5 ms·

I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright), but are still made uneasy by this development. I think the

I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright), but are still made uneasy by this development. I think the source of that discomfort is - what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? Competition in the form of space internet can’t come soon enough, not to enable pirates, but to ensure normal people have reasonable service levels and alternatives to unfair decisions.

eiaoa 8y ago
> what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government, and they have obvious interests in tilting every table to advantage themselves. Dealing with a corporate bureaucracy is dealing with a regulatory body that's been totally captured by that corporation.
- sbov 8y ago
  But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a competitor!
  - msbarnett 8y ago
    > But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a competitor! If we pretend geographic monopolies don't exist, maybe
  - gbear605 8y ago
    Not in many areas
  - jrnichols 8y ago
    I detect the sarcasm there. and you're right! you can totally bail and go to the competition... like HughesNet. They're just the same, right? (also more sarcasm)
- mdpopescu 8y ago
  Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government. Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
  - pavel_lishin 8y ago
    This story is very specifically about a corporation enforcing those laws.
  - eiaoa 8y ago
    > Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! That's an entirely different issue from what I was commenting on. > And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government. You're forgetting that ISPs are natural monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly: >> "A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were discussed as a potential source of market failure by John Stuart Mill, who advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good." > Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s You're right, it does sound great; especially when you remove the blinders of misunderstanding. Admittedly, it's not entirely without it's own problems, but those problems are best solved without re-introducing the problems that regulation successfully mitigates.
  - ctoth 8y ago
    Please do educate me as to how the government enforces a geographic monopoly.
    - 8y ago
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that. Moreover, in many cases the regulations are what make markets uncompetitive. Providing internet service to urban areas is highly lucrative and has relatively low costs -- if you could pull $40/month from each of a hundred people just for wiring a single high rise, companies would be lining up left and right to do that. But you aren't allowed to do that without also providing service to an area covering hundreds of square miles, including random farmhouses that are ten miles apart from one another. A competent government would instead solve that problem through direct subsidies to providers who expand into rural areas (or leave it to the market to figure out how to connect sparse farmhouses with some kind of medium-speed directional wireless or similar), and then there would be more competition. But we haven't got that. Moreover, even when there are actual natural monopolies (like roads or rural internet) that can justify government involvement, what works best in those cases is often for the government to just provide the thing directly rather than trying to regulate some independent private entity with a 96% chance of capturing the regulators.
  - clairity 8y ago
    > "This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that." what you say would be true of (increasingly rare) mom-and-pop shops, but the relationship you use is highly asymmetric and favorable to the large bureaucratic organization, no matter the competitive dynamics of the market. target would be the one laughing in your face, not the customer. the false dichotomy of preferring one bureaucracy over another because one is private and the other public is silly (in case it's unclear, you should prefer neither). the rest of what you said is reasonable however. direct provision, direct subsidies, or removal of regulatory barriers in rural access would be better than the convoluted compromise we have now.
sf_rob 8y ago
As you hint at, this is also a space where the FCC considers dial up and cell phone service (AFAIK) to be competitors when it comes to regulatory requirements. I got some copyright notices from a roommate's habits and Comcast was the only high speed ISP that was available at my house. Given that my work involves regular working from home, this was highly concerning.
- cronix 8y ago
  At least they (Comcast) just send you an email now and don't inject their notices into the HTML of the websites you're visiting like they were doing a few years ago. It was basically a MITM attack, done by the ISP.
  - eisrep 8y ago
    They've done this to me warning I was near the 1TB limit on data usage earlier this year. It felt pretty disgusting.
jstanley 8y ago
> I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright) FWIW, many of us don't believe in following or enforcing unjust laws.
- dionidium 8y ago
  References to 150-year copyrights is (deliberate or not) pure obfuscation. We're talking about downloading the latest box office hits†, not century-old texts bound by unjust extensions to copyright. † Edit: in most but obviously not all cases
  - kragen 8y ago
    The story doesn't have any such details. Please remember that the most famous such case, the prosecution of Aaron Swartz until he committed suicide, was for downloading academic papers from JSTOR, presumably including many century-old texts, and that the current best system for obtaining academic papers you're legally allowed to get — Sci-hub — is on the receiving end of a series of lawsuits from companies who didn't even write the texts being copied in the first place and never paid their authors.
    - dionidium 8y ago
      The prosecution of Aaron Swartz, a farcical tragedy, has nothing to do with this story.
      - vorpalhex 8y ago
        It has everything to do with the story because it shows that most copyright claims are done in absolute bad faith and consumers are given no real tools to defend themselves. Right now for the majority of people who get a DMCA, there is nothing they can do. There is no functional appeals process, there is no office in charge of handling bad DMCAs. Shy of actually going to court with a lawyer and attempting a suit, if a company files a bogus DMCA then you are boned. That is an abortion of free speech and property rights, and the Swartz case is a perfect example of that. Most of the papers Swartz obtained were supposed to belong to the public, and yet he was sued into oblivion for DOING NOTHING ILLEGAL. He had no counterclaim short of going to full court with lawyers, something entirely out of his grasp and reach, and because he felt he had no alternatives to having his life ruined, he committed suicide. It's not a farcical tragedy, it's a flipping shame for the human race. edit - language
ams6110 8y ago
AT&T is not going to be too eager to cut your service. They want your $50 - $150/month (or more) if they can get it. FTA: The bottom line: Very few copyright infringers ever get booted from their broadband provider, pointing to the severity of these cases and the number of steps at which the customer is told they are violating copyright before they are cut off from AT&T's service. Copyright infringers are often illegally pirating hundreds of hours of stolen content, not a song or two from their favorite band.
- autoexec 8y ago
  They might feel it's worth it to lose that money in the short term if they can make an example out of pirates and try to establish account termination for unproven allegations of infringement as an industry standard practice. Long term it isn't smart but there are media industry mouthpieces claiming they will be losing $52 billion to internet piracy by 2022. How many DSL customers will they be willing to drop if they think it'll help stop the billions their parent companies are "losing" annually.
- ashleyn 8y ago
  A lot more incentive now that they're the copyright owner for many TimeWarner productions. It just all becomes part of the big math problem.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  It's in AT&T's interest to cut off 'unlimited' users who use a large proportion of their network bandwidth. Using copyright claims to do that sounds like a smart plan.
Kenji 8y ago
> I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright) Actually no, why the fuck would I? Retarded laws must be broken as much and as hard as possible until the government has no choice but to change or drop them. Pressure must be exerted from the lowest ranks of the population.

