Please explain how the internet stops working if people stop pirating. I am not seeing the connection.
Easy: People will stop pirating only if you ban them from uploading any data at all. If you do that, internet will stop working (or it will turn into Television 2.0).
The point is that the owner of copyright should be free to dictate the terms under which others can access that content. There's no ethical or moral argument that really holds water to contradict that.
Why should he be able to do so? Is the manufacturer of furniture egligble for the same rights? If i buy a chair, should the manufacturer be able to dictate how i use it, how i resell it, whom i allow to sit on it etc? In not, why should copyright holder have those rights?
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so. How about we get congress to void all deeds (or simply not enforce them) and see what remains your property.
Well i'm all for physical property. You write your song, it's your property, you should be able to do with it as you like. But if you decide to publish it, i shoud be able to make copy of your song, which will be my own. Excatly like i'm able to copy your house to make one for myself.
If you're asking why -artifical scarcity- needs to be implimented in this scenario, I would guess that you already know the answer to that, but just for the sake of arguement, it is because of the tragedy of the commons. None of us wants to pay for music when it is freely available. I know I don't. But all of us not paying for music has long term devastating impact on the production of music as it currently exists.
This is IMO bad argument. You are mixing two independent things together - payment to the creators and distribution limitation (or artifical scarity). Yes those two thing are tied together in current copyright model but it doesn't have to be so. You can have functional legal models (mandatory culture tax or tax deductible coupons, distribute the money among creators via platforms similar to kickstarter for example) which provide payment to artists but place no restriction on distribution and don't create artifical scarity at all.
The artifical scarity is the root of problem here. People have no issue with paying for their culture, but they have a huge problem with a law that greatly pervades their privacy, their ability to build upon existing knowledge, their ability to effectively get, archive and share knowledge.
Of course it can. "The law" is not a computer program, it's interpreted by people. And the law and those people can't somehow infer that an entire medium is now illegal because someone used it to do something illegal. Movies, photos, and comics (Japanese or not) are entirely the same in this regard.
People want to pretend this is some slippery slope, but you know, it really isn't. Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
One other point: I have read the thread so far and it seems that a large portion of the people are complaining that Japanese hentai are what people get busted for. While that may be true in rare occurrences like someone sharing gigabytes of CP manga... I've worked with law enforcement on CP cases, and they really don't care that much about comics. Yes it's part of the law, but at least in the US, the FBI normally goes after the people with REAL CP and not cartoons. And even then, they go after the people with true collections and not 1-2 images in their cache that they stumbled into while searching random sites. Please link me to a news article that proves me wrong if people are getting busted for single images, since I am only an individual person and could have missed something. And before someone says "they don't report on small time CP busts," yes they do. Every time I've been involved with a CP case, the media is all over it as soon as they find out. They love to put the 'bad guy gets busted' stories in the news.
It's history repeating itself again. We saw similar nonsense when Lolita from Nabokov or Howl from Gingsberg were initialy published. How many people will need to be busted for lawmakers to get the the idea that the illegality of something must be based on it's level of social dangerousness and not on some false and ever-changing morality? The proponents of those bans often say that hentai/Howl/Lolita/whatever has no artistic value and is obscene, so it should be illegal, but who are they to judge the artistic value of something? And even if something realy has no artistic value, is it enough to justify its ilegality if it is otherwise harmless? I don't think so.
I agree with the rest of your post (creation and sharing of child porn involving real children should be prosecuted, maybe with some exceptions to cover cases like 17 years old partners e-mailing nude images of themself to each other).
As some commenters noted before me, blocking cell phone based just on its speed is stupid, there is no reason to block it for passangers in train/bus or car (if they are not driving).
Where i live, we have a ban on using a cellphone with zour hands while driving. It's ok to talk with someone using hands-free set.
I actually expected Czech Republic to do well, I know the ISPs there worked hard on it. I didn't know about Romania. Anyway...
I work for small cable ISP in Czech republic and there are IMO not many IPv6 enabled providers outside academic networks. IPv6 is well supported on backbone routers and by content providers (AFAIK Czech rep. is leading in number of web pages accessible via IPv6) but the problem with providing IPv6 for end users of commercial ISPs is security.
If you want to transparently authorise some port on layer2 switch for one of your customers, you need to make work two things:
1) you need to make sure that all dhcp requests coming from that switch port are tagged with the port identification, so you know what IP address you shoud offer. (DHCP option 82 serves this purposein IPv4 world) 2) you need to make sure that customer want steal IP address of his neighbour, so you need some kind of IP ACL support on the switch.
