In Defense of Six Strikes 354
Deathspawner writes with a view on Six Strikes we don't normally see around here: "It's been well-established all over the Web that the just-implemented 'Six Strikes' system is bad... horrible, worthy of death to those who created it. But let's take a deep breath for a moment. Can Six Strikes actually be a good thing for consumers? While the scheme isn't perfect (far from it), one of the biggest benefits from this system is that it introduces a proxy, and any persecution you might have easily faced prior to Six Strikes is delayed under the new program. Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
A couple of days ago, someone sent Torrentfreak an actual alert they received from Comcast (the alert itself is a few screens down). Noteworthy is that there is zero mention of the appeals process.
Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Funny)
The $35 appeal fee is waived when you upgrade to the new Comcast Lawyer class service.
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Who the FUCK delegated law enforcement to private corporations? I don't care if it's an industry association made up of shysters and leeches, like *IAA, or telco cartels. If they want to be cops, they will be treated like cops.
That aint' pretty, from the customer market angle.
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's kind of funny that way. On the one hand people are saying that copyright infringement is a private affair and the government should butt out - and certainly not devote a bunch of police work to it. On the other hand, people start complaining when private businesses do start taking action to enforce their copyrights.
( Mind you, since some say the government is bought by corporations anyway, the distinction might be moot. )
Since you seem to be railing against the latter, are you saying that e.g. the police should be actively looking for copyright infringement and bring down to bear all of the privileges granted unto them in this endeavor?
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Even still, government does not and should not get involved in "trivial matters". If a private citizen doesn't get a refund he's entitled to, if he calls 911, police will arrive at McDonald's and arrest the citizen for making a nuissance call to 911.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29498350/ [nbcnews.com]
But if an off-duty law enforcment officer makes a mistake, believing he gave a $20 bill to a cashier when he only gave a $10, it is OK for him to threaten the cashier with arrest and assault the cashier with pepper spray if th
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
I shutter to think what copyrighted crap would look like...
Do you own a TV? Turn it on.
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Copyright violations were made criminal felonies over a decade ago. That battle was lost when almost no one was looking.
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:4, Informative)
It goes without saying that I'll believe such rumors when I see them and see how much trouble ISPs give you for proving you don't have to pay the fee. And, more importantly, whether an appeal will do anything at all in the first place.
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Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Interesting)
Dear Comcast,
Let me remind you that i am innocent until proven guilty, and that the only place where i could be found guilty is the court, and that if you try to imply that i am guilty of something, without due process, and punishing me on top of that, you are either blackmailing me, or you are trying to replace the court, both of which are unconstitutional, and would force me to sue you personally (corporations are persons now, right?), not for the before mentioned "infringement", but for blackmailing.
Please consider this letter as a legal warning, and the fact that you read it, as an acknowledgment that you have read it.
Sincerely. Yours
THE CUSTOMER
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Informative)
I have an idea, for everyone who receives this kind of warning from Comcast to respond with the following:
Dear Comcast,
Let me remind you that i am innocent until proven guilty, and that the only place where i could be found guilty is the court, and that if you try to imply that i am guilty of something, without due process, and punishing me on top of that, you are either blackmailing me, or you are trying to replace the court, both of which are unconstitutional, and would force me to sue you personally (corporations are persons now, right?), not for the before mentioned "infringement", but for blackmailing.
Please consider this letter as a legal warning, and the fact that you read it, as an acknowledgment that you have read it.
Sincerely. Yours
THE CUSTOMER
P.S. make sure you send that bad boy certified mail, that way they can't say they never received it.
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
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I thought that was the point. There's a legal system and people are complaining that it's being used. What are the complainer's asking for here? That's my interpretation of the question being asked.
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
I thought that was the point. There's a legal system and people are complaining that it's being used. What are the complainer's asking for here? That's my interpretation of the question being asked.
People aren't complaining that it's getting used, they are complaining that it is getting *abused*. Instead of a copyright holder gathering clear evidence of infringement, and taking a single infringer to court, proving how much damages they did (as would be required in any other arena of civil action) and waiting for the course of justice, they instead want to corral a bunch of "defendants" together that are linked to a crime by nothing more than a set of 4 small numbers, and then offer them "immunity" from a bogeyman trial for a modest fee of thousands of dollars, never really intending for the matter to go to court at all.
