Interesting new anti-piracy news
 

Looks like there was a pretty big deal struck between the RIAA, MPAA and most major ISPs. They are going to work together in an "education" style system of copyright enforcement. Basically it will work like this:

If you are suspected of copyright violation via download/distribution you will get an email from your ISP telling you that you or someone using your account may have illegally downloaded something. If you continue to do it you will eventually get a pop up on your screen that won't go away until you acknowledge it and it may also send you to some information about why copyright infringement is bad. Eventually if you persist they will take harsher steps that could include throttling your bandwidth or redirecting you to a page that will persist until you call the support number and talk to them.

It sounds like they aren't going to sue people, but instead are just trying to educate people and make it a little more difficult for those who know what they are doing and don't care to get away with it.

I have mixed feelings about it, but I am interested in seeing how they implement this and if it will have any real effect.

Here are a couple of stories on it

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/201...ternet-access/

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20...opyright-cops/

So instead of going after the businesses that profit from it and deliver it they are going after the guy who is downloading it? Something tells me this wont work.

It has been proven that suing indivduals doens't work. They have have gone after 1000's of people with some cases getting big victories for them and making headlines and yet piracy just keeps growing. Going after the companies hasn't been much more effective. Both the Pirate Bay and Isohunt have been dragging out litigation for years now.

I guess they have decided that this might inconvenience people enough that they will stop. Depending on where you live you may only have a few options when it comes to broadband ISPs so you burn your bridges at those places you could be out of luck. Maybe the threat of that will be enough.

Five or six years ago...a person that I knew was down loading feature films from some site and burning them to CD's and had accumulated quite a large collection of movies. One day he received an E-mail from his ISP informing him that they had received notification that he had downloaded several films and the names of the films were listed. They were all produced by the same studio and I do not recall what studio it was but his ISP told him that if they received another notification his service would be terminated. He stopped.

There was an article on bbc today about illegal downloading being up 30%. Here's what one guy had to say:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/14029865

It's people like Steve, who's 25 and from Essex, that the film industry says are the biggest threat to its future survival and success.

He illegally downloads and uploads around 10 films per week.

"I think in comparison to the money they make it's a drop in the ocean," he said.

'Creating jobs'

"Also, what I'm actually doing is providing people with new jobs.

"With all these ISPs that are producing super fast broadband we [illegal downloaders] are actually helping create those jobs," he added.

The only jobs he's creating are cron jobs.

what's stopping sites offering illegal downloads/streaming go behind SSL? how could anyone know what someone downloads or views then?

There are so many reasons pirates give for what they do that make me laugh. These are a couple of great ones. I also love the "I was never going to buy it anyway" excuse. A lot of these guys see themselves as freedom fighters who see the big studios as these evil entities and somehow they are fighting for the good of the regular guy by downloading. The rationalizations are endless and priceless.

The "never going to buy anyway" rationale always cracked me up.

Can you go into Foot Locker and put on some expensive Nike basketball shoes, say "I'm keeping these, because I wasn't going to buy them anyway", then walk out?

It would be jail time.

here's where a digital thief responds with, "yeah, but a movie is a copy of the original. You can't make copies of the sneaker" -- some other dumbass double talk bullshit.

A product is a product. One goes on your feet to help you play better basketball -- the other goes in your ear and eyeholes to be processed by your neurons and give you a woody.

Nothing changes as far as going after downloaders......or, uploaders,....or sites hosting stolen content.

Seems that we just have a warning system for downloaders going into play.

Only lifetime in prison would help in such cases :)

It's interesting that Time Warner hasn't taken a more aggressive stance on their own, considering they are both content provider with Warner Music Group & Warner Studios and ISP with Time Warner Cable.

Fortunately Canada's privacy laws all but guarantee such a deal never passing here. We already pay a "piracy" tax on blank media.

the only issues I see with that is the fact that they have to inject packets to enforce that "warning page" they throw up. ISPs in canada are starting to take heat over that

while i don't agree with the "never going to buy anyway" excuse

your analogy is just plain stupid

if you buy shoes you can sell them, you can rent them, you can break them up and make new stuff out of them.

all those rights don't exist for copyright

and a whole bunch of new rights do in their place, like the right to backup, timeshift, and format shift content you bought BY any technology available.

unless you want to give buyers all of those rights, you really have no right to make the comparison.