IPv6 standard has support for similar mechanisms but they are not implemented in any cheap metro-access L2 switch i'm aware of. Simple support of IPv6 traffic is just not enough. This is IMO the main reason why not many comercial cable ISPs supports IPv6 today.
As for my point, how will regular consumers deal with firewalling? Modern OSes have to have good firewall protection, because people take laptops to all kinds of insecure networks. Stil, I'm not sure it's a good idea to make all devices directly accessible over the internet, it's kind of like begging for a wormpocalypse. On the other hand, we have UPnP for NAT-ed IPv4, allowing applications to specifically request incoming ports. This is crucial for many applications. What should we do for v6 then? (I run without a separate firewall, even for a windows laptop, but this may not be a great idea on a large scale)
Imo the best way to handle this problem would be for ISP to set some sane default firewall for all his customers (incoming connections blocked for example) and make some nice web interface where tech-savy users could turn the firewall off or could tweak it to suit their needs.
I want to see free education thru the PhD level as some countries offer.
As a citisen of one of those countries, where education (primary, secondary and terciary) is free, I agree completely. Free education allows greater social mobility. It's one of the few options for poor families to escape their social status. We live in an era where the gap between poor and rich is widening dramaticaly, so upward social mobility is more important then ever. I don't think it's possible for everyone to get huge student loan and even if it were possible, the several years payback period is just undesirable.
It's shame that our current right-wing goverment doesn't see those arguments and under influence of libertatian ideology (less state is better) wants to go away with free terciary education.
It seems that the only value of general education courses is in making you fit in with other people who think the same. I'm yet to find anything to show otherwise. I'm serious. I'm not saying that nothing else but science should be of any interest. Quite to the contrary, I find it pleasurable to explore areas of theatre and literature that interest me. I'm not going to pretend it's of any use other than giving me the pleasure of learning it. It may perhaps improve my writing a bit, but that's not very important.
We live in a complicated age of information. Every person si constantly exposed to manipulation eforts from politicians, advertisers, entertainment producers, various churches etc.
I thing that solid general education background is more then needed if you want to resist this manipulation, if you want to make your own unbiased opinions and generaly if you want to live as full-fledged citizen and not just consumer subjected to the will of others.
Uhhhh... what is illegal porn again? Child porn involves criminal acts with a child
Unfortunately you are wrong. In most western countries, child porn involves material depicting persons who look like minors engaging in "indecent" actions. No real child needs to be involved. Erotic comix can be considered child porn. Yes, the law is stupid.
Forcing youtube to screen content could have terrible consequences for all websites that act as conduits between their users (slashdot being an example) - could Slashdot afford to pre-screen every comment here for copyright violations, libel, hate speech or other illegal acts?
As some commenters pointed out before me, prescreening content for copyright violation is IMO impossible, because the site you are posting the copyrighted content on has no knowledge if you have or have not obtained the permission to do so.
If take-down notices initiated by copyright owners are not enough then only copyright owners should be able to post things online (aka internet TV-zation).
So what? Were all in agreement it might be expensive for you tube to excersize diligence. That was the point of the story of potash fertilizer. They either have to do it or youtube needs to find a different business model. For example, youtube could profit share with the RIAA and MPAA.
Its currently imposible for youtube to classify all uploaded videos as either infringing or noninfringing. They simply don't have the knowledge of who has the necessary permissions. They coul share profit with RIAA/MPAA in exchange for the right to share their content, but there is still content owned by other parties.
So are you arguing, that there should be no sites like youtube? No cloud storages, where one could upload his data and share it with others? Are you realy arguing that only content owners should be allowed to host and serve content on the internet?
In my opinion, the best solution would be to abolish copyright (and find other ways to support creators).
With copyright, the best solution seems to be to let copyright owners to manage their content. If they see some site infringing on their copyright, they shoud sue it. They did it in case of megaupload for example. So why won't they sue and close youtube? It's a matter of PR. Suing and closing youtube would unleash big public outrage and it would reveal the incompatibility between copyright and the incoming digital age. Media companies know it. They know they are loosing but they want to profit from their dying bussiness model as long as possible. Unfortunatelly, they have money so they can lobby law makers to prolong their death for quite some time.
It's clearly ISP fault and they won't fix it by limiting traffic to netflix. People will just switch to other sources od video, like p2p.
