Software That Flagged HBO.com For Piracy Will Power U.S. 'Six Strikes' System 292
An anonymous reader writes "A copyright monitoring program called MarkMonitor mistakenly flagged HBO.com for pirating its own shows, and sent automatic DMCA takedown notices to the network. It's a funny story, until you realize that MarkMonitor is the same software that will power the U.S. Copyright Alerts System (a.k.a. "Six Strikes"), due to be rolled out by the five largest U.S. ISPs sometime in the next month."
Re:So, do something (Score:4, Informative)
I see a LOT of folks complaining on /., but I never hear about anyone actually DO anything.
People actually doing something about it don't have time to rant on Slashdot. How exactly do you expect to hear about it? Telepathy?
Encrypted proxy? (Score:4, Informative)
Or is it one of those measures trying to prevent John Doe from using bittorrent? (and expecting he won't learn how to use a proxy)
Re:Which ISPs? (Score:5, Informative)
Which ones? I'd like to know who doesn't want my money.
AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon. It's in the article. :)
Re:Which ISPs? (Score:5, Informative)
AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon
Re:Which ISPs? (Score:5, Informative)
And Verizon (at least) already has implemented it.
Re:So, do something (Score:1, Informative)
The US also had a top marginal tax rate like that. It was during the great economic boom of the 50s and 60s. Turns out that trickle-down, voodoo economics is and always will be bunk.
What can we do about this? (Score:5, Informative)
You probably already pay for internet service. For a little bit more money/month, you can get away with as much piracy as you want. If you don't understand all the terms/lingo I'm about to use, hit the google. Here's what you can do:
Scenario 1: switch from bit torrent to usenet. Automate the downloading of your favorite shows with sickbeard + hellanzb/sabnzbd/your-favorite-nzb-grabber-here. Download movies with CouchPotato. I have this set up, but due to abuse of DMCA, a lot of the good nzb indexing sites (newzbin, nzbmatrix) are gone. Thinking about getting rid of a usenet provider alltogether because of this unfortunate turn of events.
Scenario 2: get a VPN. I have a VPN thru my usenet provider. I run a Win7 virtual machine for bit-torrent piracy purposes (since the good nzb indexing sites have gotten taken down, i find myself resorting to bit torrent more often now). All torrent traffic goes thru the VPN. Slows it down, but not by much.
Scenario 3: get a seedbox. Seedboxes are for fast bit-torrenting. The downloading/uploading happens on a server that you rent. Get one outside of the US. Since it's not your home connection that gets slammed, you can share more upload bandwidth with the community. When the download is done, transfer your file to your machine with a ssh/sftp client. with a good media player and a good connection, you can probably start watching a video file 10-15 seconds after you start the transfer.
Scenario 4: get a VPS. Can't find many that are bit-torrent friendly. But they're basically little virtual OS instances (typically linux) that you get root on. You can roll your own VPN with a VPS (as opposed to buying a VPN service), so if you are comfortable with Linux, going the VPS route might be your best and cheapest bet (then you can do #2 for cheap). There are plenty that are hosted outside of the US.
It's too bad that hollywood and the media content creation industries in general have been so blinded by greed that they've missed the boat on this whole internet thing. They could have made WAY more money, probably ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE MORE MONEY if they'd embraced the internet as a content delivery tool OVER A DECADE AGO, instead of using political pull to secure legislation that protects their backwards and antiquated business model.
Seriously. There are METRIC FUCKLOADS of money to be made on online advertising. Google is proof positive of this.
Of course, just giving away the content "for free" (in exchange for ad revenue) is such an anathema to the greedy fucks at the top of the totem-pole in the industry that the idea was probably never seriously on the table in the first place.
Such a shame.
I keep saying that I'd pay $100/month for a service that allowed me to watch or listen to whatever movie, tv show, or song I typed into the search box. Instead we have this bullshit like hulu and netflix, with arbitrary restrictions on what you can watch on your TV vs your computer, what you can watch via the net vs get as a disk in the mail, etc. It's bullshit and there's no technological reason for how bad this situation sucks. It sucks because of corporate greed, so I've made it my moral obligation to ensure that none of these fuckwits ever get any of my money.
Go buy a VPN.
Re:Why are ISPs in bed with big content? (Score:2, Informative)
Time Warner Cable actually split from Time Warner recently, so they're not related.
As corporate entities when it comes to accounting, but should you bother to check who owns both, you'll see something else.
Re:Of course HBO are pirates (Score:3, Informative)
The Jonathan Coulton version isn't a cover of the song, it's a derivative work. Jonathan Coulton paid the appropriate licensing fees to the owner of Sir-Mix-a-Lot's original work. He made some modifications to the lyrics ("Johnny C's in trouble", instead of the original "Mix-a-Lot's in trouble", for example), and generally changed the entire song. Fox paid a similar licensing fee to the owner of Sir-Mix-a-Lot's original work. They then used Jonathan Coulton's version, with all his changes, including the different lyrics and tracks. Fox never even contacted Jonathan Coulton, let alone paid him.
Re:Americans (Score:2, Informative)
You in the U.S. has your gun laws exactly for cases like this. The original idea was, when government (or its minions) eventually gets too tyrannical
No, the original idea was so they could form militia and defend themselves without having an expensive military. The military was explicitly not to be given funding for more than two years at a time precisely for this reason. It's all in the constitution.
Look what happened: we ended up with the - by far - most expensive military in the world, and people buying guns for reasons the founders never intended.
I suggest you read the Federalist papers before spouting this nonsense. The GP had it right. The framers wanted guns in the hands of its citizens as a safeguard against tyranny. The militia aspect always was secondary to that. In their minds the militia was the whole of the populace able to bear arms and still is according to US Law (limited to certain age ranges of course). Even taking your claims at face value. In order for any militia to be effective (well-regulated in the parlance of the 1700's) it must have guns. The framers intended for the populace (albeit only males at their time) to have weapons equal to any standing army that might be raised. So what reasons did you think were not intended by the founders, hmm? Hunting - check, self-defense - check, defense against the government - also check.
By all means enlighten us on these "reasons".
Re:So, do something (Score:5, Informative)