10 ms·

ISPs to start policing copyright by July 12

189 points by dangrossman 15y ago

alantrrs 15y ago
Im from Mexico, and aparently these kind of things are already happening here. A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that the cable company called him to say that he was downloading copyrighted material from warner and that he should stop or he would be cut off.
dangrossman 15y ago
This raises so many questions. What kind of traffic inspection are these ISPs doing that would enable them to identify infringement as it's happening? How do they know what rights the people involved have to say that a specific download is infringing or not? Speaking of the general public, how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not?
- samstave 15y ago
  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
  - tptacek 15y ago
    I don't know if this was meant to be witty or what, but it has nothing to do with how ISPs actually (a) identify file sharing traffic or (b, orthogonally) determine whether users are pirating content.
    - samstave 15y ago
      I am always amazed at how incredibly smart people can be seemingly unable to connect freaking dots. Sorry, tptacek, but this is 100% related. If you, or anyone on HN, is concerned about ISPs being able to sniff the intent/payload of your traffic, then you're fucking stupid. Why? Because the NSA has been doing it for YEARS. Here is a MAIN STREAM story on their institutionalizing of this activity in Utah which is NO SECRET! It doesnt even matter "how ISPs actually identify file sharing traffic" -- it is TOO late. File sharing is a ruse, a red herring, who the fuck cares about file sharing. This is about TIA (total information awareness) they don't care if you file share! They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal. They want to know EVERYTHING you do - and by claiming you are a criminal via file sharing, they can install stupid ass gateways in the last mile, which just makes it seem like they follow some due process - there is NO LAST MILE. THey have every single bit, already! They have already compromised the ISP, this is just a scare tactic to keep out the fluff. The fluff are those would would think that their stupid file sharing is alerting the feds, such that they refrain from doing so. So, in closing, what the NSA is doing, on mass scale, is FAR more pertinent than what you would think.
      - wmf 15y ago
        When was the last time you heard about ECHELON being used? Never? The thing about ECHELON is that it's like nuclear weapons — it's too important to be used against anyone less than a terrorist. So what do I care if the NSA is reading my Internet traffic and they're never going to use that information because they don't want to reveal that they have it in the first place or how they got it. It might not even be admissible in court. They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal. I see no evidence of that (they seem to be happy with operating illegally), so you're just using this thread as a coatrack for off-topic rants.
        samstave 15y ago
        >hen was the last time you heard about ECHELON being used? Never? Are you kidding me? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A This room is in the same building that Twitter HQ is in. It is the ground zero for the back door-ing of the social stream. You likely have not been paying attention
        wmf 15y ago
        They're definitely collecting information, but they don't use it.
        tptacek 15y ago
        I'm not sure why you're replying to someone who argues by calling people who disagree with him names.
- Timothee 15y ago
  Speaking of the general public, how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not? That's been my biggest question about streaming. On one hand I can google "watch the office online for free" and end up on Hulu, it has ads, but it's free. If I look around I can see that I don't have access to all their content, but they have a subscription model that gives full access. On the other, I can google "watch dexter online for free" and end up on MegaVideo (well, imagine you're four months ago). It has ads, but it's free. If I want to watch a lot of videos, I see that I can't because there's a daily limit, but they have a subscription model that gives full access. As a user, I have no way to know that the first one is legal while the second isn't. That being said, it's my understanding that at this point, this is what makes streaming a bit of an edge-case why mostly the website is charged, rather than the users. But that might of course change…
  - freehunter 15y ago
    >As a user, I have no way to know that the first one is legal while the second isn't. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it". Bullshit, isn't it? --edit: I'm not arguing this point. I'm just pointing out that not knowing the law isn't a valid legal defense, so not knowing which site was legal would not prevent a user from prosecution.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - Timothee 15y ago
      In this case, it's not about knowing the law or not, but about knowing which sites have contracts with the right owners. I can access the laws that say it's illegal, but I don't have access to the contracts (or the absence of contracts…) that can confirm this or that site is legal. That's what makes this question so interesting. When you can download a bunch of songs and movies for free, by now you should know that something is up, the same way people get busted when returning from Mexico with a fake Chanel purse, because "common sense" should tell you that you can't buy one for $15, the same way you can't get full albums for free. (though, common sense is of course very subjective) But the more the illegal sources look and behave like the legit ones, the more difficult it is to know what's going on. I would probably know because I would hear of the companies from TechCrunch or somewhere, but a random user wouldn't. So I do wonder if that would be a valid legal defense. Similarly I don't know if someone that had paid a few hundred dollars in a legit-looking store in Asia for a fake but good looking Chanel purse could just explain it was in good faith… Another example would be Spotify vs. Grooveshark.