You can sell ONE pair of shoes. The shoes you bought. You cannot personally sell that pair of shoes to 1,000 different people like you can with digital content.

Content producers have never gone in and busted people selling their used CD's at yard sales. Now if they're selling copies of CD's, that's a whole different thing.

I used to buy storage units at auctions and sell the stuff that was inside them. Many units had VCR tapes and DVDs and CDs in them. One unit had three boxes full of nothing but pirated DVDs. There was probably 500 movies there. When I first opened the box and saw DVD cases I was happy. Then I started going through them and realized what they were and ended up tossing them all in the trash. I wonder if I bought his unit. :)

Where did you get that info? I know some people making bank suing the dog shit out of downloaders. It's not about stopping piracy, it's about getting paid for your content. They download it, they pay for it. It's that simple.

The first step to understand piracy and what to do with it is... forget what you *think* you know about it and only rely on real facts and what is actually working in the real world.

I guess I should have said it is proven that suing people does not curb the amount of piracy out there. It can get people paid for their content and it can make some people some money, but it has done nothing to curb the amount of people who are pirating.

It's been working for a while.

Most of the people doing it don't bother with press releases.

Yes, that would be correct.

Nothing is going to curb their appetite until there are serious consequences.

However, those consequences are going to have be far more wide spread than they have been to date. There have been people fined hundreds of thousands of dollars in cases that made big news. The RIAA has sued thousands and settled out of court with most of them, yet piracy grows. Whatever the consequences are going to be they will have to be pretty major, fast acting and hit a lot of people.

Oh snap. Let's see Gideon's answer to that one.

the granted right to backup assumed that the backups were not shared, especially if those 'backups' contained copyright material that you did not own distribution rights to.

the granted right to timeshift is perfectly valid - always was - as long as you PAID for the original and did not distribute it or the copies publically or for profit

the granted right to format shift is also perfectly valid as long as you PAID for the original format and didn't sell or distribute publically

the various 'backup and distribution' sites are abusing the hell out of the 'public distribution' portion and the 'sell' portion

I think the core of your argument is: you think that - 'everything must have been paid for at least once' and therefore it is a valid argument that "making 'everything' available for free (because it is a 'backup' to 'someone') is righteous"

"and if pirates make a shitload of 'incidental' cash from advertisements, well thats just dandy."

also - your 'shoe analogy' (or any hard good 'rights') assumes that you bought A product that can't be instantly, perfectly, and for free - copied - and distributed - so do with it whatever the fuck you want - sorry, try again.

you are so batshit crazy :321GFY


.

if i buy a chair there is nothing to stop me from taking it apart going into my shop and building 100 copies and selling them


just because it easier to do with content doesn't change the fact that your talking about taking away right

the whole theft analogy is bogus because copyright is all about taking away property rights and replacing them with use rights

a trade off allowed because you automatically grant the public unlimited use rights for a collection of actions defined as fair use.

thanks for sharing!

total bullshit

no where in the fair use statue does it ever say fair use has to be private

if backups became illegal the second they were shared system management servers would be illegal

corporate ghosting images would be illegal

both restore an image to 1000s of machines from one shared source.


well since your public vs private arguement is total bullshit made up by you

yeah

torrents are network effect version of a vcr

they are superior to any pvr on the market because they are basicallly an infinite hard drive pvr which records every show and never goes down for any reason.

they have 20k built in redundancy


how easy it is to copy doesn't change the fact that copyright is about taking away property rights from the buyer and replacing them with licience rights instead.

that the point your trying to equate property rights to a model that specifically eliminates property rights.

The suits are not gonna stop.. in fact.. they are about to kick back up big time.

sweet. a decades worth of internet is going to be rolled back. better fire up that geocities page.

just like what 10% of the american population is in jail because of the fear of those same "consequences?"

get over it. the days of making easy money from content production are over - and this is coming from a content producer.

enough content has been dumped on the net to last literally a hundred years.

the point - and money to be made - is in sorting and delivering it.

Once again, fair use is defined as YOU see it.

Fair use is not unlimited.

Property rights cannot be substituted with use rights as the rights belong to two different sets of users, i.e. content producers and users.