ISP should carefully watch the total amount of bandwidth his customers are using. He should scale his infrastructure and his tarif speeds to match that traffic. He should also charge apropriate monthly fees so he can support the growth of his infrastructure (switching to fiber etc).
Well, I - and a lot of others - in turn find the publication prices of open access journals unpayable. And some people keep forgetting that if major journals - lots of which are US-based - would switch to open access publication models, the wide majority of non-US researchers would simply not be able to afford publishing in those journals
I understand that lot's of researchers rely on closed-access journal editors to edit their papers to publicable form and this editing work is not free.
But what prevents you from publishing at least raw/unedited version of the paper? My problem is, that results of research paid from tax-payers money are not available to taxpayers at all. If the funding doesn't cover editing and publications of the paper, just release the unedited results. But not releasing results at all is IMO wrong.
I would be in full support of this mandate as long as it includes a provision that all federal research funding must also pay for publishing costs.
If they don't have money to publish the paper in open-access journal, they should at last be required to release the raw unedited version of the paper they submited to the journal. There is no reason to completely withdraw all results of publicly funded research from public.
I feel for you, the current state of affairs is clearly unfair. But imo the correct solution is not for commercial software to disappear, but for copyright to disappear. Lets use tax funded grants, taxt-deductible coupons and platforms like kickstarter to raise money and distribute them between creators. There is no need for copyright, rather it makes the situation much worse and unfair.
I haven't needed to pirate anything in years, everything has a free and good-enough equivalent now. What does anyone pirate today?
Well i pirate mostly movies/TV series/manga which are not available legally in english (the only existing translation is illegal from fansubbing groups), or the version for western market is censored, or the original dub is missing, or there are commercials in the show.
You would be surprised how many works of art/entertainment are out of print, abandomed by their original authors or locked in vault by distributors. Actualy i'd argue that majority of copyrighted works are unavailable legally.
You can bet that BSA surveys are rigged to generate the highest numbers possible
Maybe you are right but i'd bet that piracy is increasing regardless of BSA. It's simply a function of ammount of available content (which is increasing over time), number of users downloading the content (which is also increasing because the total number of inet users is increasing, users are becoming more technicaly proficient in pirating content and pirating is getting easier then ever before) and failure of copyright to provide any technological mean to efficiently detect and prevent pirates activities.
IMO your system would not be accepted by any distributor. Copyright is not primaly about money, it's about control over distribution channels and it's tool for surpressing competition. Media companies would loose such control in your model. They would be not able to for example sue megaupload using copyright-based charges. They would be not able to lobby for three-strikes and similar laws. So it's not surprise to me that media distributors are not providing such service themself.
Even if your model was forced on distributors by law, it would not solve the problems we are having with copyright today. The piracy would not get away, it would rather increase, because p2p users now would be not afraid to break copyright, because it would be much harder to catch them (today, media-owners just colletct IP adresses of p2p users sharing their content, get court warant and based on it, the identity of the pirates from their ISPs and sue them. In your model, they would not be able to do it so easily, because they would be not sure if some of the IP adresses they collected aren't downloading the content legaly.)
IMO the only reasonable solution is to ditch copyright completely and introduce different system to support the creation of usefull sciences and arts, which would not limit sharing of information, invade our privacy or go against technological progress.
It's kind of nostalgia i guess. The comments value is certainly droping over time but you can discover a hidden jewell from time to time.
Fortunatelly there is google+ taking over. With a nice science circle assembled, i can get my fix of science news and comments with good information value and without the usual slashdot comment spam.
Isn't there a way on slashdot to block "funny" comments? Those years old "jokes" littering almost each science-related thread have no value at all for me.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a novel thought: if you can't pay for something that is a 100% luxury (and having your own copies of songs is exactly that), do without!
Why should i do that?
And acording to you, is it OK to pirate non-luxury intelectual property if i can't afford it (school books for example)?
(disclaimer: my opinion is that copyright is wrong and immoral and we should use other methods to compensate creators which don't limit distribution)
Please explain how the internet stops working if people stop pirating. I am not seeing the connection.
Easy: People will stop pirating only if you ban them from uploading any data at all. If you do that, internet will stop working (or it will turn into Television 2.0).
The point is that the owner of copyright should be free to dictate the terms under which others can access that content. There's no ethical or moral argument that really holds water to contradict that.
Why should he be able to do so? Is the manufacturer of furniture egligble for the same rights? If i buy a chair, should the manufacturer be able to dictate how i use it, how i resell it, whom i allow to sit on it etc? In not, why should copyright holder have those rights?