- wmf 15y ago
  how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not? Graduated response is only for P2P, which is presumptively illegal. ICE/SOPA goes after pirate sites. Nobody goes after the users of pirate sites, so you don't have to worry about that.
- freehunter 15y ago
  I work in information security, and while my company doesn't have the sophistication necessary to know exactly what data is contained in each and every packet that goes through the network (that's not what we do), I could give a "this is how I would decide" overview. We've got pretty rudimentary tools at my job, but we can still see source and destination address (even through a NAT and proxy on our end), IP ports/protocol, time of day and speed of connection trends, and we can do small amounts of packet inspection (we grab the first 120 bytes of every packet). With this data, I'm able to tell if someone is using BitTorrent vs Skype (they're both peer-to-peer UDP packets to random addresses, so finding the difference is key). I can tell where their information is being sent to. If the packet is not encrypted, I can see exactly what is being sent (the header data will show filenames being transferred). DNS data will tell me what site they've just visited, and packet capture will tell me what specific page they're on and what search terms they used on that site.) With an unencrypted session, it's as easy as piecing the domain name from DNS (thepiratebay.com) to the packet capture (http: 11:23pm March 15, "the office", /search/test/0/99/0) to the user (10.250.250.10) to the network flows (every few seconds there's another couple packets going out to or coming from a few dozen address across the world). Bam, we've got an infringing user. Now granted, people will likely be using encryption. I don't know how the tools handle this, we don't do anything with it at my job. However, I would imagine the ISPs could do deeper packet inspection. I would imagine they simply don't care if your traffic is legal or not. They may assume it's all illegal and serve notice anyway. There may be an appeals process. As for the difference between Hulu and joe-streams-hollywood.com, I would imagine they have a whitelist of addresses. TL;DR; I don't know, but I can make an educated guess. Best bet, encrypt your traffic but don't rely on that to save your ass.
  - quangv 15y ago
    scary... if ISP's sniff packets, isn't that illegal wiretapping?
    - wmf 15y ago
      They're not sniffing anything.
    - 15y ago
- toyg 15y ago
  IANAL, but from what I understand, a consumer is not guilty of watching illegally-duplicated media; it is whoever makes the content available who is breaking the law. So ISPs would only have to stop people uploading content. This is relatively easy for P2P and streaming sites, but I don't see how you could ever hope to police "file lockers" like MegaVideo; users would just upload encrypted files (even just password-protected zip files) and distribute the password. If it starts to be a cat-and-mouse game, I expect offshore filelockers will start providing privacy-protecting features for uploaders, coupled with a lot of fun and games with DNS records.
  - wmf 15y ago
    That's why they wanted to use SOPA to shut down cyberlockers completely; it's much easier than playing wack-a-mole with individual files.
- quanticle 15y ago
  >What kind of traffic inspection are these ISPs doing that would enable to identify infringement as it's happening? As I understand it, there's no actual monitoring being done by ISPs. The monitoring is done by the record and movie companies. When they see a torrent of their content being shared, they record the IP addresses of everyone seeding that torrent and then send warning requests to the ISPs whose users are uploading. Those IPs then relay that warning to the actual users associated with those IPs. Once a user gets six of these warnings, the ISP is obligated to cut off the user. At least, that's the way it was reported last summer, and that's how Ars Technica is describing the enforcement system now.
drucken 15y ago
Are US ISPs being paid to do this by the entertainment industry? If so, is there any transparency on this? Why would the ISPs choose to do this with no legal requirement for it and strong restrictions in how they can achieve this now or in future any infrastructure business around it due to net neutrality and other regulator issues? This would directly alienate their own broadband customers...
- wmf 15y ago
  It looks like the ISPs are actually paying half the cost of the system. The mind boggles. Everybody in the thread please read the MOU; it's probably totally different than you think: http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momorandum%20of%20Understanding.pdf http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momo...
  - jostmey 15y ago
    Actually, the ISPs have incentive to play along! Under these rules, the ISPs will be able to throttle back peoples internet connections, which will save the ISPs money.
- angrycoder 15y ago
  Many ISPs in the US are the entertainment industry. My ISP is comcast, which not only owns their own TV networks and sports teams, they just bought NBC. Same thing with Time Warner.
