A very clever idea to enforce copyright with minimal lawsuits. | Hacker News Reader

A very clever idea to enforce copyright with minimal lawsuits.

freedom-to-tinker.com

51 pointsamichail42 comments

Eventually, all of the clueless players will learn not to cheat.

It may actually take forever to get through the "clueless", slower than new ones are being born.

Most people do not act rationally and do not compute probabilities in their head - they simply do what others do and expect to get the outcome in the same ballpark. An infringer will stop infringing if three of the people he knows personally are caught and punished, feeling that this sort of stuff is probably dangerous. That's the only way probability theory figures into normal people's lifes - through numbers.

More effective punishment strategy would be to punish someone on TV - a popular character on TV screen tends to be "one of the people I feel close to" so a punishment of such person will have effect.

Of course another strategy is to make it convenient to comply - I started buying my music from online stores after all the DRM stuff was taken down. When people put work into making my life better I don't mind paying for that, unless they make it difficult.

Reminds me of the paradox of the unexpected hanging:

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

Also, I believe research has shown that the size of a fine has relatively little effect, and it is the perception of the certainty of being caught that is most effective as a deterrent.

I agree with the others, people won't care, they'll do it anyway and feel secrure that they won't get caught. The few who do will have no effect on the vast majority.

Mass behavior isn't rational.

> Also, I believe research has shown that the size of a fine has relatively little effect, and it is the perception of the certainty of being caught that is most effective as a deterrent.

The original paper does note that the principle is limited to circumstances where catching is easy.

What the paper doesn't account for, though, is response: which allows a straightforward general counter-strategy:

The 'resistance' place a dummy wherever the 'police-state' target next -- to deceive or take the hit harmlessly. This simply turns the attack against itself: The police-state's strategy relies on: 1. announcing their next target; and 2. keeping that promise. The resistance exploits and completely negates that. To defeat that counter, the attack must disable itself.

The critical assumption behind the police-state's strategy is that the resistance is powerless, that they have no ability to respond. But there is enough evidence this would be foolish in the internet world. If the police-state has technical means to find targets, the resistance has technical means to fool or dodge them.

Thanks for the link to the Hanging Paradox. I hadn't come across that one yet. Very interesting.

People have (severely) bounded rationality and don't continue the induction to its logical conclusion.

As proof simply see the 'guess 2/3rds of the average' game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average).

As a quick summary: Put a bunch of people in a room and tell them to each guess a number from 0 to 100 - and whoever guesses 2/3rds of the average of everyone's number 'wins.'

Logically, no one should guess above 66 (since 2/3rds the average can't exceed 66 even if everyone guesses 100). Then, no one should guess above 44 since 2/3rd the average can't exceed 44 even if everyone guesses 66. Continue on, and the only logical move is for everyone to guess 0.

But, in real life, the winning guess is almost always around 20 (which implies most people only carry on the induction for 3 or 4 steps).

Your example proves nothing about the boundedness of the rationality of (most) humans. It tells you something about what people expect about other people: others are not expected to carry an argument to its logical conclusion. However, taking that knowledge, or educated guess, into account, makes '10' or '20' a fully rational guess, based on lack of complete data.

This won't "enforce copyright", it will just push the sharing even farther underground. Compare Bittorrent today (with distributed trackers and every byte encrypted) with Napster from the beginning of the file sharing era.

The good news is that if you are planning terrorist attacks (via Skype) or distributing child porn (via Tor or Freenet), your chances of being caught are much, much lower than they were in the late nineties. Back then, the only people that needed the strong protection provided by modern file-sharing protocols were people trying to do things that most people would consider illegal. But now, you get that when you call your Mom on Skype or when you are downloading the latest linux ISO -- meaning that the "real criminals" are just noise now. There's nothing suspicious about having no cleartext coming out of your 'net connection anymore.

Suing people for sharing music makes the job of the terrorists much easier. (Can I have my Senate seat now? I'm from Illinois and am willing to pay for it with the money I've saved from downloading The Simpsons every week instead of buying the DVDs.)