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:4, Insightful)
If memory serves, the prohibition on materials protected by copyright is on the distributor of said materials. In the same way I'd get in trouble for publishing unauthorized copies of a famous book that was not in the public domain, I'd get in trouble from distributing unauthorized copies of copyrighted digital media.
The 6-strikes law turns that on its head, and is incompatible with copyright law as we know it (don't get me started on the DMCA). The 35 dollar fee collected not by the judiciary, but commercial entities that provide access to a worldwide network, is just a cherry of aggravation on top of a sundae of stupidity.
The complainers are asking that first, the appropriate entities be addressed (i.e. those distributing the files rather than those obtaining them) and second, that there be something remotely resembling due process (that thing where you're accused, can get legal counsel, might have a trial, etc) before any discussion of a fine.
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I am under the impression that this system does go after people who 'share', rather than those who download.
http://www.copyrightinformation.org/the-copyright-alert-system/what-is-a-copyright-alert/ [copyrightinformation.org]
Mind you, there's plenty of verbiage on the site along the lines of "If you have been downloading or sharing content illegally" (where said downloading may or may not be
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I am under the impression that this system does go after people who 'share', rather than those who download.
Since the alert system triggers on the agents downloading copyrighted material to make the determination that it is infringing, then yes, it is going after sharing and not simply downloading. Those agents cannot determine what other people who are connected to a server are downloading, much less who is connected. They can only see what the server is handing out.
So, if you don't want to be caught by this, don't serve copyright material.
Yes, I'm sure that it could be extended to downloads in the future,
Theoretically, the *AA can set up honeypots so they can determine who
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
The copyright holders are getting a free ride here. They aren't being required to pay anything to file the complaints, but the customer is required to pay to appeal the decision. Ultimately, the customers end up paying for the service that's being provided to the rights holders for free.
The way it should work is that the rights holders should have to be paying the fees and recover the money when they file suit. If they don't intend to file suit, then they shouldn't be forcing somebody else to pay a fee to defend themselves.
Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:4, Insightful)
I cannot wait till there are no more customers because everyone has had six strikes. Let them have their six strikes. The only way to win is not to play their games.
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Re:Intractably horrible. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no problem with the legal system being used, if the legal system were fair and equitable. But the solution isn't to introduce a "Pay $35 to appeal an accusation" system. That's just using a DIFFERENT flawed system, not fixing the root cause.
The main problems with the legal system are that penalties completely outstrip harm and it is too costly to defend yourself. If I share out a music file and five people download it, I've caused about $5 worth of damage. (Assuming that each person who downloaded it would have purchased it. Perhaps not a fair assumption, but let's give it to them for a second.) However, were I sued, I could face a fine of between $750 and $150,000. They wouldn't be able to prove how many times it was downloaded, so that's the rate for ONE file shared.
Obviously, during any legal suit, they would threaten me with the $150,000 figure. Since this is much more money than I have, and in fact could bankrupt me, and since legal fees and time spent defending a case can be pricey, I would be pressured to accept any settlement they offer. No matter how one-sided it is. Such as their standard: "I will pay you $3,000, admit that I'm a dirty criminal, and never say a bad word about the RIAA ever again" agreement.
But surely they don't have proof, right? Unfortunately, they have enough high priced lawyers to turn one line from an automated script into a convincing sounding proof that I'm a horrible pirate that deserves the worst possible punishment. (Some judges have begun to reject their arguments, but not nearly enough.) And if the case is going my way? They can drop it and walk away without a potentially precedent setting verdict against them. Meanwhile, I'm left with legal fees to pay. Otherwise, they can drag the case on until I'm bankrupt to make an example of me. So even if I win the case, I lose (my house, car, savings, credit rating, etc).
And the laws that should be in place to protect me from overbearing situations like this? Written by politicians who are paid by the RIAA and similar organizations. Sometimes written BY those organizations and introduced by the politicians.