MikeOnFire 15y ago
sounds like a bullshit article, thought up to scare people. go fuck yourself PR firms, i'll believe it when i see it
- batista 15y ago
  So, you'll believe it when it's too late. Nice attitude, bro. Also, PR firms? This is cnet. And it's not it talking about something obscure, the program is common knowledge. How about doing your research?
jostmey 15y ago
It does not take a leap of the imagination to see how ordinary, law-abiding citizens might accidently be affected. Here is a hypothetical scenario of how things might play out. People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future. Then coders like me who use SSH/SFTP heavily will be flagged as pirates too. Then my internet will be cut off.
- spindritf 15y ago
  > People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future. Which won't really help since they're being tracked by their peers, I don't think anyone is wiretapping random Internet users' connections to bust them for piracy.
  - Zirro 15y ago
    I'm assuming he means hiding behind a VPN, which encrypts traffic and masks your IP. If enough people start using them, I suppose they'll be the next to feel the heat from the media-companies.
- orbitingpluto 15y ago
  Quite a while ago my ISP threatened to shut off my Internet as I had a port open for SSH. I suggested that they should be more concerned that they had admitted to either scanning my system without permission or snooping on my traffic. That was enough to end that. Unfortunately I don't think asserting an expectation of privacy is enough anymore.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  They might get a lot of false positives for people who just stream videos a lot from the web or something. But I think I know how they will propose to "solve" this later on. They will just "allow" content websites to enter a "whitelist", and as soon as that list gets big enough, just throttle everything else.
nextparadigms 15y ago
I believe this is the "6 strike" system. They agreed to do this last July, and it seems to go into effect a year later. Also, I'm not so sure how "voluntary" this was, considering the Obama administration was involved to "mediate" the deal. My guess is the White House tried to pressure the ISP's into agreeing with this, though I wouldn't exactly call the ISP's innocent considering pretty much all of them now have their own content services, and it would benefit them to cut down on piracy somehow.
- ekianjo 15y ago
  You can only get a benefit if one is willing to pay for content. Piracy does not equal one lost sale.
  - rabidsnail 15y ago
    The equation is different for cable companies than it is for content producers. Cable companies (I'm including phone companies that provide TV service) are competing with the internet itself, in aggregate. They're thinking much longer term. If they can get people to make a habit of watching TV through them instead of the internet, they win.
    - rwmj 15y ago
      I'm wondering on which planet cable is going to beat the internet. Presumably it's a planet where the people prefer inconvenience, cost and poor usability.
      - rabidsnail 15y ago
        Cable is more convenent if you don't care what you're watching and don't want to be made to choose. It's optimized for passive consumption. Most people want a morphine IV drip, not a wine cellar.
    - eftpotrm 15y ago
      If they can get people to make a habit of watching TV through them instead of the internet, they win. Yup, but surely even a basic viewing session of Internet-based TV would convince even the dimmest bulb that they're fighting a losing battle to keep scheduled broadcast as the primary means of video consumption.
18pfsmt 15y ago
They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are in the clear? I imagine port 563 may see increased usage. Anyway, I've been considering a service to allow people to swap modems (i.e. cable -> DSL, or vice versa), to minimize switching costs. This move may make the idea more viable.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are in the clear? That's engineer thinking, not lawyer thinking. Do you really think, just because packets went over port 9999 and, let's go further and say it wasn't even HTTP, that any attorney, judge or jury will even understand, much less care that it's not the "web"?
  - etherael 15y ago
    Yes, because those protocols will never be bought to trial. This is about targeting the lowest possible hanging fruit that your average joe random idiot can click a big blue button and pull down the last version of whatever schlock big content is pushing out. Some guy using a bitcoin purchased usenet account over SSL from a VPN through tor to a remote data dump and then grabbing the booty is never going to get caught in this net.
    - batista 15y ago
      Don't bet on it.
      - stcredzero 15y ago
        Actually, I'd like to see this question on a prediction market.
      - EricDeb 15y ago
        I'd bet on it
      - etherael 15y ago
Cieplak 15y ago
What if you share an IP address with several other families? Does this imply that internet would be cut off to the IP address if it were found to be infringing?
- batista 15y ago
  What do you think? That the random guy assigned to this at the ISP would stop and investigate the issue? Maybe also send their best detectives to see if it was some random guy breaking into the WiFi from across the street? They'll cut it, and have you appeal.
- frederico 15y ago
  who ever has the name on the bill seems to be the one responsible.
  - Jach 15y ago
    It'd be a great way to shut out schools and businesses from the internet. Unless the way to opt-out of this is simply to get a business connection.
EricDeb 15y ago
I get the impression that a lot of people who are "heavy pirates" are the types that simply wouldn't listen to music otherwise. I was into pirating music simply because I could... then I realized I never listen to any of it. Since then I rarely download.
