the new program is meant to educate account holders and younger users about the perils of downloading unauthorized content
What perils? Later in the article, lawsuits are mentioned, but the whole thing is pretty vague.
Putting aside both the legality and morality, doesn't this policy seem odd? If there's nothing wrong with what people are doing, then there's no need for this at all. If people are doing something wrong, shouldn't there be legal censure, or something? Not just a warning about some mysterious "perils of downloading unauthorized content"?
What premises could you possibly have that would make the correct conclusion "warn people 5 times and then take some vague and indeterminate action"?
Since the point of all of this is to prevent evil downloading that robs these poor companies of money, I would like to see some figures relating to the amount of cash that the MPAA/RIAA spend on legislation and policy in an effort to 'save' money.
These companies are spending crazyass amounts on lawyers, lobbying, campaigns, etc. all the while mis-valuing a single download as an enormous profit loss (up to $22,000 for a single song if you believe the hype).
What I'm interested in knowing is:
(a) Does illegal file sharing of music/movies truly result in lost profits or does the exposure to said media actually drive sales?
(b) If (a) does result in a net loss, how much is it?
and the main thing:
(c) What is the amount of (b) compared to the amount of money the RIAA et al. spend on their unwinnable war against piracy? Is it profitable? Is it a wash? Or is it (my uneducated guess) negative equity resulting from a ignorant knee-jerk reaction to something they initially failed to adopt out of lack of understanding and now can't help but rail against like Cuchulain with the invulnerable tide?
Of course it's likely we'll never know, but these are the sort of questions that fascinate me. :o)
if you reference Title 17 504(c) 1 and 2 then you will see that the damages for willful infringement are up to $150,000 per work and otherwise set between $750 - $30000 per work.
These damages are 'statutory'. This means they are unrelated to the actual profits lost but rather are essentially a deterrent for others while also giving some compensation.
The perils are mainly getting sued for copyright infringement. I'm all for copyright even if the current scheme is insane.
The legal problem is that no one can tell if the content is authorized or not. Maybe it's fair use, maybe I legitimately bought it, or maybe it's similar enough to another video that the bot got confused. Sending a warning is just a way to sidestep the judicial oversight that a legitimate legal action would entail.
I think the way this works in practise is not that it's monitored by ISPs at the source but rather it's monitored at the other end of the connection.
What happens is that the copyright holder, or some company working on their behalf goes and connects to a torrent swarm.
Once they are connected to the swarm , they download the file in order to verify that it is in fact copyrighted material. At that point they can log any attempts by other peers to connect to them and download material from them since the clients have no real way of telling who is a normal peer and who is involved in monitoring.
They get a big list of IP addresses and times, from the IP they can figure out who the ISP is. They can then ask the ISP to release records for which subscriber was assigned that particular IP address at that time and bingo they have found the infringer.
- I believe there's some sort of issue with the approach where they log people who download from them, because if you download a copyrighted file being willfully shared by the copyright holder you haven't infringed.
- I once downloaded one song from a "500 greatest hits" type torrent. Some time later, my university sent me a notice that they'd received a complaint that I'd illegally downloaded Hotel California (I hadn't). Hotel California wasn't even adjacent in the torrent to the song I did download; there were never any attempts to get all or part of it. So the detection system (at that time, at least) would seem to leave something to be desired.
I'd be amazed if #1 washed in court. By connecting to a swarm that is distributing copyrighted works without the copyright holder's consent you've demonstrated that you have intent to pirate the material. Besides even if you argued that you got a few chunks of the file from the copyright holder (or a party acting on their behalf) you will have downloaded other chunks from others (and possibly uploaded some of them back to the rights holder).
#2 I'd put down to a random bureaucratic fuckup rather than an inherent issue with the detection system. I know a couple of people who've had letters from their ISPs regards these activities and they have said that they were accurate.
I've been wondering how they would tell if it was legitimate as well. There are some easy checks that would indicate that it was coming from a legal source like the site it's coming from, but what if I'm downloading from my dropbox account or from a remote backup. How is legitimacy determined then. Do I just get a strike for completely legal activity.
In general, Hollywood movies are not legitimately available over any P2P system. P2P monitoring companies can't see your Dropbox, so that's not a concern. Also, you can challenge strikes if you think they're in error.
