ISPs to start policing copyright by July 12
news.cnet.com
news.cnet.com
1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive. You have to design algorithms to detect infringement and you have to implement them in a way that can keep up with a respectable portion of your backbone bandwidth without significantly degrading performance for consumers.
2) File sharing protocols can adapt rapidly and will most likely make more and more extensive use of encryption. Distinguishing legal file sharing from illegal file sharing will only get more and more difficult. Even if there remain ways to detect infringement, this arms race with file-sharers will feed back into 1 in a big way.
3) As Neil Young famously put it, "Piracy is the new radio". Those who adapt to the "new radio" first will reap the rewards. Those who spend massive amounts of cash fighting the inevitable progress of technology will just fall behind.
What should these dinosaurs do if they want to stay competitive? Stop treating users of the "new radio" like criminals and win them over by providing a superior experience to what the pirates can deliver. e.g. Stop loading DVD's and bluray's up with annoying advertisements, anti-piracy messages, and warnings. Online stores shouldn't sell 720p videos or lossy music files when pirates are giving away 1080p videos and lossless audio for free. Above all, minimize the payment barrier. Make it cheap enough to feel like value is high and make it at least as easy and fast as pirating. In short, stop spending money to treat your customers like criminals and, instead, spend it to ensure that legal purchases are the path of least resistance to the highest quality experience.
People who torrent 24/7 just because they can are also resource intensive. I think there might be a real incentive to kick Joe Leecher out of one's customer base and keep people who only check their email.
So there's still incentive to make P2P seems a possibility.
⁕ only 0.0001% guaranteed
I can get charter business @~$200 a month which is 100mbit service (no download cap, guaranteed uptime). Are you on some sort of comcast business plan?
to who? seems the best deal ever regarding cost/benefit for the RIAA members.
VC: So what do you need this money for? Are you gonna improve your UX and distribution?
Startup: Oh no, we're just gonna use the UX and distribution our users hate. We need the money to lobby congress to pass laws that punish users who use competing products that do have better UX and distribution.
If you ever convince a VC with a pitch like that. Then you can say it's the best deal ever regarding cost/benefit for the RIAA. ;)
I live in San Francisco and chose Sonic.net because they don't cap or do any kind of traffic shaping. I did take a hit in my speed (from 20mb to 10mb), but their service is top notch and I feel good about where I put my money every month. Sonic's also been doing a fiber rollout in some areas north of SF and in one section of the city.
I won't ever go back to Comcast. I'm interested to see how this will affect people. Will there be an exodus from these guys for other ISPs that don't cap or police the line?
What kind of traffic inspection are these ISPs doing that would enable them to identify infringement as it's happening?
How do they know what rights the people involved have to say that a specific download is infringing or not?
Speaking of the general public, how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not?
Sorry, tptacek, but this is 100% related. If you, or anyone on HN, is concerned about ISPs being able to sniff the intent/payload of your traffic, then you're fucking stupid.
Why? Because the NSA has been doing it for YEARS. Here is a MAIN STREAM story on their institutionalizing of this activity in Utah which is NO SECRET!
It doesnt even matter "how ISPs actually identify file sharing traffic" -- it is TOO late.
File sharing is a ruse, a red herring, who the fuck cares about file sharing. This is about TIA (total information awareness) they don't care if you file share!
They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal.
They want to know EVERYTHING you do - and by claiming you are a criminal via file sharing, they can install stupid ass gateways in the last mile, which just makes it seem like they follow some due process - there is NO LAST MILE. THey have every single bit, already!
They have already compromised the ISP, this is just a scare tactic to keep out the fluff. The fluff are those would would think that their stupid file sharing is alerting the feds, such that they refrain from doing so.
So, in closing, what the NSA is doing, on mass scale, is FAR more pertinent than what you would think.
They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal.
I see no evidence of that (they seem to be happy with operating illegally), so you're just using this thread as a coatrack for off-topic rants.
Are you kidding me?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
This room is in the same building that Twitter HQ is in. It is the ground zero for the back door-ing of the social stream.
You likely have not been paying attention
That's been my biggest question about streaming.
On one hand I can google "watch the office online for free" and end up on Hulu, it has ads, but it's free. If I look around I can see that I don't have access to all their content, but they have a subscription model that gives full access.
On the other, I can google "watch dexter online for free" and end up on MegaVideo (well, imagine you're four months ago). It has ads, but it's free. If I want to watch a lot of videos, I see that I can't because there's a daily limit, but they have a subscription model that gives full access.