Anyway, let's say we implement the system the article describes. Judgements of millions will be issued against people without that money. They won't pay. It will go to collections. They still won't pay. (You can't get blood from a stone.) They will be arrested and have another trial (at my/the state's expense) be sentenced to prison. Except wait, there is no room in the prisons, even for violent criminals. So society will have to build more prisons, at great expense, and pay to house these deadbeat file-sharers. Or, in the real world, they won't be sentenced to prison, and will do community service or something. They won't show up for that, and nobody will be care, because it costs society a lot of money to punish these people. Oh, and there's that whole Constitution thing too.

The "deadbeats" might also take a hit on their credit score, but there is nothing anyone wants to buy with credit anymore, so this is not much of a deterrent. Oh no, you mean I can't get a loan on a house that will decrease in value over the 30 years I live in it? OH NOES.

Basically, there is no way the Content Creators can win by playing the "punish the criminals" game. Society is already tired of it, and the strategy isn't even remotely close to being effective yet.

No, they will just have to adapt. Sites like Hulu probably took a bigger bite out of piracy than the threat of punishment ever will.

>This won't "enforce copyright", it will just push the sharing even farther underground.

That amounts to reducing the number of pirates to a manageable level. The MPAA/RIAA can live with piracy by the members of Slashdot, but if Aunt Tillie gets into it they're screwed.

> Judgements of millions will be issued against people without that money. They won't pay.

If you get a judgement against you, depending on what state you live in your bank account can be frozen or your wages can be garnished. Maybe worse in some states. They don't have to collect millions to hurt you.

>They will be arrested and have another trial (at my/the state's expense) be sentenced to prison.

Charles Dickens, is that you? You don't go to prison for non-payment of debt, unless it's child support or taxes.

>The "deadbeats" might also take a hit on their credit score, but there is nothing anyone wants to buy with credit anymore, so this is not much of a deterrent. Oh no, you mean I can't get a loan on a house that will decrease in value over the 30 years I live in it?

That's a hell of an overstatement, and a hell of an extrapolation from a bursting housing bubble that will be forgotten by most people in 30 years.

You don't go to prison for non-payment of debt, unless it's child support or taxes.

You do go to prison when you ignore a court order, however.

Just sayin', it is going to be too costly to society to deter people from committing piracy this way. You may be able to deter businesses (there is no Web 2.0 for-pay piracy app yet), but not individuals.

The best way to deter people from piracy is to listen to them and give them what they want. People want to pay $1 for a high-definition DRM-free download of that just-released movie. The problem is, the industry won't let them pay, so they have to steal instead. It would be hilarious if so many lives weren't being ruined by lawsuits.

This idea assumes a higher level of knowledge in participants than the real world can provide. Even with an absolute media blitz, there will be millions of people who don't know about the 8:00PM EST file sharing apocalypse. Even with persistent hammering of the point, repeated lawsuits, etc. it would take months and millions of dollars worth of lawsuits for every file sharer to know about and understand the rules of the game.

People will not only not know the rules of the game, they won't even know they're playing.

The numbers are just too massive to matter.

Forget something complicated like IP address. Lets go with something simple like east coast to west coast. If only 1,000 people can be sued I'll actually think I'm protected from being sued since I live on the west coast. I'd be willing to bet that there are 1,000 people between me and the Atlantic Ocean still willing to cheat.

This is a great concept but it seems to only be effective on a much smaller scale.

Turn it into a reality TV show.

It brings to mind the rationality taboo puzzle you get on one of your CS Algorithms assignments. You know, the one whre all the tribesmen with blue birthmarks commit ritual suicide or cuckolded wives kill their adulterer husbands, all because an outsider came in and said something that all of them knew.

Of course, the puzzle has some hidden requirements without which the whole logical arguement falls apart - Everyone is rational, everyone knows that everyone is rational, everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone is rational (I think this much meta is required...), and everyone has perfect information except to that one blind spot as specified by the puzzle (and of course, people know that people know that everyone has all that information...).