You can challenge strikes by paying $35 and you can only challenge one strike for "you misidentified me, you muppets" (even if the "independent board" finds in your favor!!)
Seems about as fair as we'd expect from the MAFIAA to me.
Actually ISPs won't be scanning for this. Even if they wanted to (which they don't), they don't have the databases of content to match traffic against. They wait for content owners to complain about a specific IP address, and the ISP delivers the complaint to the person behind that address. The identity of the user is pretty much never revealed to the content owner unless they get a court order.
I don't get it... why do the ISPs even bother opting in? Isn't it just time and money spent on basically making their customers angry, and for what benefit on their part? Why spend money on something that provides no obvious benefit, and many negatives, to the company?
I know some ISPs are also content providers, so I get that one. But what about the rest?
Bit-torrented videos probably constitute a significant fraction of their bandwidth. If this is cut down significantly, their equipment costs will be less, possibly with added revenue as well. If they accidentally happen to flag Netflix videos, then pass the popcorn. (I wouldn't be surprised if class action lawyers are already gearing up).
Their equipment costs would be less, but their income would be way less. The only reason I pay for the channel as wide as I have is to be able to stream video, download stuff, etc. For reading email and commenting on HN, I'd be good with fraction of that bandwidth. In my book, trying to have the customers to reduce the consumption of goods they are selling is insane, but then again, in copyright world sanity is an obstacle, not a requirement.
The problem is legit video offering sucks. It is loaded with thousand of DRM hoops and constantly plagued by turf wars between content providers and delivery, so any given moment any content you enjoy can be gone because two suits somewhere couldn't agree about some royalty payment.
If they ever took their collective heads out of their collective asses and offered me a convenient DRM-less subscription service that would enable me to enjoy my favorite shows and movies online without enduring inconveniences that makes one think it was designed by TSA - I'd be super-happy to use that and give my money to them. But the aren't doing it! Instead, they pump money into stupid anti-piracy schemes and starting a war on their own clients.
The ISPs are sick of having to deal with all these (expensive) subpoenas, and they'd rather have copyright holders foot part of the bill for implementing this "six-strike" system. Simple cost-benefit: the ISPs are going to save money in the long run if the media companies aren't breathing their neck.
This could be a used as a bargaining chip in order to get cheaper content. So Verizon, for example, might say if you don't let us broadcast this new show in our FIOS network then we'll refuse to adhere to the 6-strike rule.
Most ISPs don't like torrent-traffic (or traffic at all) because it costs them money for every single packet that gets transmitted. Torrent tends to end up sending a lot of small packets which costs the ISP more than if you would have downloaded the files from a single server.
Plus customers flooding the network with tons of packets also means slower internet for others.
That and the content provider thing are the main reasons some ISPs are already sending letters to heavy-torrenting users todays.
They are offered guaranteed immunity in return. As a business, this kind of (my qualification to same: short term, narrow scope, and coerced) risk reduction can be hard to pass up. As a publicly traded business, you might even be sued by your shareholders for passing it up.
P.S. As others have pointed out, where they are also large scale content owners, it may reflect overlapping interests rather than coercion.
They already have immunity from their customer's actions. Taking that away and then offering it back conditionally seems more like a threat than an incentive.
Probably because these companies are also selling content right now, and these are the same type of companies that were throttling torrents not too long ago. This is an excuse for them to start banning such customers from their service.
One issue I see with this, is mobile ISP's could, or will abuse it.
Last year, I got a phone call and e-mail from AT&T stating that if I didn't stop using my phone for tethering, I would be automatically "upgraded" to a DataPro 4GB data plan, which would override my "unlimited data" plan.
The issue with this is, I was using my Android phone as a hotspot, and I was using it to watch videos from MSDN for work purposes because funny enough, AT&T's 3G network was faster than my work internet connection.
My concern is, with phones and tablets blurring a line between mobile computers and desktop computers (with docks included), if the next phone I get in a few years comes with the ability to dock my phone to use a full desktop, is that going to count as tethering? Is "desktop mode" data plan going to be different than a "mobile mode" data plan? Will I be forced to finally give up my "unlimited data" plan on my phone?
