The Copyright Alert System: Moving to Implementation
copyrightinformation.org
copyrightinformation.org
But if you read these articles, you'll notice that they sort of gloss over the fact that this appears to be a system for getting IP addresses of infringers to the copyright holders. Once they have that, we already know what they can do with it. The boilerplate suits stopped because they weren't economical, but who's to say that the big content owners haven't found a way to change that equation. MarkMonitor itself could even be that extra term.
I think the six strikes education system is a smokescreen. We're being misdirected from a pretty scary fact: the MPAA, RIAA and major ISPs have apparently pooled their resources to create a monolithic peer-to-peer monitoring system. Then they've sent everyone who should be freaking out about that on a wild goose chase of speculating about how the "six strikes" are going to evolve into full-on censorship. But that's not where we need to be focusing our attention. We need to ask what else they can do with the data they collect from MarkMonitor.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/
Consider the viewpoint of a typical person in power today. They see these gigantic social institutions that provide a measurable portion of the nations GDP which might soon be torn apart and replaced by a decentralized, unorganized system with unknown economic value. Much of the history that they believe is worth knowing consists of the creation of massive centralized systems to aggregate supply and demand to solve the problem of distribution (both physical distribution of product and logistical distribution of work). To them, a move to a system where content creators distribute and sell directly to consumers is, at best, a horrifying step backwards.
The first step to making sure content creators can't sell directly to consumers, of course, is to insert themselves in the new means of distribution in order to wedge the old distributors into some new place created for them.
If you're going to argue that the content industry --- which is significantly smaller than the Internet industry, by the way --- is so powerful that it can simply disregard the Constitution, what's left to argue about? Here, allow me to win the resulting debate: "the content industry is going to get a law passed that will establish the death penalty for piracy". Oh no!
It has some say, but lately it's been repeatedly ignored.
> which is significantly smaller than the Internet industry, by the way
Unfortunately, I feel that the content industry lobbies way more than the Internet industry as a whole. This is slowly changing, but we still give far less political contributions than they do.
I didn't say that. I was implying that the gov can, and it has been. Guess who lobbies the gov with more money?
Those laws exist. They have no basis. They are ridiculous. They are nothing more than protection for the business of car dealers, and no claim is even made that they provide other protections to consumers as far as I know.
Also, laws are not programs. They do not specify their goals with absolute precision. They are generally broad, and get solidified through established case law. The DMCA is a perfect example. It outlawed 'circumventing copyright protection mechanisms' and did not define what such things were. If I set a single bit in a proprietary file format that I believe indicates content is copyrighted, is that such a mechanism? No one knew. Then came RealNetworks v Streambox. They faced the exact situation I described, a single undocumented bit in a file. Their product provided a capability that was well protected by case law in other situations - they let you schedule recording and time-shifting of streamed video content. You could not copy that content or transfer it to anyone else, it was locked to the machine which recorded it. They won their case. And they won every appeal by RealNetworks. Until they ran out of money. So they couldn't respond to the Nth appeal, and it became established case law by default.
A law against circumventing the publishing industry would go the same way. It would forbid authors from directly selling books, music, videogames, and any other form of content they could come up with to consumers. I would hope that this would be seen as harebrained and insane, as it is... but consider the viewpoint of those in office. The Internet is seen by them as a bustling marketplace filled with the rabble. They see the publishing industry (really the distribution industry) as a centuries-old pinnacle of our culture representing a noticeable portion of the GDP. And they see the rabble tearing it down. They have no faith that an entirely decentralized anything can function, it goes against their very nature. They likely see protecting the existing industry as a choice between being a world leader in the publishing market and being worthless chaos bordering on anarchy, sacrificed so a bunch of shortsighted peons could get movies, books, games, music, etc for almost nothing, devaluing the entire market.
That's not how it works.
In other words, it sounds like this does exactly what they did all along to catch people on BitTorrent. The difference is that instead of hiring various independent companies to do the policing (which ended in a lot of false positives, probably because those companies were trying to turn over as many IPs as possible), they've pooled their resources to create a single streamlined process.
Now there are a couple of reasons they would want to downplay the real purpose of this system. First, ISPs aren't going to get on board with a "help us sue your customers" plan. But "help us educate your customers about copyright" is probably appealing to an ISP. And as far as the public is concerned, it's a good bet that some details of this would have gotten leaked if they had tried to just keep it under wraps. Talking about it openly, but downplaying its primary purpose, is an easy way to solve that problem.
They want to educate customers about not running open wireless networks etc so they find it more difficult to argue "oh, my wifi was open so it wasn't me".
I'm not sure what your point is. Content holders have mostly stopped suing people, and the generally accepted reason for this is that it wasn't profitable to do so. My point is that it looks an awful lot like this program is the result of an effort to make that process profitable again, in which case we can expect the lawsuit engine to crank back up. If you'll recall, that engine ended up screwing over a lot of innocent people last time it was running, so you should be against that happening even if you think suing illegal filesharers is a good thing in principle.
Nobody's talking about a "conspiracy" in anything but the most pedantic and technical sense. What I'm talking about is simple dishonesty, which is something we have come to expect from the likes of the MPAA and RIAA.