- incongruity 15y ago
  Well, if they are, they're also wasting their money: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-... & http://www.pcworld.com/article/236214/study_casts_pirate_site_users_in_good_light.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/236214/study_casts_pirate_sit... Just say'n, is all...
SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I'd be really interested in seeing a list of ISPs that have chosen not to sign. Even though I don't pirate, I would jump in a heartbeat if its feasible (e.g. I can actually find a non-signed ISP) and my ISP isn't on the list.
- cgarvey 15y ago
  That's not to say that those currently not on the list won't be in the future, they're probably just waiting to see how things pan out.
  - mistercow 15y ago
    That would make it even more important for customers to leave ISPs who have signed on.
- equalarrow 15y ago
  I left Comcast in Jan because of SOPA. This is just another reason why these 'ISPs' are a bad choice. I live in San Francisco and chose Sonic.net because they don't cap or do any kind of traffic shaping. I did take a hit in my speed (from 20mb to 10mb), but their service is top notch and I feel good about where I put my money every month. Sonic's also been doing a fiber rollout in some areas north of SF and in one section of the city. I won't ever go back to Comcast. I'm interested to see how this will affect people. Will there be an exodus from these guys for other ISPs that don't cap or police the line?
  - jimray 15y ago
    +1 in support of sonic.net in the Bay Area. They are total pros on everything from installation to customer service. Plus, they're building a last-mile fiber network in SF!
rabidsnail 15y ago
At what point will they lose their DMCA safe-harbor protection? Can we discourage them from actively policing copyright by suing them for copyright infringement?
- jrockway 15y ago
  Yes. And when they lose their common carrier status, they'll be responsible for trafficking in child pornography if any of their customers do. I anticipate failure.
  - ceol 15y ago
    I don't believe ISPs are considered common carriers.
    - AutoCorrect 15y ago
      but by doing this they ARE giving up their safe-harbour provisions.
      - wmf 15y ago
        Why do you think so?
        deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
incongruity 15y ago
How does this mix with major ISPs offering VOIP bundles – what happens if they cut off your internet access and you are no longer able to call 911? Is there any potential liability there?
- trotsky 15y ago
  They don't actually cut off your network connection, they just filter it so that you can only reach a subset of their own addresses like dhcp, dns, trouble resolution website etc. I'm sure they just include the voip servers on that list. That traffic is often provisioned totally separately (outside of your commit, possibly to a separate mac) so that it might not be an issue in the first place.
  - simcop2387 15y ago
    That would only work if you're using their bundled service. If you were using Vonage for instance it could easily interrupt that. They can whitelist all they want but they can never get all of them.
    - trotsky 15y ago
      yeah, but the third party voip providers all tell you that they aren't a replacement for a landline providing E911 service because of the (many) problems that can occur with an unmanaged pipe.
  - incongruity 15y ago
    Thanks – that all makes sense... of course, the lesson there is just grab the mac of your voip box, right? =) (this is mostly somewhat academic for me – I don't pirate, but I do wear a tinfoil hat at times)
  - cbs 15y ago
    >I'm sure they just include the voip servers on that list. That traffic is often provisioned totally separately (outside of your commit, possibly to a separate mac) But I don't use Comcast's VoIP service. And if they whitelist SIP traffic, well, people will just tunnel piracy over RTP.
maeon3 15y ago
I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4 across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it). If they get one thing wrong which they will, I'm going to piss and moan about it to no end. On the plus side, net neutrality will be gone, and ownership of the internet secured by the United States congress. I suppose it's better than falling into the hands of some other country, which will also lay claim to it. Let the Internet be divided into a million pieces with import duties for every bit and byte transmitted across an infinite number of versions of the internet. This is how evolution works, a good idea grows too big, then it compartmentalizes and specializes. Most will suck, but some will be better, and the better ones will be on the receiving end of the goods and services of the enlightened masses. If we can promote freedom to choose which internet to live under, we should be ok to Stamp out the subnets that are used for enslavement of man in favor of the "more free" versions.
- freehunter 15y ago
  >I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4 across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it). Like it or not, you can still be sued for that. You bought a license to watch the movie, not to copy the movie to another device. I'm not sure if there's a legal concept of joint ownership of the license to watch a movie. It's not the ISPs that need to change. This is like raging to the states who voted to lower their max driving speed to 55 in the 70s. Yes, it was their decision, but they were heavily coerced by the federal government with stiff penalties if they didn't. I highly doubt the ISPs signed on to lose customers just because they believe in IP that much.