Fix the legal system and I would have no problem with lawsuits against those who infringe copyright. Of course, that would be hard to do. It's so much easier to introduce a "slightly less bad" system and spin it as pro-consumer.
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I have no problem with penalties exceeding immediate damages. I have a problem when the penalties are orders of magnitude higher. For example, in the Thomas case, the final amount was $9,250 per song or over 9,300%. These amounts were initially set when "pirating music" meant that you were selling your copies on the street corner for profit or running a massive bootlegging operation. They didn't have home copying (with no profit motive) in mind. Joe Smith who shares out 10 songs should face a different
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>How should copyright holders enforce their rights?
A sure way to avoid the enforcement of rights is not to produce the work that requires the enforcement.
Bear with me here for a second. The "Happy Birthday" song is under a copyright and any public performance of over 6 people requires a payment of royalties and expressed permission under the current copyright law. Now, your question is still valid, "how can a copyright holder enforce?" Guess what, technically the copyright holder can deploy agents at every playground at every restaurant to see if anyo
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Individual rights over the rights of corporate monopoly.
THAT IS MY MOTHERFUCKING PLAN, NOW GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY MOTHERFUCKING CONSTITUTION DIPSHITS.
Yes all caps is yelling, it needs to be said and done.
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But nobody wants to hear it ...
Methinks you overestimate the value of your "nobody." The filter's a stupid club that smashes human thought from time to time. Computers and programming are still in infantcy.
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I was also trying to invoke the Samuel L Jackson meme here. =P
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How should copyright holders enforce their rights?
Enforce their rights by actually putting the content out there in a controlled fashion
Hypothetically speaking, lets assume I pirate movies. I have to decide if it's worth my time/effort to find a torrent, download a movie, make sure it's intact, hope it has proper subtitles where necessary, name it in accordance with my file structure, move it to a storage system so that I can watch it on my TV in a different room, all balanced against the potential legal ramifications.... Or I could just pay the $8 a mont
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Seriously, what would be a better way to handle this? I pirate stuff from time to time, and I would rather get a $35 dollar ticket to encourage me to stop, rather than a $5000 dollar extortion fee.
It's not "rather than." The decision as to whether or not to sue remains in the hands of the copyright holder. They haven't waived it. If they have a case against you, they can sue at any arbitrary time within the statute of limitations. 'Strikes' don't matter. It's just a way to wring money out of people and dete
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The underlying problem here is that there aren't any real damages.
It's not worth the cost a civil trial either way and law enforcement agencies simply have better things to do. If you are fortunate enough to find yourself a victim of petty theft or fraud, you can see this very thing in action yourself.
Actual damages are small. Cops don't want to bother. The relevant corporation doesn't want to bear the cost of enforcement.
The real problem here is that a RICO style statutory damages been misapplied to averag
Neither? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do I have to choose between six strikes vs. RIAA/MPAA legal threat?
Re:Neither? (Score:5, Funny)
Litigation is the Seventh Strike (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't. Don't worry, it's both. The "six strikes" are to build a case against the owner of the connection and after the owner "strikes out," they can expect a summons.
That's why they ask for confirmation: "Click the button below to confirm you received this Copyright Alert"
In court they'll say, "but your Honor, they acknowledge six times that copyright infringement was occurring and did nothing about it - exactly how many warnings do they need?!"
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My kingdom for both mod points, and the ability to log in from work to use said mod points if I had them.
This is EXACTLY what's going to happen. You get a pile of warnings, and Comcast says they won't litigate against you, sure, fine. They'll just pass your information along to the RIAA, and now they'll have all the ammunition they need to drain every dollar that you'll ever earn for the rest of your life from you. Acknowledgement that you not only "stole" (naturally, they'll keep using that word) their
What choice? (Score:3)
Appealing is a moral duty. (Score:5, Insightful)
It only costs $35 to appeal, but it will cost your ISP more than that to go through the appeals process. If everyone appeals, the system will be unworkable, and therefore everyone should appeal.
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But there are no cost for claims to be made against people. Hence they can flood the zone, send claims to ant account that gets email. The incentives on this program are simply wrong.
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There is no cost to file a complaint under six strikes, UNLESS you appeal. Therefore, you must appeal in order to discourage complaints.