As a user, I have no way to know that the first one is legal while the second isn't.
That being said, it's my understanding that at this point, this is what makes streaming a bit of an edge-case why mostly the website is charged, rather than the users. But that might of course change…
"Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it". Bullshit, isn't it?
--edit: I'm not arguing this point. I'm just pointing out that not knowing the law isn't a valid legal defense, so not knowing which site was legal would not prevent a user from prosecution.
I can access the laws that say it's illegal, but I don't have access to the contracts (or the absence of contracts…) that can confirm this or that site is legal.
That's what makes this question so interesting.
When you can download a bunch of songs and movies for free, by now you should know that something is up, the same way people get busted when returning from Mexico with a fake Chanel purse, because "common sense" should tell you that you can't buy one for $15, the same way you can't get full albums for free. (though, common sense is of course very subjective)
But the more the illegal sources look and behave like the legit ones, the more difficult it is to know what's going on. I would probably know because I would hear of the companies from TechCrunch or somewhere, but a random user wouldn't.
So I do wonder if that would be a valid legal defense. Similarly I don't know if someone that had paid a few hundred dollars in a legit-looking store in Asia for a fake but good looking Chanel purse could just explain it was in good faith…
Another example would be Spotify vs. Grooveshark.
Note that ignorance of the law is no defence, and dishonest or unreasonable ignorance of the facts is also no defence.
Graduated response is only for P2P, which is presumptively illegal. ICE/SOPA goes after pirate sites. Nobody goes after the users of pirate sites, so you don't have to worry about that.
We've got pretty rudimentary tools at my job, but we can still see source and destination address (even through a NAT and proxy on our end), IP ports/protocol, time of day and speed of connection trends, and we can do small amounts of packet inspection (we grab the first 120 bytes of every packet).
With this data, I'm able to tell if someone is using BitTorrent vs Skype (they're both peer-to-peer UDP packets to random addresses, so finding the difference is key). I can tell where their information is being sent to. If the packet is not encrypted, I can see exactly what is being sent (the header data will show filenames being transferred). DNS data will tell me what site they've just visited, and packet capture will tell me what specific page they're on and what search terms they used on that site.) With an unencrypted session, it's as easy as piecing the domain name from DNS (thepiratebay.com) to the packet capture (http: 11:23pm March 15, "the office", /search/test/0/99/0) to the user (10.250.250.10) to the network flows (every few seconds there's another couple packets going out to or coming from a few dozen address across the world). Bam, we've got an infringing user.
Now granted, people will likely be using encryption. I don't know how the tools handle this, we don't do anything with it at my job. However, I would imagine the ISPs could do deeper packet inspection. I would imagine they simply don't care if your traffic is legal or not. They may assume it's all illegal and serve notice anyway. There may be an appeals process. As for the difference between Hulu and joe-streams-hollywood.com, I would imagine they have a whitelist of addresses.
TL;DR; I don't know, but I can make an educated guess. Best bet, encrypt your traffic but don't rely on that to save your ass.
Much more feasible (and cheaper) option would be to popularize something along the lines of OneSwarm[1], which falls somewhere between a regular, direct connection and a complete Tor style overlay.
This is relatively easy for P2P and streaming sites, but I don't see how you could ever hope to police "file lockers" like MegaVideo; users would just upload encrypted files (even just password-protected zip files) and distribute the password. If it starts to be a cat-and-mouse game, I expect offshore filelockers will start providing privacy-protecting features for uploaders, coupled with a lot of fun and games with DNS records.
As I understand it, there's no actual monitoring being done by ISPs. The monitoring is done by the record and movie companies. When they see a torrent of their content being shared, they record the IP addresses of everyone seeding that torrent and then send warning requests to the ISPs whose users are uploading. Those IPs then relay that warning to the actual users associated with those IPs. Once a user gets six of these warnings, the ISP is obligated to cut off the user.
At least, that's the way it was reported last summer, and that's how Ars Technica is describing the enforcement system now.
These people are scum.
Also, I'm not so sure how "voluntary" this was, considering the Obama administration was involved to "mediate" the deal. My guess is the White House tried to pressure the ISP's into agreeing with this, though I wouldn't exactly call the ISP's innocent considering pretty much all of them now have their own content services, and it would benefit them to cut down on piracy somehow.
Yup, but surely even a basic viewing session of Internet-based TV would convince even the dimmest bulb that they're fighting a losing battle to keep scheduled broadcast as the primary means of video consumption.
