From the “I love the smell of a cartel in the morning” department comes this Los Angeles Times report:
A coalition comprised of movie and television studios, cable and phone companies and record labels are launching a wide-ranging initiative aimed at cracking down on Internet piracy.
The effort will brings together Internet Service Providers — the companies that are the gatekeepers to to the worldwide web — and content creators in the fight against the theft of intellectual property. It will be overseen by the newly created Center for Copyright Information whose backers include the Motion Picture Association of America, whose members include all the major Hollywood movie and televison producers, the Recording Industry Association of America and Internet Service Providers Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable, Verizon and AT&T.
Specifically, the initiative will target households whose Internet usage indicates that pirated content is either being uploaded or downloaded. As many as six “copyright alerts” will be sent to those homes in an effort to let subscribers know that their Internet accounts have been used in an illegal fashion. Subscribers will get a series of warnings in the form of emails or pop-up messages.
While the ISPs will not shut down a subscriber’s broadband service as punishment for piracy-related activity, there will be repercussions to users including the potential for having the speed in which they access the Internet reduced, which would hinder piracy. Repeat offenders may also be required to contact their ISP provider to discuss the matter.
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Ok. Some of us subscribe to streaming video rental services. How will they distinguish us from “pirates”?
No need; rentals are piracy in their eyes.
This is primarily going to be about P2P like bittorrent where they can effectively get your IP and where they know what you are sharing.
What? That’s not possible, bittorrent is nothing like p2p file sharing apps like limewire for example; they’re file-sharing broad-based networks that rely on search requests (provided by the apps) for general trackers with a wide range of files, whereas bittorrent is file-focused and relies in individuals trackers (trackers that are not available thru search request and must be specifically found thru the web) for that specific file.
It’s hardly “not possible” as I’ve received all of my DMCA “cease sharing” notices when using bittorrent. It’s not like the public trackers aren’t well known and easy to find.
Well yah. It’s easy.
Find a torrent, download it, and then start downloading the torrent yourself. Every IP address that connects yours is controlled by some individual violating copyright.
You automate this and then you just send out cease and desist orders to ISPs that house those numbers.
Not terribly difficult stuff if your a anti-piracy company.
It’s getting to the point where I don’t want to bother watching any Hollywood movies or TV shows, “legally” or otherwise. I’ve never “pirated”. Most of their stuff is rank anyway and Hollywood is just an imperial tool.
They’re making the anarchists dream of “privatized security” look bad.
The bastards.
Comes from the “How to Permanently Lose Customers In Short Order” manual.
Based on a vague suspicion that users are downloading pirated content, they may reduce the internet speed for the user? What they’re actually saying is they want the internet to go away so they can cling to their doomed business model.
They’d have to shut off someone’s access to prevent illegal downloads of books that are still copyright in the US. Plain text files are small compared to videos or even audio files. Even pdf’s aren’t that big.
The Hollywood types want to get paid over and over again forever for the same work.
The ISPs want to get paid every month — but don’t you dare actually _try_ to use unlimited data.
What a partnership! We can hope that some of the smaller ISPs will refuse to play this game.
First, I’m not for this at all. I think it’s a horrible idea that will not help anyone, especially ISPs. They are going to find out they are wrong. Broadband customers are in many many cases purchasing broadband to engage in at least some piracy. Even if they don’t know their kids are doing it they will decide it’s ok once they discover the alternative is buying more stuff.
That said, what they are doing is voluntary the best that I can tell and they aren’t openly using the state that I can tell. So insofar as this is the case I don’t think there is a real case to be made against it from a libertarian perspective. Isn’t it up to these companies who to associate with and under what terms to provide their service?
Now I do agree there is a large extent to which they are only so big and pervasive due to government intervention, but the proper thing to do is complain (like this article), refuse to do business with companies that are doing this if we have alternatives, or hide P2P usage under VPNs and proxies.
This is what I think we’ll see a lot more of from this, and this is the reason I think that IP can’t be enforced voluntarily. It requires government force because people will circumvent it otherwise.