  - stcredzero 15y ago
    they were heavily coerced by the federal government with stiff penalties Perhaps this should become a campaign issue?
frigite 15y ago
This has already been going on as others have noted. ISPs send email citing that X external organization representing Y media company says that you have been sharing Z content, then the ISP shuts off or redirects all web traffic from your location except that which is allowed to go to a webpage they specify in the email where you must acknowledge that you got their communication and will cease and desist. It is pretty Orwellian. We all need to switch to mesh wifi internetworking as soon as possible. With some work, it could become a better solution than our current net, and there would be no monthly cost to an ISP, and no MPAA, RIAA, or government interference. Granted, there is value in rule of law and protection of adequate compensation for created works. But when Big Brother comes down on you and your neighbors, is that ok? These guys would have cuffed you for the cassette mixtape you made for your girlfriend in the 10th grade if they would have known about it. The longer you let the ISPs or the government rule the net, the less of a chance you will have to ever get it back.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  We all need to switch to mesh wifi internet working as soon as possible. With some work... "Some" work? There are serious problems with scaling mesh networks. Private citizens are not going to replace the internet backbone with mesh networks. The best we could hope for are low bandwidth metro WAN. That said, this is something we should put in place ahead of time, so we can turn it on if the government ever wants to black out media and internet access. As far as combating this latest outrage, how about additional widespread encryption, so all the traffic is effectively on a VPN? If keys are distributed via smartphone networks, it will be hard for the ISPs to do things like mount MITM attacks. Combine this with some honeypots -- as mentioned elsewhere, have people engaging in legal sharing and sue the ISPs when they interfere.
  - wmf 15y ago
    this is something we should put in place ahead of time, so we can turn it on if... But people won't put it in place unless it provides some advantage immediately, which it doesn't.
    - 15y ago
einhverfr 15y ago
Move to central Washington state, where you have a hcoice of a dozen or so high-speed ISP's across fiber...... This reminds me. I wonder if the change during Reagan/Clinton to pro-consolidation, anti-competition has anything to do with making an industry easier to control in this way.....
- EricDeb 15y ago
  Dear god I hope you aren't suggesting moving to Ellensburg...
  - cullenking 15y ago
    or yakima....
  - einhverfr 15y ago
    Chelan or Douglas counties would be best, so Chelan, Wenatchee, Waterville....
tim_h 15y ago
If an ISP starts openly inspecting content like this will it become liable for all content that passes through it's network? Edit: I'm surprised to see this downvoted. Care to comment why?
- wmf 15y ago
  ISPs aren't common carriers.
ilaksh 15y ago
I don't think its really that important for everyone to be able to get all movies, tv shows, music and stuff for free, but the fact that the internet is controlled by a fairly small number of companies does seem to be a problem. To me its similar to general problems with over-centralization and/or monopolization in many areas. There is one water company, not very many large entertainment distributors, food production is handled by an increasingly small number of companies, electricity comes from one company, web search results mostly controlled by one company. We should do a better job of using shared knowledge exchange formats to be able to get an accurate holistic picture, but at the same time I think things would be more robust and we would be more secure if production, distribution and control was generally much more localized. I actually think that we should aim for producing water, electricity and food inside of individual homes/apartments or buildings, and also create alternative fiber, laser and wifi mesh networks for communications.
- freehunter 15y ago
  I don't agree with lumping the RIAA in with municipal water or electricity. Utilities can be much cheaper and more efficient with a local monopoly than if they were in competition. Imagine if water delivery was a free market: you'd have a half dozen or so companies pumping water to you, and unlike with rotatable Internet protocols, they wouldn't be able to use each others lines. You'd have to have the same amount of water lines run to your house as there were competing companies. Same with the choice of electricity: they can all use one line, but in the end it has to be traceable back to the one company who shilled out the watts for your benefit. Imagine if there were three or four competing power plants serving your neighborhood, all running at 1/3 capacity (plant efficiency doesn't scale down nicely). No, utilities need to be monopolized for efficiency. With rotatable protocols though, you can trace who sent what to whom. That's where competition is a good thing. That's why local monopolies on ISPs are ridiculous, same with monopolies on content distribution.
  - ilaksh 15y ago
    I don't want companies competing to send me electricity or water. I want to produce my own electricity and water.
jrockway 15y ago
Good news, everyone. Nobody told the ISPs about cryptography!