eiaoa 8y ago

> what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government, and they have obvious interests in tilting every table to advantage themselves. Dealing with a corporate bureaucracy is dealing with a regulatory body that's been totally captured by that corporation.

sbov 8y ago
But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a competitor!
- msbarnett 8y ago
  > But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a competitor! If we pretend geographic monopolies don't exist, maybe
- gbear605 8y ago
  Not in many areas
- jrnichols 8y ago
  I detect the sarcasm there. and you're right! you can totally bail and go to the competition... like HughesNet. They're just the same, right? (also more sarcasm)
mdpopescu 8y ago
Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government. Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  This story is very specifically about a corporation enforcing those laws.
- eiaoa 8y ago
  > Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! That's an entirely different issue from what I was commenting on. > And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government. You're forgetting that ISPs are natural monopolies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly: >> "A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were discussed as a potential source of market failure by John Stuart Mill, who advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good." > Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s You're right, it does sound great; especially when you remove the blinders of misunderstanding. Admittedly, it's not entirely without it's own problems, but those problems are best solved without re-introducing the problems that regulation successfully mitigates.
- ctoth 8y ago
  Please do educate me as to how the government enforces a geographic monopoly.
  - 8y ago
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that. Moreover, in many cases the regulations are what make markets uncompetitive. Providing internet service to urban areas is highly lucrative and has relatively low costs -- if you could pull $40/month from each of a hundred people just for wiring a single high rise, companies would be lining up left and right to do that. But you aren't allowed to do that without also providing service to an area covering hundreds of square miles, including random farmhouses that are ten miles apart from one another. A competent government would instead solve that problem through direct subsidies to providers who expand into rural areas (or leave it to the market to figure out how to connect sparse farmhouses with some kind of medium-speed directional wireless or similar), and then there would be more competition. But we haven't got that. Moreover, even when there are actual natural monopolies (like roads or rural internet) that can justify government involvement, what works best in those cases is often for the government to just provide the thing directly rather than trying to regulate some independent private entity with a 96% chance of capturing the regulators.
- clairity 8y ago
  > "This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that." what you say would be true of (increasingly rare) mom-and-pop shops, but the relationship you use is highly asymmetric and favorable to the large bureaucratic organization, no matter the competitive dynamics of the market. target would be the one laughing in your face, not the customer. the false dichotomy of preferring one bureaucracy over another because one is private and the other public is silly (in case it's unclear, you should prefer neither). the rest of what you said is reasonable however. direct provision, direct subsidies, or removal of regulatory barriers in rural access would be better than the convoluted compromise we have now.