Yes, this seems to be voluntary so far. But it could be made mandatory in the future.
All the more reason for customers to not put up with it, assuming there is some alternative. I will be looking for ISPs that refuse to be a part of this. But with major players on board such as AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast (which include the two wireline options and two of the major wireless options available to me), that only leaves Sprint/Clear wireless, T-Mobile wireless, and a few independent wireless operators such as Virgin Mobile that buy from one of them.
In Canada the biggest ISPs are owned by the biggest satellite TV and cable TV companies. They will happily go along with any government crackdown on the Internet, no matter how extreme, because they want to scare and throttle their customers into paying for their own premium channels and video-on-demand services.
Actually “go along with” is a poor choice of words … they would happily “conceive, inspire, demand, lobby for” any government crackdown on the internet.
This “wide-ranging” policy would, in fact, be artifactual. It would not be enforcable and the money to create and implement the policy would be wasted. I have a poster reproduced in my blog that is, in fact, attributed in the blog and Google sent a pop-up that there may be copyright issues. A single use of an oft copied work? Ridiculous. Get a hobby.
The lords of IP want it to get much, much worse. This is just the tip of the iceburg. Well actually the tip of the tip.
They are not aiming their sights at P2P as much as they did. People actually providing services on the Internet for streaming videos and music have largely destroyed much of the public’s appetites for piracy.
What they are aiming for is to monitor your connection for streaming videos and uploading content. If they catch and intimidate P2P users, then that would be a bonus, but it’s not their fundamental goal anymore.
Here is another aspect:
They want to have 50 years controls over content that is in addition to copyrights. That is if you upload your content to Youtube, say a video of a flower, and you intend it to be freely available and used by anybody it will still get additional restrictions placed on it and anybody using it will be violating Google’s IP (since they own youtube).
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/its-back-wipo-broadcasting-treaty-returns-grave
Why should we be worried about this? Broadcasters claim that a treaty is needed to protect against signal piracy, and that the Broadcasting Treaty is simply “updating” their rights for the digital age. But what’s really at stake here is something more far-reaching. This Treaty will set the legal rules that will govern the distribution of information on the Internet. The current draft Treaty would grant exclusive, 50-year intellectual property rights to distributors of information that apply in parallel with copyright protections, even when transmitters have had no role in creating the content being transmitted. Although it’s not entirely clear, the new South African proposal [PDF] and the “Non-Paper” [PDF] on elements for a new treaty also seem to contemplate intellectual property rights for broadcasters and cablecasters. This move raises the same set of public policy concerns brought up by the existing draft Treaty, which threatens to stifle innovation and the creative freedom of anyone working with audio or visual content in the Internet environment.
All sorts of fun stuff like that.
Of course this ties in heavily with every government’s desire to institute a way to monitor and control the activity of people on the internet for the sake of it’s own protections.
A example of this is Obama’s desire to make having end-to-end communication with effective encryption (read: government-proof) illegal and have all VoIP and other communications be routed through corporate offices were they can monitor people’s activities through wireless tapping laws.
Copyright and placating media companies is just a vehicle, a excuse, that will be used to eliminate true freedom of speech on the internet.
As slashdot pointed out, it’a “funny” how most of those ISP are owned by media companies.
Seedboxen
Millions of them
Well, I am not a techy. Most of these IP’s get me confused, like Internet Provider and Intellectual Property. And I get kind of hung up when the talk is about the state and the State. Expecially when the reply uses one form and the blog uses another. It seems you are talking about two different things. It is my understanding that we are already being monitored randomly and it has lead to incarceration of minors without any representation based on the terms of the anti-terrorist laws. I am pretty sure the entity in the movie Eagle Eye does already exist in some form. Are you saying, by ‘corporate offices’, that this type of monitoring can be sub contracted and become an actual industry? And even I know the fact that bit torrent is heavily monitored. I am getting kind of scared. But I’m not going to let it stop me or slow me down. It is our legacy I pity.