- rabidsnail 15y ago
  Unless everybody moves to freenet (or some other friend-to-friend network) you have to exchange keys at the beginning of every session with a peer. The ISP can see that, and MITM you. SSL/TLS gets around this with a central certificate authority that vouches for the public key of the other party. That's damn difficult if not impossible to pull off in a decentralized system.
beloch 15y ago
Reasons why this is a waste of resources: 1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive. You have to design algorithms to detect infringement and you have to implement them in a way that can keep up with a respectable portion of your backbone bandwidth without significantly degrading performance for consumers. 2) File sharing protocols can adapt rapidly and will most likely make more and more extensive use of encryption. Distinguishing legal file sharing from illegal file sharing will only get more and more difficult. Even if there remain ways to detect infringement, this arms race with file-sharers will feed back into 1 in a big way. 3) As Neil Young famously put it, "Piracy is the new radio". Those who adapt to the "new radio" first will reap the rewards. Those who spend massive amounts of cash fighting the inevitable progress of technology will just fall behind. What should these dinosaurs do if they want to stay competitive? Stop treating users of the "new radio" like criminals and win them over by providing a superior experience to what the pirates can deliver. e.g. Stop loading DVD's and bluray's up with annoying advertisements, anti-piracy messages, and warnings. Online stores shouldn't sell 720p videos or lossy music files when pirates are giving away 1080p videos and lossless audio for free. Above all, minimize the payment barrier. Make it cheap enough to feel like value is high and make it at least as easy and fast as pirating. In short, stop spending money to treat your customers like criminals and, instead, spend it to ensure that legal purchases are the path of least resistance to the highest quality experience.
- quasisimple 15y ago
  WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THEY PASSED THE CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES ACT?!?!
- gurkendoktor 15y ago
  > 1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive People who torrent 24/7 just because they can are also resource intensive. I think there might be a real incentive to kick Joe Leecher out of one's customer base and keep people who only check their email.
  - gcb 15y ago
    but no one would pay $120/mo for 328MBPS DSL⁕ only for checking email. So there's still incentive to make P2P seems a possibility. ⁕ only 0.0001% guaranteed
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
acuity12 15y ago
The moment a provider throttles my internet based on "piracy" is the moment I begin investing all of my free time into making a free and invincible p2p solution.
- mindslight 15y ago
  Given how things currently are and the hypothetical tense of your comment, I can only conclude you're bluffing yourself.
Cieplak 15y ago
"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
pjscott 15y ago
I got hit with a dire legal warning in college from these anti-piracy-crusader guys. Apparently I had been heavily uploading Beyonce songs on Limewire. This was strange, as I have never used Limewire and don't much like Beyonce's songs. I had to go to some office and fill out papers to say that I was innocent, because someone made a completely spurious (and probably automated) accusation against me. These people are scum.
aklofas 15y ago
Interesting. I'm just waiting for the ISP's to get sued for breach of contract for throttling customers internet. If a neighbor (for example) logs onto router and starts downloading, I can imagine there'll be lots of false positives. And lawyers love false positives.
gcb 15y ago
So, no ATT? or does one of those mentioned in the article is the consumer name for at&t and i'm clueless even though they get my money every month?
- dangrossman 15y ago
  AT&T is participating. > During a panel discussion held for U.S. publishers today, RIAA chairman Cary Sherman said his association and a number of ISPs—including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—will begin policing traffic to crack down on piracy starting this summer. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-isps-to-police-your-traffic-starting-july-12.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-isp...
snambi 15y ago
Well, if web policing is enforced by ISPs, it may give birth to the next generation of internet. I'm not kidding. I'm serious. Let me explain. Today everyone has a wifi router. Imagine, one wifi router sending request to the next wifi router, which routes to the next router towards the destination. It is theoretically possible to reach the destination and get back. It may be a million hops. But, it is possible. Today's wifi routers are designed to talk to CABLE or DSL. But they can be made to talk to a nearby wifi router also. If we do that the entire world will become one giant network. That would be the real internet. At that time, we won't need ISPs. Today majority of traffic goes through ISPs. If this type of wifi routers come to existence, even countries like Iran cannot control internet. This may be a blessing in disguise.
- chrisballinger 15y ago
  Do you have any technical background in this area? The usability (latency) of such networks is ridiculously bad, and the whole idea is based on the assumption that the average guy will have a wifi router capable of supporting this new protocol. The bridge nodes to connect back to the global internet are also some easy points of failure. Not to mention that anyone stupid enough to not be using a VPN or HTTPS over such a connection will have their information leaked to a ton of cool hacker kids running a custom build of DD-WRT on their Linksys router. I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but the way around the copyright cops isn't a janky 2.4 GHz "mesh network" using 802.11. It's going to require a lot more than that.