AT&T has tried numerous times to get rid of my data plan, and I know one of these days I'm going to get a bill and it's going to be gone, and I'll call AT&T and ask what is going on and they will just say "We don't offer that plan anymore, so you were moved to the most appropriate plan" just like they tried to do years ago.
I could see since I am a "unlimited data" plan user, they could implement this six strikes plan, and use it any chance they can find until the inevitable happens.
"if the next phone I get in a few years comes with the ability to dock my phone to use a full desktop, is that going to count as tethering?"
unless something changes, i have no doubt it will. i have an atrix phone on at&t, it has a 'lapdock' which turns the phone into a netbook. this lapdock is nothing more than an hdmi screen, battery, and usb mouse/keyboard - yet, at&t requires tethering to use mobile data with it...
thankfully, this can be got around by installing a custom rom that doesnt include the lapdock software (which is horribly cumbersome anyway), but it sets a rather disturbing precedent.
How about using DLNA to broadcast to a larger screen and a bluetooth keyboard for input when you chmod into Ubuntu on your Android phone? That's a reality right now even if it's not a popular choice. The smartphone data plans are ridiculously different from the laptop data plans, but... what if they're the same thing?
Isn't that essentially what the dock would provide?
I don't have an android phone anymore, but the only way I could imagine AT&T would know I'm tethering is if Android added some header information that the network would sniff, almost like a dog tag. Or they read the user-agent headers per request and saw that it was a non-mobile browser making the requests...I would think that booting into Ubuntu would show the same results unless your spoof your user-agent, but then you might end up getting the mobile version of the site instead of the full desktop version...it's all just a big mess.
If anyone knows how AT&T or other mobile ISP's would differentiate mobile traffic from tethered traffic, I would love to know.
Also, I did have to unlock my device and put a new ROM on my phone to enable tethering.
The TTL on tethered packets is 1 less than on packets originating from the phone. That's the easiest way, and one that most tethering solutions don't fix.
I fully understand that, and I complied with them without question. I'm concerned that eventually, especially with the government support, I will be bullied out of my unlimited data plan via loopholes.
If it happens, take them to a small claims court. Show your contract. They will have no case. They can't switch you to another plan if you don't agree (well, if you keep tethering, they can).
Actually, wasn't there some kind of legal suite that just conlcuded saying the wireless companies cant do that anymore? SOmething about they cant double dip for charges. Once the consumer purchases the data, we should be able to use it how we want without additional fees and restrictions. Maybe I read that wrong..
slovette: You seem to be hellbanned but I don't see why. Anyway the pro-tethering rule only applies to a specific 4g frequency band, and only for limited data plans.
Is there US governmental oversight of this program? Or is it just a business arrangement between numerous copyright holding companies and ISPs? It looks like the latter.
After an end user has received all 6 strikes, they could be sued or the ISP could cut them off. Nothing prevents someone from being sued before completing all 6 strikes, and a user could possibly complete 6 strikes and receive no penalty.
It has been specifically designed to avoid regulation. The ISPs opt-in, there are no prescribed penalties, there are no legal notices or anything that would involve the courts.
The Obama administration did play as a "mediator", but you're right. This system is specifically designed to avoid regulation, because they know they wouldn't get that regulation. This way they can sidestep it by "partnering" with the ISP's and carriers.
I predict a huge increase in uptake on VPN services and other privacy providers.
I am seriously thinking of going full encryption for absolutely all my internet and email use. Getting so tired of "Big Brother" and his idiotic "Big Business" sidekick.
It feels weird (as a conservative leaning pseudo-libertarian) believing that Big Business is doing a far better job of screwing up the Internet than Big Brother.
The next step will be prohibiting US-based services from providing truly-encrypted communication/storage.
Big Business is rather influenced by Big Brother in this case. In much of the US the telecommunications industry receives heavy funding from local and state governments to build out their networks. There might be much more competition (or not, who knows!) if it wasn't for the regulations, subsidies, and municipal monopolies that are granted.
I'm not saying it would be better, but the telecommunications market isn't even close to a free market.
Big Business is rather influenced by Big Brother in this case.
I don't think Big Brother would be pushing so hard against copyright infringers if it weren't for Big Business lobbying, particularly Big Media. Big Brother is the accomplice, Big Media is the culprit.
If you want to threaten others, best to use and influence the entity that is "allowed" to use aggressive force. If you had to threaten internet users one-by-one with guns, you might discredit yourself. Best to use Uncle Sam.
