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?
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.