Guess what? A house is not someone's property either except for the fact that congress made it so. How about we get congress to void all deeds (or simply not enforce them) and see what remains your property.
Well i'm all for physical property. You write your song, it's your property, you should be able to do with it as you like. But if you decide to publish it, i shoud be able to make copy of your song, which will be my own. Excatly like i'm able to copy your house to make one for myself.
If you're asking why -artifical scarcity- needs to be implimented in this scenario, I would guess that you already know the answer to that, but just for the sake of arguement, it is because of the tragedy of the commons. None of us wants to pay for music when it is freely available. I know I don't. But all of us not paying for music has long term devastating impact on the production of music as it currently exists.
This is IMO bad argument. You are mixing two independent things together - payment to the creators and distribution limitation (or artifical scarity). Yes those two thing are tied together in current copyright model but it doesn't have to be so. You can have functional legal models (mandatory culture tax or tax deductible coupons, distribute the money among creators via platforms similar to kickstarter for example) which provide payment to artists but place no restriction on distribution and don't create artifical scarity at all.
The artifical scarity is the root of problem here. People have no issue with paying for their culture, but they have a huge problem with a law that greatly pervades their privacy, their ability to build upon existing knowledge, their ability to effectively get, archive and share knowledge.
Of course it can. "The law" is not a computer program, it's interpreted by people. And the law and those people can't somehow infer that an entire medium is now illegal because someone used it to do something illegal. Movies, photos, and comics (Japanese or not) are entirely the same in this regard.
People want to pretend this is some slippery slope, but you know, it really isn't. Jeez, since when did NAMBLA have such a big following on slashdot?
How can bet parent rated +4 informative? Comics or drawings of virtual (nonexistent) minors in indecent poses are clearly illegal in many western countries including USA, Sweden or Britain. Many people are prosecuted for its possesion even if no real children were harmed in its creation. See http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.175488-Hentai-Collector-Sentenced-to-Jail-Over-Obscene-Material?page=1 or http://www.animenation.net/blog/2010/08/02/sweden-fines-translator-for-having-hentai-images/ for examples.
One other point: I have read the thread so far and it seems that a large portion of the people are complaining that Japanese hentai are what people get busted for. While that may be true in rare occurrences like someone sharing gigabytes of CP manga... I've worked with law enforcement on CP cases, and they really don't care that much about comics. Yes it's part of the law, but at least in the US, the FBI normally goes after the people with REAL CP and not cartoons. And even then, they go after the people with true collections and not 1-2 images in their cache that they stumbled into while searching random sites. Please link me to a news article that proves me wrong if people are getting busted for single images, since I am only an individual person and could have missed something. And before someone says "they don't report on small time CP busts," yes they do. Every time I've been involved with a CP case, the media is all over it as soon as they find out. They love to put the 'bad guy gets busted' stories in the news.
If they don't care about comics, why are the comics illegal. There is no harm in sharing even gigabytes of hentai images and the law that allows busting people for possesing/sharing virtual child porn is clearly bad. And yes, there are people who had problems just for small amount of hentai images, see here: http://www.animenation.net/blog/2010/08/02/sweden-fines-translator-for-having-hentai-images/ (arrested for one scanlation) or here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.175488-Hentai-Collector-Sentenced-to-Jail-Over-Obscene-Material?page=1 (arrested for six books)
It's history repeating itself again. We saw similar nonsense when Lolita from Nabokov or Howl from Gingsberg were initialy published. How many people will need to be busted for lawmakers to get the the idea that the illegality of something must be based on it's level of social dangerousness and not on some false and ever-changing morality? The proponents of those bans often say that hentai/Howl/Lolita/whatever has no artistic value and is obscene, so it should be illegal, but who are they to judge the artistic value of something? And even if something realy has no artistic value, is it enough to justify its ilegality if it is otherwise harmless? I don't think so.
I agree with the rest of your post (creation and sharing of child porn involving real children should be prosecuted, maybe with some exceptions to cover cases like 17 years old partners e-mailing nude images of themself to each other).
As some commenters noted before me, blocking cell phone based just on its speed is stupid, there is no reason to block it for passangers in train/bus or car (if they are not driving).
Where i live, we have a ban on using a cellphone with zour hands while driving. It's ok to talk with someone using hands-free set.
I actually expected Czech Republic to do well, I know the ISPs there worked hard on it. I didn't know about Romania. Anyway...