sf_rob 8y ago

As you hint at, this is also a space where the FCC considers dial up and cell phone service (AFAIK) to be competitors when it comes to regulatory requirements. I got some copyright notices from a roommate's habits and Comcast was the only high speed ISP that was available at my house. Given that my work involves regular working from home, this was highly concerning.

cronix 8y ago
At least they (Comcast) just send you an email now and don't inject their notices into the HTML of the websites you're visiting like they were doing a few years ago. It was basically a MITM attack, done by the ISP.
- eisrep 8y ago
  They've done this to me warning I was near the 1TB limit on data usage earlier this year. It felt pretty disgusting.

jstanley 8y ago

> I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright) FWIW, many of us don't believe in following or enforcing unjust laws.

dionidium 8y ago
References to 150-year copyrights is (deliberate or not) pure obfuscation. We're talking about downloading the latest box office hits†, not century-old texts bound by unjust extensions to copyright. † Edit: in most but obviously not all cases
- kragen 8y ago
  The story doesn't have any such details. Please remember that the most famous such case, the prosecution of Aaron Swartz until he committed suicide, was for downloading academic papers from JSTOR, presumably including many century-old texts, and that the current best system for obtaining academic papers you're legally allowed to get — Sci-hub — is on the receiving end of a series of lawsuits from companies who didn't even write the texts being copied in the first place and never paid their authors.
  - dionidium 8y ago
    The prosecution of Aaron Swartz, a farcical tragedy, has nothing to do with this story.
    - vorpalhex 8y ago
      It has everything to do with the story because it shows that most copyright claims are done in absolute bad faith and consumers are given no real tools to defend themselves. Right now for the majority of people who get a DMCA, there is nothing they can do. There is no functional appeals process, there is no office in charge of handling bad DMCAs. Shy of actually going to court with a lawyer and attempting a suit, if a company files a bogus DMCA then you are boned. That is an abortion of free speech and property rights, and the Swartz case is a perfect example of that. Most of the papers Swartz obtained were supposed to belong to the public, and yet he was sued into oblivion for DOING NOTHING ILLEGAL. He had no counterclaim short of going to full court with lawyers, something entirely out of his grasp and reach, and because he felt he had no alternatives to having his life ruined, he committed suicide. It's not a farcical tragedy, it's a flipping shame for the human race. edit - language

ams6110 8y ago

AT&T is not going to be too eager to cut your service. They want your $50 - $150/month (or more) if they can get it. FTA: The bottom line: Very few copyright infringers ever get booted from their broadband provider, pointing to the severity of these cases and the number of steps at which the customer is told they are violating copyright before they are cut off from AT&T's service. Copyright infringers are often illegally pirating hundreds of hours of stolen content, not a song or two from their favorite band.

autoexec 8y ago
They might feel it's worth it to lose that money in the short term if they can make an example out of pirates and try to establish account termination for unproven allegations of infringement as an industry standard practice. Long term it isn't smart but there are media industry mouthpieces claiming they will be losing $52 billion to internet piracy by 2022. How many DSL customers will they be willing to drop if they think it'll help stop the billions their parent companies are "losing" annually.
ashleyn 8y ago
A lot more incentive now that they're the copyright owner for many TimeWarner productions. It just all becomes part of the big math problem.
londons_explore 8y ago
It's in AT&T's interest to cut off 'unlimited' users who use a large proportion of their network bandwidth. Using copyright claims to do that sounds like a smart plan.

Kenji 8y ago

> I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright) Actually no, why the fuck would I? Retarded laws must be broken as much and as hard as possible until the government has no choice but to change or drop them. Pressure must be exerted from the lowest ranks of the population.