It's a carefully balanced house of cards that blows apart quite easily, when people are not rational, or knowledge is incomplete.

Same problem will apply here. Although, it's possible that lack of knowledge and irrationality could actually help a little bit.

Bullshit.

Professional copyright infringement (e.g. companies using pirated software) is easy to spot and easy to persecute. It's also a serious issue because you're really talking about lost sales here, not just hypothetical sales.

Private copyright infringement (e.g. mom downloading some MP3s) is hard to spot and even harder to persecute. You can't talk about lost sales because the amount pirated is in no relation to the amount that could have been sold -- if you've got a 80/20 distribution between pirated and sold, it's absurd to claim 80% lost sales.

If you're talking about real profit losses for the actual producer (i.e. the artist, developer or whatever), private copyright infringement is negligible.

In fact, the low cost of private copyright infringement could be soothed even more if the producers would allow for easy ways of donation (PayPal, whatever): in many cases the "lost sales" were lost because the would-be-customer wouldn't have paid the amount asked or was simply not willing to take the risk of paying for something before knowing they like it.

Whether you like it or not, private copyright infringement is here to stay (and has been here ever since the invention of copyright law). You can't stop it. You only have the choice between accepting it as a fact of life and trying to work with it (viral marketing, commercial support for Free software, live concerts, etc etc), or ignoring the social costs of your actions and trying to punish all the "evildoers" one-by-one making examples of the students and grandmas you actually manage to draw into courtrooms.

Publishing companies are not going to die over this, but their role will deflate back into what it had been before the record industry / Hollywood boom: as a service provider to the real artists, offering to do the marketing for them, arrange concerts and publish their work in physical form. It's only natural for RIAA and MPAA to try and tear down civil rights in their dying throes, but that doesn't make it any more ethical, no matter what the legal situation says (which they have nicely shaped according to their interests in the past, I might add).

Vive la révolution!

I think a more effective "alphabet" would be amount downloaded by that IP. Start with the people who download the most first and then publicly announce what the limit was each week. The people who download the most are the most likely to be aware of this scheme so you mitigate against the problem of ignorant users.

Also, in this scheme, the inability to track every download is a virtue, not a vice. Say they announced that the limit last week was 600Gb and you downloaded 500Gb last month. you decide to download 250Gb this month just to be safe but of the 500Gb you downloaded, they only tracked 300Gb so you're bringing the limit lower for next month even though you're nowhere near the boundary case.

This seems nice game theory but I don't see it practically unforcable for copyright laws.

- Punishment is not automatic: people are innocent unless proven otherwise (spoofed ip address, pirated wifi network, etc...).

- People are finding and adopting more and more sophisticated ways not get caught (like the transition from napster to emule/bittorrent).

- Majors are powerful, but adding more pressure requires the right propaganda to legitimate their action, imho this would be percieved as too autocratic, arbitrary, unfair.

Frankly, being sued at all is a pretty big punishment. It's not fun.

It works okay with speeding -- in places where police consistently pull over the leading car in a pack of speeders, I tend to slow down when I'm in front.

I don't think it'd work as well in this situation. It would have to be immediately obvious to everyone what the rules were, whether someone had already been caught that day, and if they were about to become the first in line. Given the casual and distributed nature of the crime in question, I think that'd be difficult.

This strikes me as an idea that is useful and interesting as a sociological theory, but in practice it's pretty pointless. Imagine the terrible press that the RIAA would get if they announced that they would start suing based on such ridiculous criteria as IP addresses or time of day. The RIAA is already seen by many to randomly submit lawsuits en masse, and a tactic like this wouldn't exactly add credibility to their effort.

Some people mentioned defense funds.

Defense funds could be a business model in itself, if RIAA/MPAA/??AA just got the clue. They could establish their own defense fund and channel the money to themselves.

??AA establishes a defense fund: pay a $5 insurance a month and you get the right to download and share any (of their) content as much as you like as long as you're listed. Or maybe you won't get the right but you'll be guaranteed to not sued.