Time shifting for private use is permitted, mass distribution in the name of time shifting is not permitted.

Fucking pirates trying to redefine the arguments. They should be prosecuted and put in jail.

I'm surprised that nobody has brought a RICO suit against one of these fucking tubesites.

reread the copyright act again

all the exclusive rights are explictly excluded for the scope of fair use


you are only granted exclusive rights for non fair use

that exactly how the law was written

if it fair use, the copyright holder has no exclusive rights what so ever.

exactly my point that why comparing copyright infringement to stealing shoes is total bs

the former is a situation where property rights can never be transfered, the latter is

that the huge difference that completely invalidates the arguement

copyright is a transfer of right of use for everything except fair use, which there is no need of tranfer because copyright act explictly says the copyright holder holds no exclusive rights for.

what to show me where in the definition it ever says private only fair use

it doesn't exist

if it did caching would be illegal because it very public

and the internet as a whole would be destroyed

yeah th e horror expecting you to obey the law as it written rather then letting you getting away with making up this private vs public bullshit as a way to invalidate LEGIT fair use.

how dare anyone redefine the arguement back to the TRUTH.

I hope it works, because I'm sick of fighting these a*holes who are stealing our content

I don't know if you realize this about yourself, but you have a way of double-talking -- almost in some kind of half-baked legalese, and twisting things to fit your view of the way YOU think things should be. What you say barely makes sense, and only makes it obvious to everyone that you have never created anything. You just want to make money from other people's work, and make up silly, overly technical excuses to justify the living you make from it.

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encycloped...ial-30100.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
(read the section on Amount and Sustainability)

You seem to be the self-proclaimed expert on fair use, but it also looks like you make up your own definition of it.

The is no "fair use" in Illegal tubes — that is asinine

So, rather than any due process, or proof, the MPAA email your ISP and say x has downloaded y, and the ISP then throttles your service?

QTF?

How many years of trying to punish downloaders do we need to learn to does nothing to stop piracy?

IF they have the tech to get the downloaders, why not use that to get the UPLOADERS? That's easy. That would stop, or at least curtail infringements.

Simple, because this has fuck all to do with stopping piracy and everything to do with quasi-extortion.

you might want to read your own quoted sources and the section you pointed me too

when i use the torrents to copy a tv show, i may be copying it from a public swarm (cloud), it however is still a copy made for a private viewing.

the cable vision case clearly established that public transmission of data does not invalidate the timeshifting right to make a copy.

I kind of think this is a better approach than trying to sue people, but I don't know how effective it's going to be to be honest. I really don't think there's any good way to stop piracy.

I have no idea if they are just going after downloaders or uploaders as well. However, the way I understand it there will be phases to it. If you are suspected of doing this they send you an email letting you know that this is happening. This way if you are innocent and maybe you have an unsecured WiFi connection or other people on your computer you can look into it and see what is going on.

If you persist in doing this they send a pop-up to your computer that will not go away until you click it and are sent to a page about why illegal downloading is bad. If you still continue they will redirect you and/or throttle you until you call them and talk to them.

So it isn't like if you download one thing, bam! you are throttled. I often see people argue that people could be a victim of unsecured WiFi or other people using their computer to download and the owner of the ISP connection gets screwed. This solution gives you a change to fix that problem without hitting you with a massive lawsuit.

I also saw no mention of them going after people for money. Maybe this will, but it sounds like they are just trying to take away people's service if they abuse it.

you do realize that current secure routers can be brute force cracked in less than 2 hours using free tools downloadable from the internet

unless the riaa is paying for 20k military grade routers with revolving key encryption

securing your wifi is not going to do shit to stop people from using your connection without authorization.

in fact because judges don't realize how easy it is to crack supposedly secure wifi
your basically going to open your self up to more liablity by securing your connection since the riaa will argue that you must be the downloader because the connection was "secure"

Where it the judicial review? Where is the process? Where is the right to appeal?

As you know, an IP address can be spoofed VERY FUCKING easily. Secure wifi can be cracked in 2 hours with open source tools.

They will be restricting/removing service for people the RIAA *say* are infringing.

That's all.

I prefer that old fashioned thing for criminals, what is it again, oh yes. Proof.

Just for the sake of argument, does any of this discussion even matter.