A prediction: Members of Anonymous (or similar) will hack the home wifi of every congressman/woman related to this, and cause them to receive six "educational alerts" and then get cut off.
I don't know where things stand with this program, but back in the days when MediaDefender's email was leaked, one of those laid out a policy of not going after politicians and the like.
Remember that the big ISPs are owned by big content companies. If anything, forcing this issue on people is going to result in increased regulatory oversight, so I honestly don't see this happening.
The point is raises is important. There is no law that you have to secure your network. If someone uses your network to pirate, do you get shut down? That's like demolishing a freeway because a criminal drove down it for his getaway.
I agree that the point is important, but that problem already exists independently of this issue.
To use your analogy, the guy I was responding to was saying: "if you make a law I don't agree with, I will break it and frame innocent people. See if I care."
That's where it becomes a competition for the title.
The "trouble" with such a warning system is that at its base is he presumption of positively identifying the infringer. Sure, and ISP can say "such-and-such activity violates our ToS, and you're responsible for all traffic on your account", but identifying a particular individual's traffic (from a content-owner's perspective) seems to be difficult given the increasing frequency of IP-as-identification being tossed from U.S. courts.
So, the biggest practical question in my mind is how they plan to reconcile penalties for individual infringers against the rights of the account holder.
IIRC you're allowed to use the open Wi-Fi defense one time (i.e. you can eliminate one strike). After that you've been "educated" so you cannot claim ignorance for any later strikes.
I assume that this will be targeted at whoever pays the bill.
The problem is that a lot of people especially families etc have more than one person using the internet even if you ignore issues such as other people breaking into your network without permission.
Another problem is that bit torrent traffic is very difficult to block without effectively crippling the internet connection since modern clients seem to be clever about using encryption and trying different ports etc. I've tried blocking bittorrents on my router using it's feature for doing so, didn't work at all.
This means that you might have a family with a shared internet connection where all of the kids are given internet access because they need it for schoolwork & keeping in touch with friends etc but maybe one of them simply keeps downloading copyrighted material despite being told not to. Identifying and preventing this behaviour might prove impossible and it's likely that the entire household suffers as a result.
(Went through all this stuff 5 years ago when it was passed in France, so I already went through most of the arguments/counter arguments)
The argument is that they don't care, it is the fault of the account owner if they are not able to prevent "illegal" usage. Account owner should be able to install "something" (they were always vague) that would help him prevent people doing illegal stuff.
By something we always thought it would be allowing ISPs to do DPI or something (and you would off course have to pay for it, because it's a service they offer).
I'm not sure if DPI would help much if the torrent connections are all encrypted.
Perhaps you could do something by profiling connections, for example if a particular computer has a large amount of connections open to a large number of IP addresses.
But then again in theory you don't have to download very much to trip over this, downloading 6 separate 4MB MP3 files could do it if you are very unlucky.
The only thing I can think of would be to run everything through an HTTP proxy and then explicitly whitelist IP addresses of individual websites as and when you need them.
Of course this would break stuff like XboX games and any legitimate use of P2P networking.
So then, is imagined property set to be the basis of this century's systematic child abuse, much like religion was the last's? I suppose it's not the only similarity between the two.
I worry this is the step in between illegal downloads and making anonymity illegal. If they can flag you for downloading unpaid content, it won't be long before they flag you for circumstantial patterns leading to that behavior such as using TOR.
Try being truly anonymous on the Internet these days. It's near impossible. Most online vendors won't accept pre-paid credit cards. Many email providers require you to provide a phone number or another email address as "verification".
Even posting on forums is difficult, because while Tor is decent for fetching data, some websites blacklist Tor IP addresses (or, even if they don't, there's a chance you may be sharing an IP address with someone who was banned from a forum).
Online vendors don't accept pre-paid Visa? This is news to me. How do they even know - it's just a regular Visa card. I've used a number of such online (mostly ones I got in all kinds of promotions) and never had a problem - I didn't even think anybody could do that and I doubt Visa would allow you to do that - to reject pre-paid Visa card. Do you have any source to this claim?
While Paypal will accept it if you provide a Visa-verified billing address, not all will, and that would defeat the point of anonymity anyway.
