6 Strikes and you're Screwed (your ISP and piracy crackdown)

[Mousey]

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Anytime copyright holders find that their content is being illegally downloaded, they will contact the participating ISPs. The ISPs will then send out an initial “copyright alert” to accounts linked to the alleged infringement. If a subscriber’s account continues to be linked to infringement, his or her ISP will send out up to four written notices, the natures of which are sometimes vague and varying. If the alleged infringement continues still, the ISP will then take “mitigation measures,” which include bandwidth throttling (i.e. slowing down the accused subscriber’s connection), or even temporarily cutting off full Web browsing abilities. In cases where alleged infringement persists after the initial mitigation measure, the subscriber may face lawsuits from the copyright holder, and/or have their Internet access cut entirely, in accordance with section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA).

Who is in charge of this system?
Administering “six strikes” is a new entity called the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), which was established by the entertainment industry and the ISP industry. (Internet users were not part of the negotiations.) ....


...As it stands, all a copyright holder has to do is say — but not prove — that infringing activities are taking place in order for an ISP to alert or punish a subscriber with throttling or access disruption. In other words: Users are considered guilty unless they can prove themselves innocent. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a public rights advocacy group, notes, “This burden-shift violates our traditional procedural due process norms and is based on the presumed reliability of infringement-detection systems that subscribers haven’t vetted and to which they cannot object.”

and blah blah blah ad infinitum... the DOJ, the MPAA, and the RIAA rule the frickin' internet....

 

[LaHutti]

They would like to.

 

[Realitybitez]

Its less strict than our countries new copy rite laws. 3 strikes your'll out Broadband throttled, then cut off, a huge as fine and then if caught again.. jail

 

[Mousey]

Its less strict than our countries new copy rite laws. 3 strikes your'll out Broadband throttled, then cut off, a huge as fine and then if caught again.. jail

Well, you know how things are here in the states.... they don't want to put violators in jail, they just want all their money. "the subscriber may face lawsuits from the copyright holder"

 

[jetset]

Great news for copyright bounty hunters like Righthaven, you could say, although they've suffered some serious setbacks recently from people prepared and financially capable of defending themselves.

It hasn't taken long for self-interested groups and politicians to take the internet apart and tinker with its global nature, that's for sure.

 

[vinylweatherman]

Surely this will fall apart like the previous efforts.

Whilst the strikes and penalties may be enacted, a subscriber could then "prove their innocence" by suing their ISP and other bodies for getting it wrong. Unless the detection systems are accurate, such cases could prove both expensive and damaging to the industry. It's possible even that the copyright bodies themselves could end up in the dock.

The UK is supposed to have had measures lile this for a while, but the ISPs have been resistent to get involved as those who are toughest risk losing customers. Customers could also change ISPs on a regular basis and mess up the tracking.

The REAL pirates will quickly find a way around these measures, so these measures may miss the intended target.

Over zealous pursuit also risks having many people receiving notices for no real offence, which will devalue the seriousness of the issue because it will become a law that "everybody breaks sometime" because it is near impossible to know what is, and what is not, considered an offence.

Despite all previous efforts, far from decreasing, there has never been so much BLATANT piracy in the past. Rather than search the file sharing networks for the chance of downloading something very slowly after waiting in a queue, it seems there are now plenty of sites that have whole movies and shows for download, and quite blatantly "mainstream and legit" as they can take payment from credit and debit cards, paypal, etc. They are carefully worded so that they charge for a "premium download service", rather than any actual content. They also seem immune from actions to shut them down, and they also manage to advertise in the mainstream such as Facebook and Google ads. Google even brings such sites up for searches based on film and TV, so they are pretty easy to find.

As well as all this, they have to catch and identify individual offenders among all the other internet traffic.

This underground industry is fuelled by the "luddite" attitude of many film and TV studios, who have starved customers of legal means of digital access, and still continue to do so. An expansion of legal digital access that actually WORKS, rather than causes endless frustrations with "technical issues", random availability or not of content, and endless obstacles to smooth access, will reduce the appeal of the pirate sites.

The only way this can be made to work is to more or less kill the internet. If all offenders could be caught every time, soon half the world's internet users will be thrown off. This will solve the problem, but kill the internet. Other internet based industries should consider the consequences, as those kicked off the internet will be unable to shop online, bank online, or even pay bills online. They may then come to realise just how critical the internet has become to the modern economy.

It's almost like the "war on drugs", which has been waged for much longer than the internet has been around, yet there is more access to cheaper drugs that ever before, and you can go to jail for a FIRST offence, let alone your 7th.

 

[maxd]

FWIW the current administration in France has been messing about with a "3 strikes" system called HADOPI. Might have something to do with the fact that the average price for a music CD is US$20 while DVDs are still up around US$30. Coincidentally the party leader is good friends with a number of the largest media retail barons in France.