Then they proceed to sue non-listed downloaders and sharers in as large numbers as it is required to deter people from getting listed and as it doesn't consume too much money. Maybe they want to use Felten's ordering system, too.

Yes, some people would still not pay, some people would still be sued, but they would make lots of money pretty much "for free" because people would pay to avoid the potential hassle.

Ideally the online sharing culture would florish in open and that would bring more innovations to the field. Yet I'd like to see the world without copyright.

This strikes me as an (at least theoretically) smart way to solve a very stupid problem.

There is an unspoken assumption in this article that piracy is actually a crime.

Well, if it is indeed a crime then the only victims are various MAFIAA execs, and the lawyers they supply.

And this article writer of course, who is almost assuredly being paid to write this dreck.

This is fatally flawed, there is such a thing as a defense fund. All the 'cheaters' could pledge to each other to help out in case of a fine.

Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Uh-huh.

Let's modify the scheme just a tiny little bit:

"We're going to sue the first 1000 people we see violating our copyrights starting at 8:00, and we're not going to count people who we find during discovery accepted money from a 'defense fund'".

I'm pretty sure that leaves 99.999% of the original target population to sue.

http://freeculturenews.com/2009/01/27/jammie-thomas-receives...

I forgot if that case ever resolved itself fully, but, isn't $3000 like less than 1% of what she wound up liable for?

Yes, but that wasn't the point, defense funds exist, they're being used, and it won't take much to institutionalize them where people will simply set them up pre-emptively.

Such indemnification schemes can be made illegal by the authorities though.

It's a reverse lottery, if you play and you end up losing then the pot covers your losses.

What I said was, even if defense funds actually happened --- and the only example you have is a large organization defraying a tiny fraction of the legal costs for a hugely publicized case --- they wouldn't interfere with this recovery strategy.

http://www.tankafritt.nu/uk/

Then the plaintiff can follow the money trail and fry them all.

Is contributing money to a defense fund really evidence of conspiracy? That seems legally questionable.

If the cheaters can collude in an enforceable way, they'll each pay a small amount to A to cheat, giving A slightly more than $10, making A happy to take the enforcement hit. The cartel of cheaters still earns a net $16 by cheating.

I think the cartel would be ruled illegal and shut down. Otherwise a business would have stepped up already to provide insurance coverage.

Enforcing the anit-collusion laws runs into exactly the same problem as enforcing the original anti-copyright laws, so that's not really a solution.

Colluders would be a subset of copyright infringers. Also, there wouldn't be that many insurance companies willing to do outlawed business, so it wouldn't be a problem to take a significant part of them to court.

Would it be a cartel, or a voluntary tax? It sounds like it could evolve from a fine for illegal behaviour into a legal subscription program. The lawyers would be sad, but overall it might not be a bad deal.

I'm certain that the RIAA and MPAA hope that the "cartel" known as the BitTorrent protocol will be ruled illegal. Sometimes collusion can be relatively spontaneous and nearly anonymous.

Sueing your customers and potential customers in proportion to their devotion will never be clever and only sustainable by virtue of abhorrent damages and societal control.

How about introducing a blackmailers charter for music fans ? Or just F shoot them ? Federal PYITA Jail ? Racial profiling. Prohibition.

I listen to more music than I own. Copying is now free. Humanity is universally enriched. Make money from a joyful future.

This is fundamentally flawed, because the sources for infringing content are many. Piracy doesn't line up for the counting. Not even all torrents could be watched, let alone all protocols, and darknets abound. This would only create an arms race of more darknets and new protocols.

this feels ethically wrong, though i can't exactly state why. calling out who you're going to punish doesn't feel right, though the fact that it is a prioritization not a direct singling-out makes it a little bit better.

what if the enforcer said "i'll punish the person with the darkest skin tone"?

Ethical or not, it is certainly a PR disaster to be perceived as picking victims arbitrarily, almost playfully.

They're not "victims". They're "defendants".

this assumes the players have full awareness and are mostly rational.

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