The Copyright Alert System: Moving to Implementation

http://www.copyrightinformation.org/node/709

by kghose • 14 years ago

41 53 14 years ago

melvinng• 14 years ago

educate or brainwash? I'm pretty sure the general public already knows about it with SOPA and every ad before the start of the movie.

spindritf• 14 years ago

Also discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679150

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

If they really start doing this, it's time to rent a seedbox.

https://www.feralhosting.com/pricing

tux19682• 14 years ago

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.

tomjen3• 14 years ago

What legal options?

Actually watching things on a physical tv?

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

> 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.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

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?

icebraining• 14 years ago

What makes you think they care?

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

"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.

hnolable2• 14 years ago

http://lifehacker.com/5940565/why-you-should-start-using-a-v... (why you should start using a vpn)

vegardx• 14 years ago

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.

hnolable2• 14 years ago

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.

Quarrelsome2• 14 years ago

> they are subject to the same laws and regulations

True, but the VPN provider doesn't need to be in a country that follows these laws. Russia and China spring to mind as long term solutions.

jinx_xnij• 14 years ago

Seedbox in Europe, rented through a company in Canada, SFTP to me = awesome

montecarl• 14 years ago

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.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

How does that work with bittorrent's out of order downloading?

mgkimsal• 14 years ago

Are they only looking at P2P traffic? Can we start torrenting on port 80?

bo10242• 14 years ago

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).

noahc• 14 years ago

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.

benologist3• 14 years ago

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); ...

http://www.att.com/shop/internet/att-internet-terms-of-servi...

bo10242• 14 years ago

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

benologist3• 14 years ago

Didn't we just have this discussion?

Edit: apparently not, hours ago we discussed "Internet providers to begin warning customers who pirate content" which is of course, different.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4679150

mistercow4• 14 years ago

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.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/

otakucode2• 14 years ago

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.

Hoff• 14 years ago

Economic Analysis Group Competition Advocacy Paper by Gerald R. Bodisch, US DoJ Antitrust division

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/eag/246374.htm

tptacek4• 14 years ago

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!

wmf2• 14 years ago

system for getting IP addresses of infringers to the copyright holders

That's not how it works.

chaostheory4• 14 years ago

How does it work?

mistercow4• 14 years ago

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.

javajosh• 14 years ago

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.

jiggy20115• 14 years ago

Can you elaborate? I'm not sure what the point of such a law would be.

pmorici• 14 years ago

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.

The Copyright Alert System: Moving to Implementation

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