I work for small cable ISP in Czech republic and there are IMO not many IPv6 enabled providers outside academic networks. IPv6 is well supported on backbone routers and by content providers (AFAIK Czech rep. is leading in number of web pages accessible via IPv6) but the problem with providing IPv6 for end users of commercial ISPs is security.
If you want to transparently authorise some port on layer2 switch for one of your customers, you need to make work two things:
1) you need to make sure that all dhcp requests coming from that switch port are tagged with the port identification, so you know what IP address you shoud offer. (DHCP option 82 serves this purposein IPv4 world)
2) you need to make sure that customer want steal IP address of his neighbour, so you need some kind of IP ACL support on the switch.
IPv6 standard has support for similar mechanisms but they are not implemented in any cheap metro-access L2 switch i'm aware of. Simple support of IPv6 traffic is just not enough. This is IMO the main reason why not many comercial cable ISPs supports IPv6 today.
As for my point, how will regular consumers deal with firewalling? Modern OSes have to have good firewall protection, because people take laptops to all kinds of insecure networks. Stil, I'm not sure it's a good idea to make all devices directly accessible over the internet, it's kind of like begging for a wormpocalypse. On the other hand, we have UPnP for NAT-ed IPv4, allowing applications to specifically request incoming ports. This is crucial for many applications. What should we do for v6 then? (I run without a separate firewall, even for a windows laptop, but this may not be a great idea on a large scale)
Imo the best way to handle this problem would be for ISP to set some sane default firewall for all his customers (incoming connections blocked for example) and make some nice web interface where tech-savy users could turn the firewall off or could tweak it to suit their needs.
I want to see free education thru the PhD level as some countries offer.
As a citisen of one of those countries, where education (primary, secondary and terciary) is free, I agree completely. Free education allows greater social mobility. It's one of the few options for poor families to escape their social status. We live in an era where the gap between poor and rich is widening dramaticaly, so upward social mobility is more important then ever. I don't think it's possible for everyone to get huge student loan and even if it were possible, the several years payback period is just undesirable.
It's shame that our current right-wing goverment doesn't see those arguments and under influence of libertatian ideology (less state is better) wants to go away with free terciary education.
It seems that the only value of general education courses is in making you fit in with other people who think the same. I'm yet to find anything to show otherwise. I'm serious. I'm not saying that nothing else but science should be of any interest. Quite to the contrary, I find it pleasurable to explore areas of theatre and literature that interest me. I'm not going to pretend it's of any use other than giving me the pleasure of learning it. It may perhaps improve my writing a bit, but that's not very important.
We live in a complicated age of information. Every person si constantly exposed to manipulation eforts from politicians, advertisers, entertainment producers, various churches etc.
I thing that solid general education background is more then needed if you want to resist this manipulation, if you want to make your own unbiased opinions and generaly if you want to live as full-fledged citizen and not just consumer subjected to the will of others.
Uhhhh... what is illegal porn again? Child porn involves criminal acts with a child
Unfortunately you are wrong. In most western countries, child porn involves material depicting persons who look like minors engaging in "indecent" actions.
No real child needs to be involved. Erotic comix can be considered child porn. Yes, the law is stupid.
Forcing youtube to screen content could have terrible consequences for all websites that act as conduits between their users (slashdot being an example) - could Slashdot afford to pre-screen every comment here for copyright violations, libel, hate speech or other illegal acts?
As some commenters pointed out before me, prescreening content for copyright violation is IMO impossible, because the site you are posting the copyrighted content on has no knowledge if you have or have not obtained the permission to do so.
If take-down notices initiated by copyright owners are not enough then only copyright owners should be able to post things online (aka internet TV-zation).
Or we could abolish copyright...
So what? Were all in agreement it might be expensive for you tube to excersize diligence. That was the point of the story of potash fertilizer. They either have to do it or youtube needs to find a different business model. For example, youtube could profit share with the RIAA and MPAA.
Its currently imposible for youtube to classify all uploaded videos as either infringing or noninfringing. They simply don't have the knowledge of who has the necessary permissions. They coul share profit with RIAA/MPAA in exchange for the right to share their content, but there is still content owned by other parties.
So are you arguing, that there should be no sites like youtube? No cloud storages, where one could upload his data and share it with others? Are you realy arguing that only content owners should be allowed to host and serve content on the internet?
In my opinion, the best solution would be to abolish copyright (and find other ways to support creators).