As for the violation of privacy, that's a trickier subject, but not one that is important to my point. An open home WiFi with unsecured servers on it is advertised publicly too, but if you go and poke around someone's PC, you're still violating their privacy. IPs are exchanged on p2p services for the sake of communication, not identification. So pretending to be an ordinary peer so that you can find someone's identity (i.e. through a subpoena) is arguably a violation of their privacy (although obviously not an illegal one). Again though, this is a tangent that isn't really important to my point.
>They want to educate customers about not running open wireless networks etc so they find it more difficult to argue "oh, my wifi was open so it wasn't me".
As far as I know, that defense has never even been attempted in a copyright case in the US, and nobody really thinks it would work if it were. It has been used in a child pornography case, and the courts didn't go for it.
But even if that were the point, why would they need six strikes to tell you to close your WiFi?
* Stroz Friedberg has completed its initial review of MarkMonitor’s methodologies and found that the system is accurate and works properly. Importantly, the methodology for identifying infringed content and the IP address from which it has been distributed is based on a review of peer-to-peer networks and publicly available information.*
So MarkMonitor is running a system that monitors p2p networks and collects IP addresses.
And we have this:
CCI has also retained Stroz Friedberg to review the technical processes used by each ISP to match subscriber accounts with IP addresses forwarded by the content owners.
So content owners forward the IP addresses. You can't forward something you don't have. So clearly, MarkMonitor's system sends the IP addresses to the content owners, who can then do with them as they please.
If you have some other information that contradicts what this article says, please do tell.
They aren't looking at your traffic, they are waiting for complaints from third parties.
Third parties do this by connecting to P2P networks themselves and watching the traffic of certain files.
Let us hope that one day we get this, so that the MPAA and RIAA can be empowered to do the right thing and protect their copyright holders' rights.
Hence if there were a law like that and everyone obeyed it then you could generally identify the exact machine that did the file sharing.
For example if I watch the source MAC address of incoming HTTP requests to my server it always reports the MAC address as being the one for the router/firewall in front of the server even though the source IP addresses will vary.
The only way I can think this would be possible to achieve would be to require a signed certificate and HMAC (message authentication code) from the the originating client to be sent with every IP packet and make sharing private keys a serious criminal offence. Even then it would probably be basically unenforceable on any kind of scale.
Edit: apparently not, hours ago we discussed "Internet providers to begin warning customers who pirate content" which is of course, different.
True, but the VPN provider doesn't need to be in a country that follows these laws. Russia and China spring to mind as long term solutions.
If I gave my credit card number to someone and they decided to sell it for $20 to someone who runs up $10,000 worth of monkey porn on it, whatever, it's not my money they're spending. I'd call Amex and have a credit the same day.
For the record I don't live in the US, does that make my business untrustworthy too??
And if they write anything about illegal copyright violations into the contract, I would hope some people who use P2P legally would challenge that (see if they get throttled, file a lawsuit).
Increasingly, this will be built into new contracts. There are a lot of third party contracts signed in business where one party will take a particular action based on the needs/wants of a third party.
Again, only if the ISP is notified does this come into effect. Download all the Ubuntu iso files you want via P2P you want and you'll be uneffected.
... (d) you (or a subaccount associated with your Member ID) engage in conduct that is a violation of any law, regulation or tariff (including, without limitation, copyright and intellectual property laws); ...
http://www.att.com/shop/internet/att-internet-terms-of-servi...
2) an ip address is seen uploading or maybe even downloading the latest Bieber album
3) the ISP's logs show that ip address was assigned to bo1024's account
Pretty much the only thing that can go wrong is that the company complaining does not have the authority to complain about that file and that's happened with automated DMCA notifications because they use some sort of dumb keyword monitors.
They don't need to automate choosing which torrents to spy on, a single person lurking on TPB's top 100 movies and musics would cover the majority of people by far.
Which route they go can make this all very accurate.
Once the vast majority of casual piracy is curtailed, more more focused enforcement against people on private trackers / seedbox providers etc can begin.
Sure there will be loopholes and ways for determined pirates to slip through the cracks, but the days where everyone and their brother can grab pirated content without worry are numbered.
Actually watching things on a physical tv?
Yeah, this enforcement will likely expand beyond the US as they are pressing very hard in every trade negotiation. But legal options will expand over time as well.
Not on any of the private trackers that I use. The speed of the downloads has never been an issue because there are already a few people with seedboxes on every torrent, ensuring that downloads are always fast.
Moreover, this program is only in the US, where people have super shitty Internet speeds anyway - most of the times I'm downloading and there are no seedbox peers, it's someone in Europe with a fast connection who's sending me the bulk of the data. Those people will keep downloading regardless of what happens in the US.
Finally, the types of people who frequent private trackers are exactly those who would be willing to rent a seedbox. Ultimately, this will only hurt the ISPs. Right now I pay for the fastest U-Verse connection I can get. If AT&T starts sending me these notices, I'll just downgrade my speed and use the leftover money to rent a seedbox.
I'm pretty sure clients can be configured to make this work, but I haven't looked into the details.