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They could simply ignore your appeal, which you would then win by default.
They could simply make a new claim, costing you another $35 dollars, Rinse, wash, repeat until you no longer have money.
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And not appealing is tacitly saying "yeah, I did that".
This boils down to "a 3rd party has made an allegation with no actual proof, we're going to assume this is true". If you didn't download copyrighted stuff, you'll need to appeal every time you get one of these at your own expense.
And I have no faith whatsoever that the copyright folks are doing good evidence gathering
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That assumes that there are any costs to the ISP or the copyright holder associated with an appeal. So far the appeals process sounds like a complete farce that would consist of nothing more than a 5 minute "hearing" in front of someone being paid minimum wage - and that's assuming the hearing isn't conducted via telephone with someone off-shore making $0.15 / hr.
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It only costs $35 to appeal, but it will cost your ISP more than that to go through the appeals process. If everyone appeals, the system will be unworkable, and therefore everyone should appeal.
How do you know it costs the ISP more? Have we seen what this appeal process looks like? Is your ISP just forwarding your appeal to the source of the complaint? A canned response from the Six Strike Tribunal with all the fields filled out from the Monitor (or did you mean: ISP as Internet Surveillance Provider) is hardly $35 to produce.
Aside of costs, first you are volunteering yourself as a party in the process and what evidence are you required to submit, for instance names and addresses of everyone who h
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Some of us will say "I'M NOT GOING TO STAND FOR IT ANYMORE! FUCK YOU GUYS! I'M GOING WITH THE COMPETI....oh..."
Dumbth! (Score:3)
... and any persecution you might have easily faced prior to Six Strikes is delayed under the new program. Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
"Delayed." Very funny. You must be joking. Before, you got a legal threat, which you could pretty much ignore. An IP address != an individual. Now, "$moran" accuses you, and you have to pay to contest the accusation, or find another provider, and in the US, that's often not possible.
Six Strikes is evil incarnate. You pay for net access, and now who you're paying for that access is working for imbeciles against you. CAPITALISM!!!111
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You could NOT ignore the legal threat and MANY courts have found that an IP Address *does* equal an individual.
That's because US' tort law is broken, and your politicos have been bought and your LEOs have been "regulatory captured" into making civil problems criminal! US (and Euro) Judges are only now starting to get a clue, but there's still a long way to go down.
Before, you could just reply "No, I didn't. Prove it." Now, YOU have to pay to prove your innocence. Feature! The idiots are issuing DMCA takedowns of stuff they put up by themselves, ffs! The whole system is a crapfest! A quarter of a million dolla
No (Score:5, Insightful)
No. It can, at best, be a marginally better than the alternative.
Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
Yes, but I would also rather have my kneecaps broken than shot in the face. It doesn't make either option actually palatable.
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So it's official, the MAFIAA declared war on its customers?
Gee, I never thought they'd be so forward...
Manipulation (Score:3)
I sell you this dumb phone at $1000, and tell you that at retail is selling at 5000, would you buy it? Putting that your only choices are punishment and strong punishment means that you take out of your mind that you couldn't be doing anything wrong. So you have to accept the lesser evil because could be a worse one, instead of considering that should not be any or that are more alternatives.
But probably is ok in US, after all they choose Obama instead of Romney because the very same reasoning, so they explicitely wanted all that is coming after, including this.
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It's extralegal, that's why (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA/MPAA is doing an end run around the court system and attacking the ISPs. Let's just toss this on the stack of things this private industry is doing to ruin the lives of the people who would ordinarily want to pay them money:
They have copyright terms that last two centuries.
They have the incredibly overbearing Digital Millenium Copyright Act that ensures that anything you do to copyrighted material which you own is illegal.
They have the ability to take down any content on the internet they feel infringes on said copyright without having to prove they hold the copyright in question, that the infringing activity actually infringes, or that they have the right to make the claim under the DMCA. (Oh, and this process is completely automated in many cases, while appeals are not only grounds for lawsuits but must be evaluated by a human being on a case by case basis... Does anyone remember the mortgage foreclosure robosigning scandal? Because I sure do.)