It doesn't matter where you got on the train or why, once it pulls into that last station, you're done.
Once the technology is set up and the practice is sanctioned, more and more 'bad practices' will start being policed and punished.
Are you so sure that those good reasons aren't conceived by ill intented guys knowing what you have just described: It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front.
More commonly refered to as wolf in sheep's clothing.
Big power players are not naive.
In essence you've called out the fact that its the slippery slope.
In this case though its intentional. These structures affect the power structures, so the power structure will react to it in order to either minimize/control/remove its effect.
Sadly you have to play ball in a manner that shows that the power on the other end (the anti RIAA portion of the spectrum) has the ability to create/co-ordinate voters.
The RIAA supports its cause by spending tonnes of money to 'educate' legislators.
If you can influence their voting base though, that education is pointless, since voting power is far more important.
I anticipate failure.
Edit: I'm surprised to see this downvoted. Care to comment why?
ISPs send email citing that X external organization representing Y media company says that you have been sharing Z content, then the ISP shuts off or redirects all web traffic from your location except that which is allowed to go to a webpage they specify in the email where you must acknowledge that you got their communication and will cease and desist. It is pretty Orwellian.
We all need to switch to mesh wifi internetworking as soon as possible. With some work, it could become a better solution than our current net, and there would be no monthly cost to an ISP, and no MPAA, RIAA, or government interference. Granted, there is value in rule of law and protection of adequate compensation for created works. But when Big Brother comes down on you and your neighbors, is that ok? These guys would have cuffed you for the cassette mixtape you made for your girlfriend in the 10th grade if they would have known about it. The longer you let the ISPs or the government rule the net, the less of a chance you will have to ever get it back.
"Some" work? There are serious problems with scaling mesh networks. Private citizens are not going to replace the internet backbone with mesh networks. The best we could hope for are low bandwidth metro WAN. That said, this is something we should put in place ahead of time, so we can turn it on if the government ever wants to black out media and internet access.
As far as combating this latest outrage, how about additional widespread encryption, so all the traffic is effectively on a VPN? If keys are distributed via smartphone networks, it will be hard for the ISPs to do things like mount MITM attacks. Combine this with some honeypots -- as mentioned elsewhere, have people engaging in legal sharing and sue the ISPs when they interfere.
But people won't put it in place unless it provides some advantage immediately, which it doesn't.
I know lots of people who are perfectly willing to design and assemble the hardware, just for the fun of it.
People treated kids that programmed like socially disabled outcasts in the 1980s. Ten years later, many of those kids were making millions. Dialing into a BBS to communicate was a waste of time. Now almost every business has a Twitter account.
Mesh may seem stupid now, but when the current net gets locked down and turned into a "white" government-regulated net within the next 20 years, people are going to start connecting to the shadow "black" mesh net to share files. No, I'm not talking about mesh nets connected to our current net. I'm talking about a completely different internetwork. And if we wait too long, we won't be allowed to setup such a network, because it will be outlawed before it has a chance to flower.
I'm not saying there is a magic field of jellybeans that can replace our current net, although IPv6 may as well be that, as slow as it has been rolled out. But, to dismiss mesh as a crock is just plain lame.
In contrast, the only people willing to suggest that a decentralized wireless mesh has the possibility of replacing the internet are people that haven't used one and have no rf background.
http://emergentbydesign.com/2011/02/11/16-projects-initiativ...
It's perfectly fine that you don't know a lot about networking or network management. Just stop telling people how they can replace the internet when you really have no idea.
If you don't want your ISPs or others sniffing your traffic user encryption. If you don't want the RIAA telling your ISP that you're pirating music stop putting your computer on a global list of computers that are offering to serve popular.mp3. It's a pretty solved problem.
I am not suggesting everyone can use mesh now and magically you no longer need an ISP. I am saying that is where we need to go. And I started off many years ago learning how to design and manage networks, getting certifications, wiring my business with cat3 then cat5, managing routers and switches, and then I moved onto something more interesting- now I just try to protect HN from morons.
Ant colonies? WTF?
Why would the ISPs choose to do this with no legal requirement for it and strong restrictions in how they can achieve this now or in future any infrastructure business around it due to net neutrality and other regulator issues? This would directly alienate their own broadband customers...
Everybody in the thread please read the MOU; it's probably totally different than you think: http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momo...
My ISP is comcast, which not only owns their own TV networks and sports teams, they just bought NBC.
Same thing with Time Warner.