Visa and AmEx also forbid international payments on prepaid cards, and most merchants nowadays require a verified billing address. (This wasn't the case as recently as 2009).
Remember that a prepaid card is not a credit card - there's no risk of you not paying, because they [Visa] already have your money and yet merchants refuse to take it. It's completely ridiculous.
This sounds more like a problem with the issuing banks. Is there any way for a merchant to know that a card is prepaid? If not, how would they know not to check the billing address?
(Semi-related: Do prepaid cards count as debit for purposes of the regulation on swipe fees?)
1. They're never going to roll this out and aren't actually putting any resources into it, but are simply hoping that they can stir up some news every few months as a cheap deterrent.
2. They are going to roll this out, and the primary target of it is kids downloading on their parents' connections, which would explain why they only seem to even be attempting to work with the largest ISPs. Obviously that would be ineffective at deterring anyone who pays their own ISP bill; those users could just move to a smaller provider. But if they're hoping to use parents as enforcers, it makes perfect sense.
I have the feeling this will end up very bad for Americans, much like the patent system, and then there will be a decade or more before anyone even tries to revert it.
You make it sound like this is official government policy or a law, but it's just an agreement between some private companies. Copyright holders can already can communicate with ISPs and ISPs can already shut off someone's internet.
My ISP used to forward me copyright violation notices periodically (it was my roommate's doing), and claimed they could shut off my internet after three of them. This six 'strike' policy seems lenient in comparison.
You make it sound like this is official government policy or a law, but it's just an agreement between some private companies.
Not just any private companies. These are agreements between private companies whose size and influence gives them a unique position of control over peoples' lives; such a partnership, negotiated with the involvement of the white house, might as well be official government policy or law.
I would like to hear from somebody living in a country that already has this kind of system in place. How does it work in practice? Do they catch every torrent you download for instance?
In France, "95 percent of people who have received a first-time notice of illegal sharing 'do not give rise to the need for a second notice,' that 92 percent of people who received a second notice cease illegal sharing, and that 98 percent of people who receive a third notice 'show the same trend.'" http://www.theverge.com/2012/9/11/3316158/graduated-piracy-r...
So yeah, telling people "don't get caught again" works.
Luckily there are still smaller independent internet service providers out there. A mass switch from Comcast after people discover they are being spied on might wake them up.
To who exactly? I left Comcast due to their horrible service but that meant stepping down to a 6mbps DSL line. In the evenings Netflix can't even maintain a stream.
I have a choice between two terrible providers. If you know of some amazing ISP we can all switch to, I'd love to hear it.
Pay attention. What's implemented in the U.S. will be pushed heavily by U.S. lobbyists in Ottawa next.
e.g. After the DMCA and associated acts in the U.S. were passed, U.S. lobbyists went to work in Canada. The result was a series of bills that were delayed and ultimately not passed by the recent series of minority governments. To ramp up pressure on Canada, the U.S. added Canada to it's piracy "priority watch list" along with countries like China. Piracy is practically non-existent in Canada as compared to China, but that list was never about where piracy is actually happening! Canada will likely never be taken off that list unless we completely obliterate our own film and TV industries and turn the CBC into a re-broadcaster for HBO.
Now that there's a majority government, the successor to those failed bills, Bill C-11, is now in the process of being passed. It cleared the House of Commons in June. This bill contains some truly bad legislation on digital locks. i.e. If media has a "digital lock" such as the half-assed encryption on DVD's, it is illegal to circumvent those locks even for fair-use or educational purposes. e.g. Ripping a DVD to your laptop so you can watch it on the plane without bringing along an external DVD player is now illegal because you had to use software that breaks a digital lock to do so.
It's news to me! It probably just took a backseat to SOPA/etc. and was likely tabled at that time, only to resurface now that those efforts have been unsuccessful.
What perils? Later in the article, lawsuits are mentioned, but the whole thing is pretty vague.
Putting aside both the legality and morality, doesn't this policy seem odd? If there's nothing wrong with what people are doing, then there's no need for this at all. If people are doing something wrong, shouldn't there be legal censure, or something? Not just a warning about some mysterious "perils of downloading unauthorized content"?
What premises could you possibly have that would make the correct conclusion "warn people 5 times and then take some vague and indeterminate action"?