How ISPs will do “six strikes”: throttled speeds, blocked sites
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
In reality there may not be enough time for the ISPs to respond to each act of piracy before a new one is commited.
And in the end, all they will do is force the pirates down into the darker corners of the internet. A good thing for freenet (better that people trade the latest Game Of Thrones episode than the latest 40 year old rapes children and films it for your enjoyment), but a bad thing for the internet, and society at large.
At that point I could have done one of two things
1) Start spending $10 a month or so on an SSL Usenet provider, a VPN, or any of the other various tools that would allow me to keep pirating without getting caught
2) Start spending $10 a month or so on HBO, and watch it from the comfort of my couch on my flat screen without messing around with any of that stuff.
There are always going to be ways around whatever system they put in place, but the more obstacles they put in the way the more people will decide its no longer worth the effort.
I have cable because I watch a lot of sports, as soon ESPN lets me pay for streaming without a cable subscription I will drop it, but unfortunately live sports is the one thing than can not be pirated easily, consistently, and in high quality.
You can't spend that $10 marginal price for HBO without spending a bunch more money on stuff you will never watch. For example, even if you never watch sports you're pretty much forced to get a cable package with ESPN included, which is a sizable chunk of your subscription cost.
I'd like to see cable companies offer ala carte channel choices, or even better, offer usage-based billing like they do for their data packages. Until that day, many people are going to take the free option instead.
The problem is that there are more obstacles in the way of legal consumption.
You can fix that by putting up artificial obstacles to illegal consumption, or by simply removing the obstacles to the legal consumption which most "pirates" would prefer to use.
Guess which path they've chosen.
I have to think hard to recall the last time I pirated anything, three or four years at least and it was probably eight-plus years ago that I did it with any regularity.
Netflix, Steam, Amazon, O'Reilly Safari and a world of excellent OSS provide me with more fairly priced / free content, education and tools than I have time.
For a $35 dollar appeal fee, it might indeed be time to look at other providers if this happened very often.
Good-bye making back-ups from home.
> For a $35 dollar appeal fee, it might indeed be time to look at other providers if this happened very often.
That would be great, if there were any in my area.
Basically DtecNet/MarkMonitor is participating in a lot of BitTorrent swarms and recording IP addresses of peers.
EDIT: I would happily stop torrenting and pay $20-30 for the few shows I watch. If, say, all of them were on a Hulu-like service, I'd definitely go that route.
There is a huge opportunity for someone to come in and create the Spotify of video, but it probably won't happen soon because it will be near impossible to work with content providers to create it. Plus there's not a huge incentive, since even Spotify is being sucked dry with licensing fees.
Let's face it: the current state of the industry is not capable of providing a high quality user experience to the consumer (I'm almost 100% convinced). They're all about forcing the consumer to use whatever creates the most money, and if you amass enough power, sure, you can do that. Effectively, they are exercising their legal rights to hold back the quality of the end-user experience. Is it right? It is a moral grey area. They have the right to protect their content and the creators of that content, to ensure they are compensated fairly. But at the same time, it is holding back progress.
In short: if you want the best personal digital entertainment experience, a legal alternative at any cost is not available. There are simply too many providers and too many limitations and services. Furthermore, the quality of illegal methods (which will not be named; the secret ones are indeed the best) are extremely high as to be almost the best possible outcome.
It is a very complicated situation. "Legal alternative" is synonymous with "worse" right now, but I do hope that improves.
Terrific! Anyone know the IP addresses of the state and federal Supreme Courts? It will be good preparation for justices to understand IP spoofing.
The problem is if they can tell that you're connecting to an IP that they know belongs to a seedbox used for torrenting copyrighted content.
It's guilt-by-association, but far more draconian, 1984-esque things have already occurred in this debacle, so it wouldn't surprise me.
Most people pirate stuff because it's easy. If it's not easy, they'll just shift to paying for things.
Me, I would just have made purchasing of content much easier, but I suppose if you're in Hollywood it somehow seems sensible to just make everything in the world harder instead.
So the question is, who is right?
Haven't it become the social norm because it's the easiest way?
No, it's because it's become the only way.
I loved them when I used them in SF.
For years, I've paid Speakeasy and Sonic more than I could have paid to a phone or cable incumbent. And I've been happy to do it, because when something goes wrong I get to talk to actual smart people who want to fix things.
I'm also sad that our competition regulators allowed this to happen. A pseudo-choice between two basically equivalent options isn't enough for the magic of the free market to work.
It's not just that - we subsidized the construction of the Internet channels with our tax dollars, and then the government essentially handed over the control of those to the private companies, who now claim that they can charge whatever they want for access to "their" lines.
Consumers may have played a role, but at the end of the day, it's the government (the constituents)[1] who have sanctioned the existing monopolies.
> I'm also sad that our competition regulators allowed this to happen. A pseudo-choice between two basically equivalent options isn't enough for the magic of the free market to work.
Choice? 80% of consumers have zero choice in their ISP. For me, the only alternative is 'no Internet'.
[1] Obviously consumers == constituents for the most part, but I make the distinction to draw attention to the fact that they would need to act in their role as voters/citizens, not as consumers, if they want to change anything.
Sadly, my house is 12K feet past a remote terminal, so it is unlikely I'll be able to get anything other than UVerse or Comcast for a long time.
How many ISPs can (or would) post a news item on their home page re: EFF...
“Sonic.net privacy policies recognized by the EFF The Electronic Frontier Foundation assessed the policies of 18 leading Internet companies, and Sonic.net has come out with top marks. The EFF wrote in their report that...”
FWIW: No ties to sonic.net
Presumably by injecting Javascript into customer web traffic? I don't torrent copyrighted material, but I was hoping we were done with ISPs screwing with HTTP after the ad replacement scandals of a few years ago.
If an ISP is going to communicate with me outside the usual channels, I'd much rather they do it at a DNS level, where it's obvious something's happening, than at an HTTP level where there's a much greater temptation for mischief.
Or just hardcode the values into /etc/hosts.
> though that may not work if they cut off your connection until you acknowledge
Oh, so they can threaten to renege on their end of the contract (the service I have already paid for) unless I admit to their accusations of potentially incriminating activity? That's just ridiculous[1].
[1] But I still wouldn't put it past them!
Throttling access to your competitors (Netflix) artificially to make your own product seem more attractive by comparison - does that qualify as 'bundling'?
"First comes the "notice" phase, which simply involves letting users know they've been tracked on copyright-infringing sites."
So, if I wander over to the Pirate Bay or any other site like it, even just for research, I'm in trouble without downloading anything?
... why? they might have the best torrent for a [completely legally acquired game] mod.