"Six strikes" Internet warning system will come to US this year
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
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"?
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.
Seems like ISPs will be scanning as well not just P2P monitors, that's why I wonder about something like dropbox or ftp setting it off.
Seems about as fair as we'd expect from the MAFIAA to me.
(see http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momo... [sic] - "attachment C", specifically 4.1.6 )
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.
#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.
Hopefully, though, it's in response to (and replacement for) the absurdity of getting sued for $3mil. because you downloaded a few mp3's or movies.
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)
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.
I know some ISPs are also content providers, so I get that one. But what about the rest?
They all see higher profits in screwing over consumers, apparently
Especially if the ISPs come to an arrangement with content providers to sell access to their content as an add-on to the broadband service.
They can also charge content providers a premium to deliver their content at a higher priority than content of other providers.
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.
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.
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.
That and the content provider thing are the main reasons some ISPs are already sending letters to heavy-torrenting users todays.
Thanks for clearing that up, Ms. Doublespeak.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The next step will be prohibiting US-based services from providing truly-encrypted communication/storage.
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.
Soon thereafter the law will change or die.
Just seems like this is the Copyright absolutionist's mindset in a nutshell. Nothing is what it seems like, it's what we say it is.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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).
Paypal, for one, makes no attempt to hide this: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-My-Account/using-p...
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.
(Semi-related: Do prepaid cards count as debit for purposes of the regulation on swipe fees?)
It's a problem with both parties, since both are known to refuse to process them.
> Is there any way for a merchant to know that a card is prepaid?
Yes
> Is there any way for a merchant to know that a card is prepaid?
No
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.
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.
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.
So, these 6 (or so) ISPs can make an abusive "6 Strikes" copyright regime into de facto national law.
I think it is one of the best descriptions of this split, and what problems we'll have to overcome.
So yeah, telling people "don't get caught again" works.
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.
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.
For more on this, read: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6544/125/
Canada will see it's own 6-strikes legislation soon enough.