They have been making great strides in persuading countries around the world to make copyright infringement a criminal, rather than civil offense so they can get the law enforcement agencies to do their dirty work. (Oh wait, the FBI raided Dotcom and ICE seizes websites at the behest of private industry without due process... nevermind.)
What really confuses me is that in the big picture the RIAA/MPAA is small potatoes compared to the other things that make money via digital distribution. They wield rather disproportionate influence over the activities of third parties that have nothing to do with them or those they claim to represent.
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And here's why a lot of companies realized it's more profitable to invest in lobbying than in R&D.
I like this idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Now collect the IPs of everyone who clicks the link and vies the file. Spam the six strike system with those IPs.
If they ignore legitimate notices from you and do not issue alerts, sue, as they are using what is supposed to be a fair arbitration system to only police for content/companies they deem worthy. Keep flooding them with -legitimate- requests until they cannot handle it.
Re:I like this idea (Score:5, Informative)
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Idea is interesting, but it doesn't work under the current copyright law. The fact that anyone is downloading any material does not make that an infringement. "Making available" or sharing the copyrighted work is the only infringement that is a violation. In your case, only the server that hosts the file might be infringing on the copyright, not the people downloading.
Which law would that be? Not US law, not the way US courts rule. source [resource.org]:
We agree that plaintiffs have shown that Napster users infringe at least two of the copyright holders' exclusive rights: the rights of reproduction, 106(1); and distribution, 106(3). Napster users who upload file names to the search index for others to copy violate plaintiffs' distribution rights. Napster users who download files containing copyrighted music violate plaintiffs' reproduction rights.
In fact, it is far more debatable if "making available" is an infringement without proving actual instances of distribution.
Re:I like this idea (Score:4, Interesting)
But Six Strikes ISN'T about the hoster. It's about the downloader. That's why so many people are upset about it - there's a good legal argument that they didn't violate copyright, yet they're getting warnings accusing them of doing just that. The *AA hasn't had much (if any) luck going after the hosters, so they're going after the downloaders and forcing the ISPs to be their lackeys. Because otherwise they'll just sue the ISPs for contributing to the process, and the ISPs REALLY don't want that...
CAPTCHA: crueler
6 strikes today, it could be 1 strike tomorrow (Score:2)
The same people that decided 6 strikes could change their mind depending on who gives them the most money or the most pain.
It's like a tax that starts at .5%. Sooner or later it gets increased to suit those with the most influence.
Doesn't cover all cases (Score:5, Informative)
1. "Six Strikes" it NOT a _LAW_.
2. Not all copyright holders are participating and none are _bound_ to it.
Because of that, there is no guarantee that you will receive a "strike" before receiving a settlement demand for infringement or before being named in a federal copyright infringement lawsuit!
Example: Let's say you go download the latest LA porn producer's newest amateur flick via a public BitTorrent tracker. This producer is not participating in six strikes. The porn producer is monitoring the torrent, and logs your IP. They are teamed with a lawyer, and sue you as a John Doe in a lawsuit. You find out when the lawsuit reaches discovery.
What will your defense be? "I never got a first strike, let alone a sixth!" Yeah, tell _THAT_ to the judge. They won't care. You're still getting sued. Copyright trolls will continue extorting innocent victims.
Anti-trust (Score:5, Interesting)
What we really have here is a huge anti-trust lawsuit waiting to happen - a situation where the large record & movie companies have banded together to collectively negotiate away our privacy with all of the large ISP's, who themselves have banded together and negotiated it away. Its completely anti-competitive in that, if I had any sort of option to get high speed Internet Access where I live from a company who wouldn't wave the white flag and offer up my information based on an IP address at the first hint of displeasure from the copyright industry, and I'd dump Time Warner immediately, almost entirely without regard for the cost or other aspects of whatever the alternative company might be offering.
Any argument about supporting the artists crumbles in the face of studio accounting practices where no movie is ever profitable if the studios must share the profits, and where music artists basically never see a dime from the music that they record.
No (Score:5, Informative)
Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
No.
This is a form of the prisoner's dilemma.
