'Six Strikes' May Be Dead, But ISPs Keep Threatening To Disconnect Accused Pirates Anyway
from the undead-whac-a-mole dept
Earlier this year, the entertainment and telecom industries' "six strikes" anti-piracy initiative died a quiet death after years of hype from the RIAA and MPAA about how it would revolutionize copyright enforcement (it didn't). The program involved ISPs using a rotating crop of "escalation measures" to temporarily block, throttle or otherwise harass accused pirates until they acknowledged receipt of laughably one-sided copyright educational materials. Offenders, accused entirely based on IP address as proof of guilt, were allowed to try and contest these accusations -- if they paid a $35 fee.
Needless to say, data suggests the Copyright Alert System didn't do much if anything to stop piracy, since most would-be pirates simply obscured their internet behavior using proxies and VPNs. Meanwhile, the supposed "education" the program provided American consumers accomplished little more than driving up broadband costs as ISPs passed on the cost of participation in the farce to the end user.
But while six strikes is technically dead, that's not apparently stopping participating ISPs like Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable (now Charter Spectrum) from continuing to threaten to disconnect users from the internet based on often-flimsy IP address evidence. Users of these ISPs say they continue to receive threats from their ISP that they'll be kicked off of the internet if they don't stop being naughty:
"So, over the weekend my internet got interrupted by my ISP (internet service provider) stating that someone on my network has violated some copyright laws. I had to complete a survey and they brought back the internet to me,” one subscriber wrote a few weeks ago. He added that his (unnamed) ISP advised him that seven warnings would get his account disconnected.
Another user, who named his ISP as Comcast, reported receiving a notice after downloading a game using BitTorrent. He was warned that the alleged infringement “may result in the suspension or termination of your Service account” but what remains unclear is how many warnings people can receive before this happens.
To be clear ISPs don't actually kick people off of the internet, as nearly everybody (outside of the RIAA and MPAA) has acknowledged that severing access to a necessary utility is a draconian over-reaction to downloading the Led Zeppelin discography. Under the six strikes initiative, nothing actually happened to users after reaching the sixth strike, the hope being you could scare people into compliance (it doesn't work). The only way to ensure compliance would be to craft an organization tasked with tracking individual users as they float between ISPs, an approach France found to be an untenable disaster.
Nothing still happens to users who give a middle finger to these warnings, but that apparently doesn't stop ISPs like Verizon from temporarily suspending user accounts, requiring they call up the droll old telco sexy new Millennial-focused advertising powerhouse to get reconnected to the internet:
"So lately I’ve been getting more and more annoyed with pirating because I get blasted with a webpage telling me my internet is disconnected and that I need to delete the file to reconnect, with the latest one having me actually call Verizon to reconnect,” a subscriber to the service reported earlier this month."
Of course many of these ISPs are just going through the motions because of the Cox versus BMG case, in which a notably-distorted interpretation of the DMCA by Judge Liam O'Grady now puts ISP safe harbor protections at risk -- if they don't participate in this useless and costly game of make believe. Most ISP executives I've spoken to make it clear that the broadband industry is cooperating begrudgingly to protect themselves from liability, and are all well aware of the futility and ineffectiveness of these systems, the cost of which are now rolled into your already bloated broadband bill.
So while six strikes may formally be dead, the animated corpse of the misguided concept lives on, with ISPs that don't even believe in what they're doing pretending that this costly and annoying system of threats and scolding actually has any substantive purpose. That, apparently, will have to make do until the MPAA and RIAA (and the myriad of lawmakers and dollar per holler consultants paid to love them) can concoct an even worse idea.
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Filed Under: copyright, isps, six strikes, three strikes
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The MAFIAA existence is the worst idea of all in this madness we call copyright. They have been toxic to humanity for quite a while now. Sadly their predictions that piracy would be their demise haven't materialized, it would have been wonderful.
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That shouldn't take very long. The RIAA and MPAA seem to be remarkably good at that.
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User tracking
So I see you're one of those privileged few with access to more than one ISP. Around here, it's the wireless provider or no access at all.
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Creative engineering
Those of us that live in the real world know that an IP address does not equal an individual person. So how the hell is this 'crafted organization' going to track individuals? Mind melds?
Network/computer security is so lax that I find it hard to believe that anyone could prove that anyone else guilty of copyright infringement, even if they had the accused's hard drive. How would they 'prove' that it wasn't a hacker?
The above premise assumes (dangerous I know) that the judge doesn't sleep through a hearing and that the defense lawyers have some reasonable ability.
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Re: User tracking
The genie is out of the bottle; the toothpaste is out of the tube regarding digital piracy. It's not going away, so the smart move would be to focus or re-focus on providing content people want to those who are willing to pay for it. Those aren't lost sales- they were never going to be sales. If what you offer with your product or service is good, people will throw their money at it. Innovate or die
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You misunderstand
But Rightscorp and the other little bottom feeders will continue to threaten to sue under DMCA if ISPs refuse to "remove the infringing content", and they interpret that to mean disconnecting customers who torrent.
Those lawsuits can be lucrative and the ISPs are unlikely to prevail in court.
This isn't like legislation being "dead". When legislation dies, it's ineffective. This is a PR(opaganda) campaign, and when those die, business continues as usual.
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His idiotic ruling is based on accepting someone saying that's a thief and throwing them in jail.
No one can explain how the magic black box works, hell they even deleted code rather than turn it over to be audited.
No one can explain how the name on the bill became responsible for everything done on the IP assigned to them.
No one can explain how form letters with no legal basis or adjudication become evidence of a crime.
IP is our most valuable asset, it keeps bottomfeeders employed extracting cash from the economy while making things worse for all sides.
Someone shouldn't have to explain to a judge that chicken little screaming the sky is falling, was not actual evidence & shouldn't be treated as legally binding upon a 3rd party without due process.
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Re: Creative engineering
This really isn't that hard, since the proponents aren't particularly concerned with strict accuracy. Credit reporting agencies have been doing something similar for decades (and making quite a mess of it lately). Assumptions:
Given these assumptions (only the last of which is generally even somewhat accurate in the real world), we can go from accusation against an IP address to accusation against a customer account number (the ISP's logs should handle this easily). From the customer account number, we can then get the subscriber's offline identity. We then blacklist that identity. New ISP signups check to see if the offline identity to be recorded for the new account is on the blacklist and act accordingly. This scheme probably violates the typical person's expectations of privacy and reasonable process, and may violate a few privacy laws, but it's technically straightforward to implement.
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It's also almost as if those pushing for the six strikes system were completely full of it...
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Re: User tracking
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Abolish Copyright
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Comcast owns NBCUniversal and is the world's largest entertainment company, so that's not surprising. Time Warner Cable apparently has no current connection to Time Warner, but it and Verizon would both benefit from scaring cord-cutters into reconnecting to the TV services they sell... not that the current government is actually going to recognize this as anticompetitive.
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Re: Re: User tracking
If a concerted campaign can derail SOPA or ACTA or the alleged healthcare reforms, it can sort out messes like this. Bad actors rely on campaign fatigue so we've got to keep on raising awareness and contacting our representatives.
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Re: Re: Creative engineering
May violate a few laws?
- lol -
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