  - snambi 15y ago
    It is just an idea. You are right, the current wifi routers doesn't have capability. However, this is done by the backbone routers at present. If we go back to the 80s, the PCs of that time cannot handle the computing needs of a large website. However, today nearly all datacenters are run using PC hardware. In other words the business of big servers got commoditized in the early 2000s. In the same way, the big network backbone business will be commoditized at some point in time. The restrictions such as this, will only accelerate the commoditization.
noonespecial 15y ago
We sure are turning chinese fast. In the end, does it really matter what ideology underpins the censorship? Users say to themselves, "I have to be really careful not to even appear like I'm doing something 'bad' on the internet or I could lose my access or worse." It doesn't matter where you got on the train or why, once it pulls into that last station, you're done.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- ttt_ 15y ago
  It seems to me that this whole endeavor is just a doorway for more control/censorship a couple of years from now. Once the technology is set up and the practice is sanctioned, more and more 'bad practices' will start being policed and punished.
  - noonespecial 15y ago
    I don't believe that that's intentional. If if was that might be better because we might have a chance at stopping it. Its an emergent behavior. The tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the type that use it for evil later. It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front. You sometimes have to fight the good intentions now to prevent the evil later. That's an impossible political sell.
    - ttt_ 15y ago
      >> The tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the type that use it for evil later. Are you so sure that those good reasons aren't conceived by ill intented guys knowing what you have just described: It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front. More commonly refered to as wolf in sheep's clothing. Big power players are not naive.
    - intended 15y ago
      Unfortunately its an essential political sell. In essence you've called out the fact that its the slippery slope. In this case though its intentional. These structures affect the power structures, so the power structure will react to it in order to either minimize/control/remove its effect. Sadly you have to play ball in a manner that shows that the power on the other end (the anti RIAA portion of the spectrum) has the ability to create/co-ordinate voters. The RIAA supports its cause by spending tonnes of money to 'educate' legislators. If you can influence their voting base though, that education is pointless, since voting power is far more important.
mistercow 15y ago
> Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers According to the official Copyright Alerts site[1], the only "other bandwidth provider" that has signed on is AT&T. [1] http://www.copyrightinformation.org/about http://www.copyrightinformation.org/about
yaix 15y ago
> [...] notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, [...] Stop of being accused?
joejohnson 15y ago
Can anyone recommend a good VPN or other solution to encrypt all of my traffic?
- ohashi 15y ago
  get a free ec2 instance. How I got web in china.

189 points by dangrossman 15y ago

Im from Mexico, and aparently these kind of things are already happening here. A friend of mine told me a few weeks ago that the cable company called him to say that he was downloading copyrighted material from warner and that he should stop or he would be cut off.

dangrossman 15y ago

This raises so many questions. What kind of traffic inspection are these ISPs doing that would enable them to identify infringement as it's happening? How do they know what rights the people involved have to say that a specific download is infringing or not? Speaking of the general public, how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not?

samstave 15y ago
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/ http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
- tptacek 15y ago
  I don't know if this was meant to be witty or what, but it has nothing to do with how ISPs actually (a) identify file sharing traffic or (b, orthogonally) determine whether users are pirating content.
  - samstave 15y ago
    I am always amazed at how incredibly smart people can be seemingly unable to connect freaking dots. Sorry, tptacek, but this is 100% related. If you, or anyone on HN, is concerned about ISPs being able to sniff the intent/payload of your traffic, then you're fucking stupid. Why? Because the NSA has been doing it for YEARS. Here is a MAIN STREAM story on their institutionalizing of this activity in Utah which is NO SECRET! It doesnt even matter "how ISPs actually identify file sharing traffic" -- it is TOO late. File sharing is a ruse, a red herring, who the fuck cares about file sharing. This is about TIA (total information awareness) they don't care if you file share! They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal. They want to know EVERYTHING you do - and by claiming you are a criminal via file sharing, they can install stupid ass gateways in the last mile, which just makes it seem like they follow some due process - there is NO LAST MILE. THey have every single bit, already! They have already compromised the ISP, this is just a scare tactic to keep out the fluff. The fluff are those would would think that their stupid file sharing is alerting the feds, such that they refrain from doing so. So, in closing, what the NSA is doing, on mass scale, is FAR more pertinent than what you would think.
    - wmf 15y ago
      When was the last time you heard about ECHELON being used? Never? The thing about ECHELON is that it's like nuclear weapons — it's too important to be used against anyone less than a terrorist. So what do I care if the NSA is reading my Internet traffic and they're never going to use that information because they don't want to reveal that they have it in the first place or how they got it. It might not even be admissible in court. They use file sharing and copyright to enact laws that make binary wiretap both trivial and legal. I see no evidence of that (they seem to be happy with operating illegally), so you're just using this thread as a coatrack for off-topic rants.