Individually, it makes sense for each of us to take the easy way out, but collectively, this is bad public policy.
Private accusations of crime, followed by private punishments, is odious to our system of justice.
More and more court cases are ending up like this one [techdirt.com], where minimal evidence gets turned away as insufficient.
The real truth is that the copyright industry doesn't want to prosecute these cases, because lawyers and discovery and expert witnesses are expensive.
Even Hollywood can't afford 10,000 cases at a time.
I am not unsympathetic to their problem, but the solution needs to balance the due process rights of the people with the interests of big business.
That hasn't happened since the copyright owners discovered the scale of infringement couldn't be cheaply addressed by the existing legal system.
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Actually, it's stag hunt: Stag Hunt [wikipedia.org]
Yes, copyright holder should send notices (Score:2)
Wouldn't you rather receive a warning from your ISP than be sent a bill or legal threat by the RIAA/MPAA?"
Yes, I absolutely would like to rather get a notice from the copyright holder. However, given the nature of the Internet connection, I cannot ever agree to my ISP giving out my details to any third party at their will. I also cannot assume any responsibility for some IP address that was leased to me by my ISP and was not spelled out as a part of my contract. That also means that when I have the internet connection, I should be able to share it to whomever I want to share and not have some artificial anti
Please help with logic (Score:2)
Could someone help me with this "would you rather" logic displayed in TFA.
There are NO changes in law. The only change is an agreement between vigilante conspirators.
MPAA/RIAA have to get a court order/subpeona to send you legal threats. They remain perfectly free do this regardless of the numbered strike you happen to be on today.
If anything CAS makes it worse. The lawyers will no doubt argue by clicking close on connection hijack delivered warnings or following subsequent instructions you have admitted
Innocent? Not any more (Score:2)
One Question. (Score:3)
One provider who's not on with it (Score:2)
logic fail at #2 (Score:3)
He fell on his face with point #2.
The entire argument depends upon the above quotation being logically well-founded. Take the error probability, raise it to the sixth power, and you get a small enough fraction that you can blow it off. On the face of it, it's not stupid... until you realize that the system actually adds the fractions to each other, rather than multiplying them. Oy. We're off to a good start here, aren't we? And that's if we accept that the errors will really just be random noise, rather than possibly arise from systematic failures and patterns.
If you disagree with that founding assertion (and you will, if you have observed what has happened so far), then nothing else he says is going to make sense.
IMHO, nobody knows how Six Strikes works, or what its false positive rate is. If someone knew, they would have stepped forward by now. This is getting to become something like both the evidence which suggests Intelligent Design as a hypothesis, and the secret idea for an experiment to falsify it, together which would make it be a theory. At some point, when no one comes forth with either or them (let alone both), it starts to become reasonable to assume the theory probably doesn't yet exist.
Similarly, we have no reason to suspect Six Strikes' detection and identification tech is accurate. It might be, it's just that nothing leads us to that conclusion except faith. And it's not that it can't be done (within certain limitations); it's that we have past records (anyone remember the RIAA lawsuits?) of it being done by totally incompetent people, who went to work for the "MAFIAA" because that was the only job they could get. MAFIAA, show us your methodology, because your reputation is that you're crooks who just make shit up.
And because of the how-it-works problem, his last sentence
is exactly wrong. It will be taken less seriously, because when you get one of these notices, your first thought isn't going to be "who in the house shared the Megadeth song?" It's going to be "which now-dead neighbor, who DHCP leased my current address for a couple weeks back in 2006, downloaded a file named peace_time_economics_in_the_rust_belt.pdf which matched some Megadeth keywords?"
Oh, they might be taken seriously as threats, but seriously not as being related to anything which may have happened on your ISP connection.
If you have seen how the MPAA has DMCAed some Google results in recent times, you will know (it's not even speculative) that false positives are extremely common in this industry's robot's actions, right now. Once I saw one of these false positives happen to me, it became apparent how easy it would be to accrue six Google-censored-results in a year, just by having truly innocent web pages which say certain words on them. (Tip: use HBO's show names. Haven't tried Showtime yet.) We're supposed to believe that your Six Strikes p2p tech is vastly better than your web tech? Why? What's your excuse? Please. [sits back, opens popcorn] This'll be good.
