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Comment by luu | Hacker News Reader

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"?

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Sounds like a coordinated effort to bypass due process and mete out extrajudicial penalties.

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.

Agreed. This exactly.

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.

You've never had to hire a lawyer, have you?

No I haven't, but that's exactly my point.

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.

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html#504

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages

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.

two points:

- 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.

(see http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momo... [sic] - "attachment C", specifically 4.1.6 )

"At that point, all of the tools that the content owners and the ISPs have at their disposal are there,"

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.

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.

Self-censorship: The most efficient form of censorship.

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