Movie Studios Want Automated BitTorrent Warnings 140
daria42 writes "The lawsuit filed by movie and TV studios against Australian Internet service provider iiNet appears to have taken a new twist, with the studios using early judgments in the case to attempt to push other ISPs towards what it has described as a 'standardized automated processing system' for BitTorrent copyright infringement notices that would integrate with the ISPs' networks and automatically forward messages to customers when they were sent by the studios."
Rent it and Rip it (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously.... between tools like MakeMKV and Handbrake, it is trivial to rip a DVD these days. And on the crappy connections that they want to sell us (I'm on a 5mbit DSL with torrent traffic shaping turned on so I'm lucky to pull more than 100kbit), it's faster to simply rip the DVD to your local hard drive. Since I've already paid for the privilege, where's the incentive to actually go out and buy a DVD, now?
These people do realize that pirates are actually their best customers, right? The whole try before you buy thing? Yes, some folks will do it simply because they can, but I simply won't buy a DVD unless I've seen the movie, because I want to make sure I'm not paying for a crappy movie. That either means I download the movie, or I've seen it in theatre. If they don't want my business, that's their call; I'll just give the money to the local rental store, instead.
Re:Rent it and Rip it (Score:4, Interesting)
So you are saying you're willing to pay some scratch for it (rental).
This is it's worth to you, crappy movie or not.
The fact you indulge in pirate downloading actually validates some of their arguments (you acknowledge it has _some_ worth, but take the convenience route).
The best thing that can happen to the open source / free software movement is that enforceable / unbreakable DRM exists - so idiots like you who think convenience justifies pirating content can't play your pirated games or movies any more. (This also goes for Office, Windows etc)
If you had to pay the real price for the things you pirate - you wouldn't - so it clearly isn't worth that much to you, right?
O wait, I forgot, we have a few generations now who believe they should get stuff for free. Sure you should, but only the things people have decided they want to give you for free.
Re:"We want to spam all your customers at will..." (Score:5, Interesting)
What about this: What counts is trust. You need to make a network where everybody connects directly with trustworthy friends ONLY---talking real friends, not "Facebook friends." These are connected with other trustworthy friends, but friendship is not transitive, and so you cannot connect with the friends of your friends unless they are already your friends. On top of this, add an onion-routing based mechanism to request things from friends, and their friends if they don't have it, and so on, until the requested entity is found and onion-routed back.
Assuming it's technically implemented in the right way, a node in such a network can only be compromised when a friend betrays you. As long as you add only real friends, the network is pretty safe and very hard to subvert. I wanted to implement this myself but the NAT traversal without central servers needed for this to work turned out to be a tough nut to crack. Of course, using a broadcast/flooding search the network is also not very efficient. But perhaps someone finds the idea interesting...?
Re:"We want to spam all your customers at will..." (Score:5, Interesting)
welcome back to the rise of sneakernet.
I have not been in college for decades and decades; but I *assume* that that many kids together will have drive sharing parties. no intertubes THERE to get in the way.
Re:"We want to spam all your customers at will..." (Score:4, Interesting)
What you are describing is typically called a darknet. In small groups darknets work great, but as the group grows the risk grows.
Assuming it's technically implemented in the right way, a node in such a network can only be compromised when a friend betrays you.
Let's assume 3 friends are in the relationship A -> B -> C. If A is somehow caught (due to coincidence, stupidity or simply trusting the wrong person) then that exposes B. When B is caught inevitably due to A, that exposes C. Each node that is compromised on the network reveals more and more, and basically an attacker only needs one node to get started.
Given the nature of the average user, this network will not survive many iterations of "friends of friends". It's inevitable that someone who misunderstands the concept of a darknet breaks trust. What you're describing is already implemented several times and is used by W.A.S.T.E. and if I'm not mistaken Freenet 0.7 has an implementation of a darknet.
I wanted to implement this myself but the NAT traversal without central servers needed for this to work turned out to be a tough nut to crack. Of course, using a broadcast/flooding search the network is also not very efficient. But perhaps someone finds the idea interesting...?
Kademlia does a good job of maintaining a "routing table" for your network, but doesn't solve the NAT traversal problem for you. You're stuck with STUN and NAT-PMP or UPnP for solving the NAT problem. These techniques are already in use in current bittorrent clients that use DHT. The biggest problem with Kademlia is that it builds a list of all nodes on the network for efficiency reasons, allowing it to survive network churn. A kademlia like DHT would be needed for building an index of what is on the network.
You would most likely be more interested in having each node in the network act as a relay for other nodes, so Kademlia is perhaps a bit overkill for tracking nodes. Suppose that you're interested in downloading "cop_dog.mpg". You go look in your lookup table for "cop_dog.mpg" and find that you got keys from your neighbour node B. So you know who to contact. Node B knows that Node C and D on the network have this movie, but they are only connected to node B, and you're node A. This would mean that node B can download the movie from C and D, and has to relay all that data towards your node A (if you want to make sure that you only allow direct peers to connect to eachother).
There are several problems with this setup as well:
I'm not an expert on the subject, and I'm sure the developers of Tor, I2P and Freenet have much more interesting things (and most likely more accurate) to say on the subject. There's also a lot of interesting research papers written on P2P networks, although mostly about churn. I got interested in P2P a long time ago when I was looking for a solution to a particular problem, but opted for a centralized system in the end due to not finding a decent way to "trust" nodes in the network.