Re:There always is the alternative... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not about supporting arts. It's about supporting a dead business model that rewards little to the artists themselves, and which now has the right to spy on what you do online.
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rewards little to the artists themselves,
I'm sick of seeing this argument. If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so. I'm free to take my skill and try to launch a grand software project on my own. Sure, if I'm successful I'll make a lot more money than I do at work, but I don't think "my product was unsuccessful" will garner much sympathy from the folks that own my mortgage.
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Its a legitimate counter-argument to the argument made by the large record companies that they're protecting the artists interests. It doesn't make piracy "right", but it utterly invalidates recording-industry argument #1.
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And good luck with that. ASCAP gets a fee from damn near every establishment where you might want to perform your music, just in case somebody uses something that is covered by the ASCAP license. Radio access is basically non-existent without a contract with a major label.
You do have the internet, but without tons of money for advertising it can be hard to get sufficient attention to build an audience.
And it's not about success, it's about the industry using their money to create success rather than advanci
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And good luck with that. ASCAP gets a fee from damn near every establishment where you might want to perform your music, just in case somebody uses something that is covered by the ASCAP license. Radio access is basically non-existent without a contract with a major label.
THIS is the point. You can argue that artists are signing up with a label by choice, but really it's a choice between trying to support yourself with your craft and eating half of your instant ramen in the morning so you get to eat the rest that night.
The point behind RIAA and MPAA (MAFIAA) was to establish a distribution cartel, thereby creating a system where the only way to play is to play with them.
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If artists are willing to take on the risk that comes with launching their music on their own, then they're free to do so.
Many do just that, and a fair number who do make enough to support themselves well enough or even do quite well for themselves performing live and selling CDs on their own. You've probably never heard of them unless they're local to you, though, because they get no radio airplay and basically no distribution. The media conglomerates enforce that with contracts (or in some cases overlapping ownership), so that any retailer that will carry, say, the latest Taylor Swift album will not be allowed to carry indep
Re:There always is the alternative... (Score:5, Insightful)
And the best way to not support that business model is to buy alternatives and boycott protected media. Stealing Argo doesn't make a statement, it's a way of justifying obtaining something you want enough to download but not enough to pay the asking price for.
May I recommend Libraries (many, including the one in my city are partnered with digital distributors offering free music and e-books) , NetFlix, Rdio, as new business model alternatives that aren't illegal.
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And the best way to not support that business model is to buy alternatives and boycott protected media.
I believe the slightly more effective way to do that is to give money to the EFF or other organizations which will lobby politicians to reverse such rules, while voting against politicians who support the MPAA/RIAA, and calling and bugging the ones you don't.
I'm deeply cynical about both, but I can't recall a consumer movement that did anything substantial. Threats of boycotts work if you want walmart to start saying "Happy Jesus' Birthday," but they don't seem to have driven any walmart locations to st
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Hey, hey, you can't steal Argo. Didn't you see that they never really wanted to make that movie, it was all just a scam, so it's quite ok to copy that, after all it was never meant to be a blockbuster, it had a higher goal.
Or so I heard...
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I love the spin they are putting on it though. How do you make someone grateful for punching them in the face? Tell them the alternative is breaking their legs. I'd bet even money that this has been the long term plan for some time.
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If I could pay $30 or even $50 per month to get access to every movie and TV show ever made on demand within minutes I would happily pay that. Even though my family would probably only spend 5-10 hours per month using it. But that's not available. And don't tell me Netflix or Hulu. Those services are great, and I am a Netflix subscriber, but it's not complete.
The industry needs to change it's business model...
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Exactly. If someone told the movie industry even at its height that they could collect $50 / month from most every family in America, they'd be doing triple back flips. The fact that they could, but they won't make it happen, and instead chose to alienate their customers / potential customers, is mind-boggling.
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And they wonder why their business is failing?
Gee, in a free market they couldn't survive a month. Business IS all about finding a middle ground between the parties, if it is in a truly free market.
If you rip me off, I will lose money and will not want to do business with you again, and I'll do what I can to get out of this one.