Can't a private company like an ISP pretty have much any TOS they want. For example, when you sign up to any ISP they usually have a line in the contract that says using this account for spam will cause them to close your account. They don't need proof from any sort of court, they can just cancel you as a subscriber if they suspect you are spamming.

I'm not saying it's right, but private companies have all kinds of shit in their TOS so they can pretty much tell you to fuck off anytime they want without any court proceeding. Credit cards, cell phone companies, gym memberships, they all have stuff in the TOS that lets them stop giving you service whenever they want for pretty much whatever reason. Most even have blatant language like "Company XYZ can terminate this agreement at anytime".

Check out some of the stuff you sign and you'll see what I mean. Very few companies are legally bound to continue providing you service if they choose not to and give you notice.

A quote from the Netflix TOS:

Even in adult, if a program puts it in their TOS that they don't want to pay for certain types of joins, they can do it.

I don't know about judicial review or what process they will be using. I just read the story and thought it was an interesting way to deal with it. Would you rather have it this way and defend yourself against possibly losing your ISP connection or would you rather it be a lawsuit asking for huge damages? To me the lawsuits are the hammer, this is more like the poke.

If you get the email or the pop up accusing you of piracy and really are innocent of any wrong doing I would assume you could contact your ISP explain this to them and perhaps they could look into it and find out what is going on.

Really, and be 100% honest here, how often do you think individuals encrypted WiFi connections are forced hacked so that the hacker can use the WiFi to download pirated movies and music? I'm sure it has happened but I would assume it is pretty rare especially when they could just drive down the street and likely find a completely unsecured WiFi connection to use. A few months ago I was at my brother's house helping my niece setup her laptop. When I went to connect to the WiFi they had in the house there were at least half a dozen other signals that I could reach that belonged to the various neighbors. Two of them had no security at all on them. I could see how someone like that could have their WiFi used for downloading, but I think the cases of people getting encrypted WiFi hacked for the purpose of downloading is pretty damn rare.

We can go back to the way you want it. The old fashioned way. With this technique the RIAA will decide that you are infringing and without warning they will file a suit against you asking for potentially thousands of dollars in damages and now you get the pleasure of hiring a lawyer and defending yourself against this and if you do win the case then you get to hope that your lawyer will get his fees paid by them. Even if it all works out in your favor and win the case how many hours of your time and how much stress are you going go through dealing with that? If you truly are innocent wouldn't you rather have them notify you that they think you are downloading and you can find out what is going on and put an end to it before anything gets started?

A friend of mine and I were talking about this today and we decided that if this idea is to go forward it will be through TOS changes. He argued that if the ISP's put something on his site to redirect him or give him a pop-up that was violating his privacy. I said that while that might be true the ISP would likely change their TOS so that you agree to let them do that as part of having internet access. I wouldn't be shocked if they also added that if you are notified/reported/or whatever they are going to call it of downloading more than a set number to times they have the right to terminate your service.

seriously

you just pointed out above that under this policy people who had unsecured wifi would have a chance to fix the problem by securing their wifi

if this policy was established how many unsecured wifi do you think you would find

the ony unsecured wifi would be people who know that you need a 20k router to properly protect yourself against open source tools currently available.


and your arguing those people should be throddled to hell

are you actually trying to justify this abuse by saying the old abuse was worse

do you realize that the old abuse was basically made illegal with the rulings that ip address is not proof of infringement.

I don't want to be rude and not answer so I will just quickly say two things.

I'm not justifying anything. I read the articles, I thought they were interesting and I thought they were a different take on attacking the piracy problem. I don't have the answers. I don't know how they plan to enforce it or how they will deal with people. I just posted the links because I thought they were interesting.

Secondly, I made an agreement with myself to stop dealing with you during our last debate so I am going to stick to that and not debate you. Think what you will. I don't care.

tell that to eharmony

http://www.ebar.com/news/article.php...s&article=1886

eharmony lost this case even though they proved they excluded gays because the cost of comming up with the 29 points of compatibility test for the demographic was not cost effective (they would spend more on the research then they would recoup by sellinf the service)

you can not tos away your legal responsibilities

try putting a clause in your contract that you won't pay hahahahahahas
and see how fast you get sued

such an action would violate privacy laws, rights to due process, etc.