With copyright, the best solution seems to be to let copyright owners to manage their content. If they see some site infringing on their copyright, they shoud sue it. They did it in case of megaupload for example. So why won't they sue and close youtube? It's a matter of PR. Suing and closing youtube would unleash big public outrage and it would reveal the incompatibility between copyright and the incoming digital age. Media companies know it. They know they are loosing but they want to profit from their dying bussiness model as long as possible. Unfortunatelly, they have money so they can lobby law makers to prolong their death for quite some time.
It's clearly ISP fault and they won't fix it by limiting traffic to netflix. People will just switch to other sources od video, like p2p.
ISP should carefully watch the total amount of bandwidth his customers are using. He should scale his infrastructure and his tarif speeds to match that traffic. He should also charge apropriate monthly fees so he can support the growth of his infrastructure (switching to fiber etc).
Well, I - and a lot of others - in turn find the publication prices of open access journals unpayable. And some people keep forgetting that if major journals - lots of which are US-based - would switch to open access publication models, the wide majority of non-US researchers would simply not be able to afford publishing in those journals
I understand that lot's of researchers rely on closed-access journal editors to edit their papers to publicable form and this editing work is not free.
But what prevents you from publishing at least raw/unedited version of the paper? My problem is, that results of research paid from tax-payers money are not available to taxpayers at all. If the funding doesn't cover editing and publications of the paper, just release the unedited results. But not releasing results at all is IMO wrong.
I would be in full support of this mandate as long as it includes a provision that all federal research funding must also pay for publishing costs.
If they don't have money to publish the paper in open-access journal, they should at last be required to release the raw unedited version of the paper they submited to the journal. There is no reason to completely withdraw all results of publicly funded research from public.
I feel for you, the current state of affairs is clearly unfair. But imo the correct solution is not for commercial software to disappear, but for copyright to disappear. Lets use tax funded grants, taxt-deductible coupons and platforms like kickstarter to raise money and distribute them between creators. There is no need for copyright, rather it makes the situation much worse and unfair.
I haven't needed to pirate anything in years, everything has a free and good-enough equivalent now. What does anyone pirate today?
Well i pirate mostly movies/TV series/manga which are not available legally in english (the only existing translation is illegal from fansubbing groups), or the version for western market is censored, or the original dub is missing, or there are commercials in the show.
You would be surprised how many works of art/entertainment are out of print, abandomed by their original authors or locked in vault by distributors. Actualy i'd argue that majority of copyrighted works are unavailable legally.
You can bet that BSA surveys are rigged to generate the highest numbers possible
Maybe you are right but i'd bet that piracy is increasing regardless of BSA. It's simply a function of ammount of available content (which is increasing over time), number of users downloading the content (which is also increasing because the total number of inet users is increasing, users are becoming more technicaly proficient in pirating content and pirating is getting easier then ever before) and failure of copyright to provide any technological mean to efficiently detect and prevent pirates activities.
Isn't that right. If the majority of the population breaks the law, there is a problem with the law.
Well this is not necessarily always true. Consider traffic laws. Most people break them occasionaly but that doesn't mean there is problem with them.
But in a case of copyright, i indeed agree that it is broken horribly:)
IMO your system would not be accepted by any distributor. Copyright is not primaly about money, it's about control over distribution channels and it's tool for surpressing competition. Media companies would loose such control in your model. They would be not able to for example sue megaupload using copyright-based charges. They would be not able to lobby for three-strikes and similar laws. So it's not surprise to me that media distributors are not providing such service themself.
Even if your model was forced on distributors by law, it would not solve the problems we are having with copyright today. The piracy would not get away, it would rather increase, because p2p users now would be not afraid to break copyright, because it would be much harder to catch them (today, media-owners just colletct IP adresses of p2p users sharing their content, get court warant and based on it, the identity of the pirates from their ISPs and sue them. In your model, they would not be able to do it so easily, because they would be not sure if some of the IP adresses they collected aren't downloading the content legaly.)
IMO the only reasonable solution is to ditch copyright completely and introduce different system to support the creation of usefull sciences and arts, which would not limit sharing of information, invade our privacy or go against technological progress.
It's kind of nostalgia i guess. The comments value is certainly droping over time but you can discover a hidden jewell from time to time.
Fortunatelly there is google+ taking over. With a nice science circle assembled, i can get my fix of science news and comments with good information value and without the usual slashdot comment spam.
Isn't there a way on slashdot to block "funny" comments? Those years old "jokes" littering almost each science-related thread have no value at all for me.