proposals there is an assumption: That any large and popular file on the internet is probably pirated, and should be assumed to be pirated until shown otherwise.
Do these entertainment executives believe that it is impossible for popular media to be created outside of their studios? That they and they alone have the talent and resources to make something that people want to watch?
What this boils down to is that the content industry is asking ISPs to do lots of deep analysis of their traffic. That's the problem here. ISPs should have no business looking at the data portion of packets. The proposals here are all about looking at the data portion.
Yet another argument that everything needs to be encrypted and routed to a single port. You can almost do this with sslh to de-multiplex a port, but some protocols (e.g., IMAP) don't send distinguishing headers immediately when the client connects. Of course, this doesn't stop ISPs from doing packet size and frequency analysis to determine the type of traffic through fingerprinting.
It's long enough ago that most of you younger folks have no idea. But once upon a time, Sony was the premier name in home audio. Their name became household with the Sony Walkman - a portable cassette player which solved the biggest problem with portable cassette players - maintaining playback speed when shaken. If you took a cassette player jogging, the tape motor would speed up and slow down with the vibration, distorting the music. The Walkman didn't do that, and it instantly became the biggest consumer electronics hit of the decade.
So why is Sony almost absent in home audio today, aside from a few headphones? In the 1990s, music was transitioning from analog to digital. First to CDs, then to MP3s. The music industry was already horrified that they'd screwed up with CDs. They had insisted CDs hold uncompressed audio, to try to limit the amount of music it could store to 1 hour, believing people wouldn't copy them because the uncompressed audio file was so big (a CD held 650 MB, my HDD back then was about 300 MB). But storage capacities quickly caught up to, then surpassed the amount a CD held. Then in the 1990s the MP3 format (compressed audio) appeared, and companies started playing around with a portable MP3 player. MP3s were small enough you could easily exchange them over the slow Internet speeds back then (56 kbps dialup, 1.5 Mbps DSL).
Sony was of course on the forefront. A lot of new unknown companies were the first to release MP3 players, but *everyone* remembered the Sony Walkman and was waiting for the Sony MP3 player. Problem was, in 1988, Sony bought Columbia Records. In terms of revenue, it was less than 1/10th the size of Sony's home audio division. But in a classic example of the tail wagging the dog, Columbia Records insisted on and got Sony's home audio division to add crippling DRM to its MP3 player. You couldn't simply copy MP3 files to it like you could with other MP3 players. Heck, the first ones couldn't even play MP3s. You had to use some cumbersome software which would convert a physical CD to its own compressed and DRMed audio format.
Sony's MP3 player bombed. As did their mini-disc player (though that did enjoy some success in Europe). And Sony nearly vanished from the home audio scene. The music executives at Columbia Records succeeded in killing off the biggest name in home audio electronics through their intransigence.
This story isn't unique. Over and over, executives in the music and movie industries have opposed every new technology out of fear of piracy. New technologies which then went on to become their biggest revenue sources. They opposed VCRs (movies on VHS and DVDs eventually surpassed theater revenue), video rental stores (video rental revenue eventually surpassed theater revenue), iTunes (most music and movie sales are now via Internet distribution), Netflix streaming (streamed movie revenue eventually surpassed DVD sales). They're clueless, short-sighted, with overly simplistic reasoning (anything which could promote piracy = death of their industry). They have a track record of opposing and even killing off technologies (e.g. Digital Audio Tapes) which eventually made our lives so much better. Their industry would be much better off today if they'd embraced these changes instead of opposed them. Perhaps then, music distribution would be through their own platform instead of iTunes and Amazon Music, and movie streaming would predominantly be through their own company (Hulu) instead of Netflix. They're their own worst enemy.