Comcast Working On 'Helpful' Copyright Violation Pop-ups 284
gregor-e writes "Comcast is said to be preparing to snoop on your internet browsing to detect when you attempt to download a copyright-protected item. On detection, Comcast will pop up a helpful window that contains information about where you can obtain a legal version of whatever you're downloading. 'While sources familiar with the new initiative emphasized that it is being seen as a complement to CAS [a.k.a. six strikes] and not a replacement, the very emergence of an alternative raises questions as to the viability of CAS, which has been criticized for myriad reasons ranging from the questionable strategic rationale of punishing subscribers to an implementation that has been characterized as scattershot. How the two systems would coexist is unclear.'"
Comcast will be inviting other ISPs to join its new system as well.
Re:let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
Safe Harbor is the first victim? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't this violate their "safe harbor" protection? This would mean they would know about violations and they might even benefit from them by saying "get it legally FROM OUR STORE"
as measured by... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Is this so bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
You guys here at Slashdot have spent the last 12 years fighting to legalize your pre-college, college-, post-college habit of spending all your leisure time downloading content from fold-tent-one-step-ahead-of-the-sheriff sites, 80 percent of which you'll never get around to listen to or watch.
So who won? You didn't win. Look around at pop music and what's being created today. Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and Justin Bieber style music is all that anyone can make money doing nowadays. Tower Records and all of its bricks and mortar competitors went out of business long ago. So did Borders.
SOMEBODY will make big money from content, that's how capitalism works, and now we see the winners are big, ugly somebodies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T, the owners of the pipes, along with the Chinese and South Koreans who manufacture the handsets and others gadgets. All you guys did was drive the individual artists out of business so these corporate bullies could step in and rake *all* the profits.
Re:let me get this straight (Score:5, Interesting)
The copyright infringement problem you describe is only the beginning. The long-term flaw in this plan, I suspect, is that they are claiming to be able to detect a class of "illegal"/"bad" data.
In the early days of the net, this kind of detection was a major part of the pornography debate in addition to the usual copyright stuff. A major defense (one I suspect lead to the creation of the "safe harbor" provisions in the DMCA) was that it is patently unreasonable to force an ISP to decide the legality of each bit that moves across their network. Comparisons were made to the Common Carriers, etc. The consensus seems to be more or less that "safe harbor" idea - that it was only reasonable to request the ISP act after the fact, instead of trying to make them invent some sort of magic "evil bit" detector.
If an ISP wants to ignore all that, though, and volunteer that they have such detection capability... they might be asking for a long line of lawsuits for each item they *failed* to warn about. Even better: it's all the excuse the anti-porn (or anti-whatever) busybodies need to impose their ideas of a "child safe" internet. After all, if you can detect something complicated like copyright infringement, detecting pornography must be trivial.
TL;DR - their lawyer must be having a seizure over the potential liability exposure they seem to be asking for
Re:let me get this straight (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm a little curious now...do you think an 'underground' set of HTTPS certificate authorities is out of the question? Does such a thing exist?
Re:Is this so bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let me put it this way -
I have 3 kids and a wife. Counting myself, that means 5 people. Prices in my area run ~10 for an adult, ~8 for a child. So I'm already up to $44 just to get into the door. Then for concessions, figure about 7.50 a head, and that's being conservative. So add another $38ish, and I've already got a pretty expensive night out for the family. Since we traditionally eat out when we go to the movies, that generally adds another 40 bucks or so.
Now, I'm also a technically savvy geek, who likes his toys. I have a fairly nice home theater system. Have to watch Star Wars in style, you know.
Now let's say my tv provider was offering the same movie I'd go see in the theater as an on demand option, at the same time it's in the theater, for $50. A quick run to the store to buy some soda and microwave popcorn and order out for a pizza for dinner instead, and I've got some fairly substantial savings, can watch the movie in the comfort of my own home on my nice equipment, and I don't have to drive anywhere and deal with a crowd. I'd leap at that.