US ISPs, Big Content Reaching Antipiracy Agreement 342
Chaonici writes "The word from CNet is that an antipiracy agreement between a number of ISPs (including Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast) and the RIAA & MPAA is nearing completion. Under the agreement, ISPs will step up their responses to copyright infringement complaints against subscribers. If a subscriber accumulates enough complaints, the ISP can throttle their bandwidth, limit their Web access to only the top 200 websites, and/or require participation in a 'copyright awareness' program that explains the rights of content creators. ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system. Ars Technica confirms the story with notes from an industry source, who mentions that the Obama administration is 'generally supportive' of the agreement."
What is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
What is this, fascism week?
The wording scares me (Score:4, Insightful)
subject (Score:4, Insightful)
"ISPs and rights holders will share the costs of the system."
Ha ha! But seriously, customers will share the costs with other customers. RIAA might jack up member fees, but they were probably going to do that anyway.
Internet Access Is a Basic Human Right (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, who am I kidding. They probably won't have anything to say about it at all.
Re:What is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
That would be great if there was actual market competition in the broadband arena. It's pretty simply a monopoly, and if you factor in the government sanction that provides the monopoly... then yes... it is fascism.
This is vastly more sinister than the government adopting this stance officially.. because we can vote the bastards out who passed it. With the current state of broadband in the US, the only voting out we can do is canceling service in protest, something I suspect the Great Unwashed is unwilling to do.
This has nothing to do with actual infringement. All you need is to piss off the right people and zing! you're throttled and limited. There is no due process. If you get "enough complaints"... your ISP is going to screw you over withholding service that YOU paid for. How equitable is that? How is that not illegal? The EFF needs to sue.
Without competition, we are, to put it bluntly... fucked. And this sort of nonsense has made it more and more clear that the *AA's don't want my money. That's fine. I'll keep it. If only 20% of the people in the US did that, we'd be able to force change. As it stands now, about all we can do is shake our fists and shout insults as the *AA's burn down the orphanage and assrape the kids escaping the fire.
Re:Peer Block (Score:2, Insightful)
Peer Block is neigh pointless. All it does it prevent communication with an IP based off a list. This fails in 2 distinct ways. A. You have to have a trustworthy list that assumes they don't rotate their IP addresses and isn't poisoned by those same companies. B. The Trackers have a full list of IP addresses that are part of the swarm and also maintain statistics on upload/downloads. Preventing communication isnt the same as being hidden, dont trust peer block to do much for you.
Re:What is this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't Pirate Bay in the top 200 sites?
How will this impact hardcore infringers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Answer: It won't.
Most people who are hardcore infringers are already using things like seedboxes for uploading & downloading torrents. How do these idiot lawyers expect these agreements to impact VPS's hosted in countries like India? Rent 100gig of disk space & bandwidth from another country for $20/month or so, run all your torrents there, then use rsync via ssh, scp, etc. to do an encrypted transfer to/from your home. Even with deep packet inspection the ISP couldn't possibly know that you're copying copyrighted material to/from your seedbox.
The future is here! (Score:4, Insightful)
consumer is powerless (Score:5, Insightful)
When all of the business are in collusion, the consumer has no power.
Re:What does it take to become an ISP? (Score:4, Insightful)
You are entirely right, except:
You see the problem isn't fascism, its corporatism.
That's what 'fascism' is, dude. The corporations and the government, working together. The corporations do what the 'government isn't allow to' (Like find people guilty of crimes without due process), and the government makes sure the corporations stay well feed, and invulnerable to any sort of lawsuits or prosecutions.
Don't go around inventing another word. It already exists, it's 'fascism'.
I pointed this out back when the government asserted the right to immunize the telecoms for the telecoms' illegal spying at the government's request. In short, the government hired corporations to commit felonies, and then forgave those felonies, and classified their end of it so they couldn't be prosecuted either.
We're not in some hypothetical hysteria people making up stuff...we're in actual, literal, dictionary-definition fascism. Sadly, people seem to think fascism requires concentration camps or something....it doesn't, ask the Italians.
We are also, I feel I should point out, in a dictionary-definition police state. Because of Gitmo. The executive claiming the power to imprison and hold people without charging them with crimes is the definition of a police state.
Re:Bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
One more has finally seen the light.
I don't consider myself pro-piracy. I believe that receiving the benefit from something without the owner's permission is unethical (even if the owner still gets to benefit from it). I am an artist myself, and thus have a vested interest in copyright law. I believe that a reasonable copyright system is worthwhile, and those who try to avoid recompensing artists and authors under such a system should be punished.
We do not have such a system. We have a system where a person can be punished on the mere accusation of wrongdoing (DMCA takedown notice); where the online equivalent of jaywalking is punishable by fines in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (Jammie Thomas); where so-called "limited-time" copyright keeps getting extended so that nothing will ever go public domain again; where companies can lock up their works so that even when they do go public domain they still can't be accessed (DRM); where the force of law backs this up so you're not allowed to bypass such locks even for legitimate use (DMCA); where copyright infringement is equated to terrorism by assigning it to the organization created specifically to go after terrorists (DHS); where anti-piracy international agreements are made in secret and all we get is a name that equates piracy with one of the most severe crimes of a civilized society (Anti-COUNTERFEITING Trade Agreement); where companies can get away with spamming letters threatening lawsuits without even a hint of accuracy checking so that even people who don't have a computer get threatened without any legal recourse; where giant companies can convince the government to do practically anything just by complaining about how much they're being harmed by piracy even when they're making record-breaking profits; where the whole idea of copyright, which was originally meant "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" now keeps every possible idea locked up so tightly that the law hinders the progress of science and the useful arts, all so that a handful of executives of big companies can each buy a third yacht.
I'm not pro-piracy. I'm anti-broken-copyright-system. It's gotten to the point where I consider it more unethical to give money to those who support such a system than to copy or share something that does not belong to me.
Don't blame me. I'm just a product of the system. The system has declared war on me, as it has on everyone who has ever read a book, watched a movie, or listened to a song and wanted a copy of it for ourselves, but not at the price nor in the format that is on the market. And when you declare war on that many people, don't be surprised if some of them fight back.