If I rip you off, you will lose money and you will not want to do business with me again, and you'll do what you can to get out of this one.
Only if we BOTH get a good deal out of it
Like youtube? (Score:2)
Re:There always is the alternative... (Score:5, Interesting)
The program they're using has a ton of false positives. It was removing stuff from NASA's youtube channel that NASA uploaded because news programs decided to use the footage.
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You realize these 'strikes' aren't for infringements, but for 'claims' of infringements, right? The RIAA has misidentified users before, and it will continue to do so. Not infringing is not a perfect solution.
Re:There always is the alternative... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a lot of IP addresses, but it could probably be done. I haven't read the entire actual law but the Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything about punishments for false infringement claims.
Re:There always is the alternative... (Score:5, Informative)
There's a tort called vexatious litigation. It's common law.
There is also a possible penalty under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 11, for signing your name to a legal declaration that you have not investigated and, thus, do not have good reason to believe that it is true. The judge, essentially, gets to make up any penalty they think is appropriate (within reason).
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Can you tell that to the people who have been accused of copyright infringement, with no effective appeals process, when they have not copied anything, or what they have copied is public domain, out of copyright, or even their own work ...!
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I support the arts, in a large number of cases where I feel confident that any of the money I give to the supporting will actually go to the people creating the art in question. Live music, live drama, books, even recorded music from less mainstream musicians. But mainstream musicians signed to RIAA labels can suck it, and so can the whole broken tv-on-a-tv system.
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I'd love to support the artist. I am closing to my 40th birthday, but I still routinely go to concerts and shows of artists that I love.
It's been a while since I bought a CD, though. Mostly 'cause a friend of mine IS an artist and I know where that money goes to.
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That assumes that this is the end of the story, and not just the tip of the iceberg. Do you really think the fact that you received those six strikes is not getting recorded in preparation to be used as evidence against you in a future lawsuit? And correct me if I'm wrong, but are they really even right now supposedly stopping after the 6th strike? Or do you get the "6th strike" penalty for strike 7, 8, 9 and so on?
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That assumes that this is the end of the story, and not just the tip of the iceberg. Do you really think the fact that you received those six strikes is not getting recorded in preparation to be used as evidence against you in a future lawsuit? And correct me if I'm wrong, but are they really even right now supposedly stopping after the 6th strike? Or do you get the "6th strike" penalty for strike 7, 8, 9 and so on?
Furthermore, these will no doubt become part of the standard usage agreement for online services, allowing immediate termination (without refund). You know what costs more money than pirates? Bandwidth hogs! Providers would LOVE a free-and-clear excuse to kick off the top 1% of users that consume far far far more than 1% of the network resources (and just happen to almost all be bittorrenters), it would improve the service for the other 99% and allow even more over-subscription so they could run their inf
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I appreciate the time cube reference, and how you tied it into the story. Well done.
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I don't think anybody can speak for 'everyone'. If you asked the ARRRRRR types, everybody in Hollywood would love to charge you per pixel * second of content watched with a minimum of $100/month and something about firstborns, while if you ask the weasely lawyer types in the employ of the record labels/studios, then every internet user by default is somebody who simply gets couchpotato to download All The Things into a folder that is shared across multiple P2P programs and a torrent client directly sources
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If the other viewers aren't pulling their weight because they're sucking down a torrent stream, well I've got to pay more or the production quality drops. I don't like either choice.
So pull your weight.
(to give you an example on what's wrong with your argumentation)
No, I won't do it only because you want to watch movies cheap. And I tell you what: I won't pirate them either, I simply refuse to consume what your beloved Hollywood produces.
Now you'll have to pay a bit extra not because I pirated the movie, but because I chose not to play your game. Is it better for you? Will you sue me because of it?
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Well, first of all, you don't need to copy anything to get a notice. All it takes is a mixup in IP addresses and you get one, nobody bothers to check those claims against reality. But let's move on to your second part, how to efficiently "combat pirating".
The *AAs are no longer needed for distribution. That's a thing of the past, when they pretty much controlled the only way how you, artist, could get into a store. You couldn't run around and find a place to record, then someone to press it on a record or C