(this is mostly somewhat academic for me – I don't pirate, but I do wear a tinfoil hat at times)
But I don't use Comcast's VoIP service. And if they whitelist SIP traffic, well, people will just tunnel piracy over RTP.
This reminds me. I wonder if the change during Reagan/Clinton to pro-consolidation, anti-competition has anything to do with making an industry easier to control in this way.....
People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future. Then coders like me who use SSH/SFTP heavily will be flagged as pirates too. Then my internet will be cut off.
Which won't really help since they're being tracked by their peers, I don't think anyone is wiretapping random Internet users' connections to bust them for piracy.
That was enough to end that. Unfortunately I don't think asserting an expectation of privacy is enough anymore.
Let me explain. Today everyone has a wifi router. Imagine, one wifi router sending request to the next wifi router, which routes to the next router towards the destination. It is theoretically possible to reach the destination and get back. It may be a million hops. But, it is possible.
Today's wifi routers are designed to talk to CABLE or DSL. But they can be made to talk to a nearby wifi router also. If we do that the entire world will become one giant network. That would be the real internet. At that time, we won't need ISPs.
Today majority of traffic goes through ISPs. If this type of wifi routers come to existence, even countries like Iran cannot control internet.
This may be a blessing in disguise.
I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but the way around the copyright cops isn't a janky 2.4 GHz "mesh network" using 802.11. It's going to require a lot more than that.
According to the official Copyright Alerts site[1], the only "other bandwidth provider" that has signed on is AT&T.
They'll cut it, and have you appeal.
Unless the way to opt-out of this is simply to get a business connection.
Stop of being accused?
Anyway, I've been considering a service to allow people to swap modems (i.e. cable -> DSL, or vice versa), to minimize switching costs. This move may make the idea more viable.
That's engineer thinking, not lawyer thinking. Do you really think, just because packets went over port 9999 and, let's go further and say it wasn't even HTTP, that any attorney, judge or jury will even understand, much less care that it's not the "web"?
This is about targeting the lowest possible hanging fruit that your average joe random idiot can click a big blue button and pull down the last version of whatever schlock big content is pushing out.
Some guy using a bitcoin purchased usenet account over SSL from a VPN through tor to a remote data dump and then grabbing the booty is never going to get caught in this net.
OTOH, VPNs are needed by companies of course, so they can't outlaw this kind of use. But it's not like they cannot poison usenet/tor et al, and catch guys this way. If they have their way, one can imagine a future that you're only allowed to VPN to a whitelist of addresses that you have declared beforehand for business use --or something of that kind.
Also, how about any "odd" pattern, like repeated high volume traffic, giving them "probable cause" to bust into your house and check for illegal downloads?
Usenet is already a haven of scum and villainy as the saying goes due to being commonly used as a vector to distribute malware, people that are accustomed to this environment once again take plenty of precautions to reduce their exposure to these attacks. Another agency joining in on the poison would just be par for the course for our theoretical target.
The idea that a person would go to this extent to avoid detection and then not use deniable encryption volumes to stow their black data is somewhat crazy, even if you grant that someone downloading high volumes of data for illicit purposes is distinguishable on a probable cause basis from someone who just really loves watching a lot of online video or uses a high volume update channel operating system or runs a bunch of computers behind a single ip etc.
This really is asymmetric warfare terrain highly favouring the policed rather than the policing entity if you assume infinitely competent actors on both sides
Just say'n, is all...
To me its similar to general problems with over-centralization and/or monopolization in many areas. There is one water company, not very many large entertainment distributors, food production is handled by an increasingly small number of companies, electricity comes from one company, web search results mostly controlled by one company.
We should do a better job of using shared knowledge exchange formats to be able to get an accurate holistic picture, but at the same time I think things would be more robust and we would be more secure if production, distribution and control was generally much more localized.
I actually think that we should aim for producing water, electricity and food inside of individual homes/apartments or buildings, and also create alternative fiber, laser and wifi mesh networks for communications.
No, utilities need to be monopolized for efficiency. With rotatable protocols though, you can trace who sent what to whom. That's where competition is a good thing. That's why local monopolies on ISPs are ridiculous, same with monopolies on content distribution.
How many solar panels would be on a building if everyone had to generate their own power? How many wind turbines? How many generators? Where would this space come from, and who would pay for it? What if those panels or turbines could not generate enough on one specific day? Is there a contingency plan?
Even if you think the current market of ISPs and content distribution is bad, don't delude yourself into thinking the Internet would exist without cities. With cities comes a need for utility management. If everyone had enough land to generate their own power and water, your Internet bills would be worlds more expensive and your control over entertainment products would be far less (what local bands will you see when your nearest neighbor is three miles away and there's no centralized location to perform?)
