I can't help but notice that I am confused[1] by this six strikes deal. So they're going to invest millions of dollars in a system to monitor and notify ISPs for the purpose of... educating people about copyright? With no significant repercussions? And you can avoid those education steps by just not being with one of the top 6 ISPs? Doesn't add up.
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.
I would not be too surprised if action were taken to create a new law which makes it illegal for content creators to sell content directly to consumers. Such laws already exist that prevent car manufacturers from selling directly to the public, and they exist for no reason other than to create an artificial market in which car dealerships can pretend to offer a valuable service. Content distributors are now in the same position. They need to have an artificial market constructed to make it look like they are doing something of value.
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.
Exactly how do you propose that any statute could be devised to forbid the sale of "content" to consumers? If you can do that, you can just as easily forbid the sale of anything colored blue, or of books containing the word "prickleberry". The Constitution has something to say about that.
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!
> The Constitution has something to say about that.
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.
If you're going to say the content industry can ignore the Constitution, then what's to argue with? If they can do that, they can do anything. Disney can charge you not only for copying Mickey Mouse, but for also for simply having mice in your house.
Can you explain your reasoning in a way that does not also lead to the conclusion that nobody would ever pass a law outlawing the direct sale of automobiles to consumers?
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.
You never know. With the current trend being the sale of licenses and not the actual content, maybe one day in the future people can only sell licenses through approved license sellers. If you think that's ridiculous, what do you think people 50 years ago would think of what's happened to our airports? It's not that far fetched unless one thing changes: techies as a whole start lobbying harder and with more money.
OK, they're pretty nebulous about the exact process, but you can piece it together. First we have this:
* 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.
No, I did not mean that, because that's not what it does. It pretty clearly monitors p2p networks, finds the IP addresses, and then notifies the ISPs. If you read closely, you'll see that it also passes the IP along to the content owners.
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.
Whenever you connect to a P2P system you are advertising your IP address publically, so it requires no conspiracy to get them and certainly no violation of privacy.
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".
>Whenever you connect to a P2P system you are advertising your IP address publically, so it requires no conspiracy to get them and certainly no violation of privacy.
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?
This really makes me want to upload all my (legally obtained) files to EC2 then download them. How could they ever tell whether the bits are licensed or not?
"Over the course of the next two months, each participating ISP expects to begin rolling out its version of the CAS – a system through which ISPs will pass on to their subscribers notices sent by content owners alleging copyright infringement over peer-to-peer networks."
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.
Actually, they need a law that requires immutable MAC addresses, routers that expose their NAT tables and MAC tables to "trusted third parties", and ISPs to expose their physical-address-to-IP tables. Altering a MAC address, possessing contraband "open" hardware, would be a criminal offense. Like a car at the DMV, computers would need to be registered and private party transfers would have to be registered. Possession of a device with either an unregistered MAC address or an address associated with someone else would be a serious crime.
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.
The point would be so you could identify an individual computer and upon investigation tie it definitively to an owner. As it stands you can easily change a MAC address and the translation of private -> public IP address done by a NAT capable network device combines the traffic of multiple computers to look like it is a single one. This means you can only attribute file sharing activity to a public ip which in practice might have numerous clients behind it.
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.
You will only usually only know the MAC address of the last hop since a new layer 2 frame is generated every time a packet hits a switch or router.
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.
A VPN is not a solution, it bypasses the problem temporarily. A VPN provider is no different than any other ISP, they are subject to the same laws and regulations. And you really don't want to be surfing the web with an added 50-100ms latency just so you can pirate.
This "educational" campaign isn't due to laws or regulations but to some corporate agreements. So VPN is a solution. Also some VPN providers provide SOCKS proxies as well so you can selectively proxy your traffic. Also 50-100ms is pretty ridiculous, most VPN providers will have a server within a few 10s of ms from you.
Are you ready to give your credit card number to a service run by chinese or russians ? rememeber they dont follow US laws , wait til they screw you ...
Who cares? Your credit card company is American and as such you have all the American consumer protections on credit card purchases (which are actually very good.)
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.
I still don't understand how this is legal. If you signed an agreement with your ISP for a certain speed of internet for a certain length of time, why can they just choose to violate the contract based on what some third party says?
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).
ISPs have always had explicit policies about not using their service or facilities to break laws. Your agreement to pay $xx/month for some number of megabits does not and can not and has never superseded the law.
... (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); ...
Sure, but that doesn't (or shouldn't) mean that if I phone your ISP and tell them you broke the law, they can assume that's true and take action against you
1) bo1024 explicitly agrees neither he nor anybody else will use his internet account for illegal activities
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.
This is legal because like most contracts you sign with service providers they read, "And subject to change at any time for any reason" or "We reserve the right to modify this contract at will".
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.
Sure, but a slim fraction of people who currently download content with bittorrent will resort to this. This will dramatically decrease the number of seeders and thus reduce the effectiveness of torrents even for those willing to pay for a seedbox. In any case, it will increase the cost of downloading pirated content and make legal options more attractive.
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.
> This will dramatically decrease the number of seeders and thus reduce the effectiveness of torrents even for those willing to pay for a seedbox.
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.
Sure, or Hulu or whatever. Remember this enforcement isn't world-wide, it's only in the USA for now.
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.
It's only a matter of time until the US media organizations starts putting political pressure on others to implement the same thing. The only difference is we have no legal way at all to obtain the content.
Rsync would be better than SFTP, because you can start copying the file before it is done. I have large files copied to my laptop from my seedbox almost as soon as the download completes on the seedbox.
I haven't used a seedbox, but it seems like the best arrangement would be to download the files from your seedbox using BitTorrent over a VPN. Your local client would only accept local peers (which the seedbox would be, virtually), so you aren't compromising your security, but you get your files almost as fast as your seedbox.
I'm pretty sure clients can be configured to make this work, but I haven't looked into the details.
Rsync sends only the changes, wherever they are in the file. So if you set up a "while 1 rsync remotefile localfile" kind of script it will converge on the correct version of the file with minimal overhead.
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/