Copyright Alert System To Launch Monday 224
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from the Daily Dot:
"Starting next week, most U.S. Internet users will be subject to a new copyright enforcement system that could force them to complete educational programs, and even slow their Internet speeds to a crawl. A source with direct knowledge of the Copyright Alert System [said] the five participating Internet service providers will start the controversial program Monday. The ISPs — industry giants AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon — will launch their versions of the CAS on different days throughout the week. Comcast is expected to be the first, on Monday."
Of course, there are many ways around the Copyright Alert System, so it probably won't be terribly effective.
Re:To be fair. (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it as bad? Well, this could easily affect innocent people, and it could be used against anyone. Hell, since there's no real oversight, I can say that it probably will.
Regardless of whether it's as bad as some of the other insane copyright enforcement schemes, it's still unjust.
PLEASE!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Can we PLEASE keep referring to it as "Six Strikes system"? Not the Industry-concocted, innocent-sounding "alert system" crap? Thank you.
force violators to take educational courses (Score:2, Interesting)
" force violators to take educational courses". where they can learn the 'company line'. I'll switch ISP's when one tries that shit with me, and when their are no ISP's to switch to, get away with as much as possible and make it a RULE to NOT purchase any IP media ever, regardless.
A solution to this would be if everyone just stopped going to theaters and stopped buying movies for about 6-12 months, it would bankrupt all these corps and there wouldn't be a lobby to try to criminalize this stuff. Sure no new GOOD movies for a few months but startups would think differently until they too got to big for their britches.
Re:To be fair. (Score:2, Interesting)
The funny thing is that all this is gonna do is grow tor's (and other thingies) use to levels unseen before. It will take some years, sure, but sooner or later these dumbasses are going to be scratching their heads wondering what the hell is that seemingly random flow out there that they cannot crack.
Re:Download Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
I got a nasty letter from my ISP telling me "No peer-to-peer". I called them, and said "WTF guys? I download Linux distros and OpenOffice ISOs via torrent, all kinds of 100% legal and legitimate content." "We don't care. No peer-to-peer."
So I signed up for a VPN, of course.
Re:Download Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
Fortunately or unfortunately, only agents of the *AA can report infringement. The system cannot be turned against itself. Arguably this is unfair to all copyright holders who are not part of the *AA, but the flip side is that you can pirate non-AA content with impunity.
Re:Please don't let that happen -- not yet (Score:4, Interesting)
Encrypt everything by default, and allow nothing unencrypted, just needs to become default behavior in all operating systems, and become the de-facto standard, for everything, for security purposes, before anyone else can act.
The trouble is, while passing good laws often requires a lot of time and debate, passing knee-jerk reactionary laws based on lobbying in technical fields that most legislators frankly don't understand can be done almost in moments. It's already a criminal offence here in the UK to refuse to hand over a password if the Powers That Be want to know what your encrypted communications say, and the law was widely criticised for (among other things) being about as black-and-white as you could possibly be. For example, minor details like whether the password you've been required to provide actually exists tend not to be relevant to any defence.
So in my admittedly pessimistic view of how these things currently tend to work in practice, I don't see your "default behaviour in all operating systems" as being even remotely possible until the authorities and in particular the legislators are far, far more clued up on technical issues than most of them are today. Plausible preemptive countermeasures might include whoever first creates such an operating system being labelled an $EMOTIVE_THREAT and getting banned from trading/selling in the jurisdiction, anyone installing such an OS being labelled a criminal under those same knee-jerk blanket-ban laws I talked about before, or possibly more insidious things like Microsoft/Apple/etc. cutting a RIM-style deal where their "secure" systems weren't really secure at all (but of course any more secure/trustworthy platform like, say, Linux, is now an $EMOTIVE_THREAT, according to lots of "industry experts" probably indirectly funded by the aforementioned Microsoft/Apple/etc.).
The basic problem with this whole situation is that there is no good answer that always works. There really are bad people in the world, and there really are legitimate reasons that security services would want to intercept their communications, so any argument for universally encrypting anything is always going to run into some degree of resistance for sensible reasons that few reasonable people would disagree with even if they might feel that on balance the costs outweigh the benefits. But as we've seen on many occasions already, such legitimate reasons are all too easily twisted into mere commercial power plays when governments and big business mix. Sadly, but honestly, I see no reason to expect anything better to happen as long as the political status quo in most of the western world remains.
Re:Good News (Score:3, Interesting)
Subscription VPN services are about as shady as porn and warez sites. Good luck finding the right mix of:
+ Our policy is not to retain logs, so we have no data to respond to requests for data with.
+ We have plenty of locations.
+ We don't have caps (or, at least, low caps).
+ We don't require that you install a ridiculous crappy VPN client (and, often, one that is just specifically aimed at file sharing -- or even worse, they just give you their own version of a torrent client with the VPN crap built into it).
+ We actually are in business and provide a service (you'll find many are fly-by-not or that you just sent payment to a company that hasn't done business in six months, despite their site suggesting its an active company.
+ We have decent speeds and are not overloading our capacity.
It's also unfortunate that so many end-users believe that if they use a VPN, they're completely fine. They don't understand that -- even if everything else is fine -- your VPN provider, themselves, is a weak point and subject to warrant and so forth.