Let me know if I've completely misunderstood your statement.
If they get one thing wrong which they will, I'm going to piss and moan about it to no end. On the plus side, net neutrality will be gone, and ownership of the internet secured by the United States congress. I suppose it's better than falling into the hands of some other country, which will also lay claim to it. Let the Internet be divided into a million pieces with import duties for every bit and byte transmitted across an infinite number of versions of the internet.
This is how evolution works, a good idea grows too big, then it compartmentalizes and specializes. Most will suck, but some will be better, and the better ones will be on the receiving end of the goods and services of the enlightened masses. If we can promote freedom to choose which internet to live under, we should be ok to Stamp out the subnets that are used for enslavement of man in favor of the "more free" versions.
Like it or not, you can still be sued for that. You bought a license to watch the movie, not to copy the movie to another device. I'm not sure if there's a legal concept of joint ownership of the license to watch a movie.
It's not the ISPs that need to change. This is like raging to the states who voted to lower their max driving speed to 55 in the 70s. Yes, it was their decision, but they were heavily coerced by the federal government with stiff penalties if they didn't. I highly doubt the ISPs signed on to lose customers just because they believe in IP that much.
Perhaps this should become a campaign issue?
How does this relate to today? "No one" is losing their job or their house or their property because of the RIAA/MPAA. I put "no one" in quotes because obviously people are, just not the voting block at large. Should it be a campaign issue like oil was in 1973-1979? I think so. But we'd never see that until the largest voting group in the country decided it should be, and since the Internet generation still has 40 years to go until they reach senior citizen status, we're a long way out from that day.
Sure, that's how it's commonly played...
Is this actually allowed though, or would the MPAA say you're breaking copyright despite the fact that this other person spent his or her money on it.
My understanding is that the license to view/use the file belongs to the account of the person who actually bought the thing, regardless of who else supplied cash for the undertaking. That could mean that while it seems obvious to you that the two of you share the ability to use the file, the reality might be much more gray (or you could just be outright wrong).
This is exactly the issue that keeps me from buying digital movies (other than DRM issues), and it's why I don't own a kindle. From a legal perspective, it seems like things that are easily and legally shareable with physical items, such as DVDs and dead tree books, aren't easily or legally shareable at all.
I can't download a book from Amazon to my Kindle and then, if she decides she also wants to read it, simply transfer the file it to my girlfriends Kindle as well. At least not strictly legally. We could share accounts, sure, but people break up, and even for married couples there is still a pretty high divorce rate. If we split, one of the two of us (legally) loses everything we've bought for ourselves on the shared account.
I wish that there were an easy way to manage multiple accounts on your devices, so that each person could have a shared, yet separate, account to maintain their own libraries. This is hard to do, I know, and it would require some form of DRM, which is unacceptable for well documented reasons, but we need to find some analog for the first sale doctrine and easy lending.
Even iTunes, with it's lack of DRM, bothers me. I could buy DRM-less music and load it onto both mine and my girlfriends MP3 players, but iTunes still adds a watermark of some kind to the file. That means that if something were to happen to the file, and it got shared, it's traceable back to me. That's fine, but I have no way to ensure that - if we were to break up - the traceable-to-me file gets destroyed from her device. It's a severely paranoid worst case scenario, and the odds against a negative result from a loose file like that are astronomical, but they're not zero, and that bothers me.
I'm a reasonably techie guy. I'm a programmer, I hang out on Hacker News, I keep up (more or less) with the latest trends, but the implementation details of digital media are so counter-intuitive to me that I still buy DVDs and dead tree books.
Yes, it looks like it is actually allowed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartoon_Network,_LP_v._CSC_Holdings,_Inc.> I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission…
Raise holy hell in what sense? You'll switch ISPs? The other ISP has probably agreed to this, too, and that's if you even have a choice of ISP (I know I don't.)
So what's your next option? A lawsuit? What they're doing is perfectly legal.
Fine, so let's change the legal system… ahhh, you have two candidates to vote for, a democrat and republican. Which of them is the one that's going to do something about this, again?
> During a panel discussion held for U.S. publishers today, RIAA chairman Cary Sherman said his association and a number of ISPs—including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—will begin policing traffic to crack down on piracy starting this summer.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-isp...
Also, PR firms? This is cnet. And it's not it talking about something obscure, the program is common knowledge. How about doing your research?