I am sorry if I am being vague and a bit incoherent.
It’s technical.
For a VoIP connection (Say you want to talk to Bob) have two major parts:
1) You need to create connection. You need to know were Bob is and how to communicate with him.
2) The actual connection that the VoIP traffic goes over.
These are two distict and seperate issues.
There are 2 major approaches to doing VoIP:
Type A. (Discovery service + Peer-to-Peer Voip) You connect to a discovery service that reveals the location of Bob. Now that you know Bob’s location can connect directly to him Peer-to-Peer and by-pass the provider’s servers completely.
Type B. (Traditional style telephone, just over the internet) You connect to a VoIP provider and it works like a old fashion telephone company. They take your VoIP connection, route it around on their servers (in their corporate offices), and then sends it to Bob’s phone.
Both types have their plusses and minuses. Examples… Type A allows better performance and (potentially) better security since it’s a direct connection. Type B makes it easier to work around network problems and provide lot more features (like Voice mail or conference calling).. and tends to be more user-friendly.
A full-featured commercial offering will provide both types (and/or mixtures of them) so customers can choose based on what they need for their purposes.
From the government’s perspective, however, Type B allows them to continue to take advantage of wiretapping. Since your VoIP traffic needs to be decrypted to provide services like conference calling then that allows the government to get access to your VoIP conversation at the corporate offices of the VoIP provider.
Type A *can be secured effectively using government wiretapping. You can use encryption techniques like ‘One Time Pad’ to get better-then-military encryption and make it impossible for anybody to wiretap you (IF done correct). The only people that would be able to record the converstation are you or Bob.
*(CAN, it is currently, generally NOT secure by most providers. Most VoIP is unecrypted)
Obama and friends are trying to pass wiretapping laws that would require commercial VoIP providers to provide mechanisms for wiretapping.
This means that ‘Type A P2P’ VoIP would be effectively illegal to provide support for commercially.
Fascist, not necessarily liberal, we are talking here. Thanks for explanation. I kind of got it and googled P2P and stuff. Bless dialogue.
The state and State thing? I always thought our country was about State’s Rights. Like no one is paying attention to that anymore.
Well, I am old and romantic. So. . .
Yeah. States rights have gone the way of the dodo when the Federal government smashed states that tried to secede. That is when a voluntary union became involuntary.
Too bad they left the union over the dispute of such a morally reprehensible subject as of slavery. It makes even the discussion of “State rights” a political minefield.
Complete waste of time and money on their part. They should focus on new ways to make money in the age of the internet instead of trying to pretend it is 1990 still. You don’t even need to download movies anymore. You can just watch them online thru a multitude of different sites for free. Sure they can shut down a site but ten others pop up the same day. Even if you believe in IP it should be obvious that technology is only making it easier to access these products for free. These stories and the ones of Rupert Murdoch putting up pay walls always make me laugh. Death to the dinosaurs and good riddance.
These people aren’t doing this based on reason, but emotion. They feel in their gut that it is their right to have a monopoly over any use of these intellectual creations, that unauthorized use is no different than someone walking into their house and taking their belongings. They haven’t yet taken the time to reflect on whether these are justified, so their rampage continues.
And speaking of walking into people’s houses. I am the one that has been espousing the deed-in-lieu-of foreclosure process, loudly, clearly, and repeatedly. My daughter is doing it. The bank gives her $2000 to avoid foreclosure, it takes effect July 18, and she has until July 30 to empty the house. Yesterday, July 09, someone broke in through a window, knocking over a high bookshelf, drilled out the old locks and put in new ones. Police report for breaking and entering the bank will have to answer, but the irony is it takes them six months to get back to you about any other piece of paper. More WTFery.
Something like that would make me want to just set fire to the place.
“Well, shit. I was frying some egg’s and my sister’s kid called me up saying that he broke his leg and needed help to get to the hospital. They are out of town and so I panicked and went to pick him up. I guess I forgot I was cooking with grease and left the oven on!”
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