      - samstave 15y ago
        >hen was the last time you heard about ECHELON being used? Never? Are you kidding me? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A This room is in the same building that Twitter HQ is in. It is the ground zero for the back door-ing of the social stream. You likely have not been paying attention
        wmf 15y ago
        They're definitely collecting information, but they don't use it.
        tptacek 15y ago
        I'm not sure why you're replying to someone who argues by calling people who disagree with him names.
Timothee 15y ago
Speaking of the general public, how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not? That's been my biggest question about streaming. On one hand I can google "watch the office online for free" and end up on Hulu, it has ads, but it's free. If I look around I can see that I don't have access to all their content, but they have a subscription model that gives full access. On the other, I can google "watch dexter online for free" and end up on MegaVideo (well, imagine you're four months ago). It has ads, but it's free. If I want to watch a lot of videos, I see that I can't because there's a daily limit, but they have a subscription model that gives full access. As a user, I have no way to know that the first one is legal while the second isn't. That being said, it's my understanding that at this point, this is what makes streaming a bit of an edge-case why mostly the website is charged, rather than the users. But that might of course change…
- freehunter 15y ago
  >As a user, I have no way to know that the first one is legal while the second isn't. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it". Bullshit, isn't it? --edit: I'm not arguing this point. I'm just pointing out that not knowing the law isn't a valid legal defense, so not knowing which site was legal would not prevent a user from prosecution.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - Timothee 15y ago
    In this case, it's not about knowing the law or not, but about knowing which sites have contracts with the right owners. I can access the laws that say it's illegal, but I don't have access to the contracts (or the absence of contracts…) that can confirm this or that site is legal. That's what makes this question so interesting. When you can download a bunch of songs and movies for free, by now you should know that something is up, the same way people get busted when returning from Mexico with a fake Chanel purse, because "common sense" should tell you that you can't buy one for $15, the same way you can't get full albums for free. (though, common sense is of course very subjective) But the more the illegal sources look and behave like the legit ones, the more difficult it is to know what's going on. I would probably know because I would hear of the companies from TechCrunch or somewhere, but a random user wouldn't. So I do wonder if that would be a valid legal defense. Similarly I don't know if someone that had paid a few hundred dollars in a legit-looking store in Asia for a fake but good looking Chanel purse could just explain it was in good faith… Another example would be Spotify vs. Grooveshark.
wmf 15y ago
how does Joe Smith know that Hulu's stream of "The Office" is legal but some other site's is not? Graduated response is only for P2P, which is presumptively illegal. ICE/SOPA goes after pirate sites. Nobody goes after the users of pirate sites, so you don't have to worry about that.
freehunter 15y ago
I work in information security, and while my company doesn't have the sophistication necessary to know exactly what data is contained in each and every packet that goes through the network (that's not what we do), I could give a "this is how I would decide" overview. We've got pretty rudimentary tools at my job, but we can still see source and destination address (even through a NAT and proxy on our end), IP ports/protocol, time of day and speed of connection trends, and we can do small amounts of packet inspection (we grab the first 120 bytes of every packet). With this data, I'm able to tell if someone is using BitTorrent vs Skype (they're both peer-to-peer UDP packets to random addresses, so finding the difference is key). I can tell where their information is being sent to. If the packet is not encrypted, I can see exactly what is being sent (the header data will show filenames being transferred). DNS data will tell me what site they've just visited, and packet capture will tell me what specific page they're on and what search terms they used on that site.) With an unencrypted session, it's as easy as piecing the domain name from DNS (thepiratebay.com) to the packet capture (http: 11:23pm March 15, "the office", /search/test/0/99/0) to the user (10.250.250.10) to the network flows (every few seconds there's another couple packets going out to or coming from a few dozen address across the world). Bam, we've got an infringing user. Now granted, people will likely be using encryption. I don't know how the tools handle this, we don't do anything with it at my job. However, I would imagine the ISPs could do deeper packet inspection. I would imagine they simply don't care if your traffic is legal or not. They may assume it's all illegal and serve notice anyway. There may be an appeals process. As for the difference between Hulu and joe-streams-hollywood.com, I would imagine they have a whitelist of addresses. TL;DR; I don't know, but I can make an educated guess. Best bet, encrypt your traffic but don't rely on that to save your ass.
- quangv 15y ago
  scary... if ISP's sniff packets, isn't that illegal wiretapping?
  - wmf 15y ago
    They're not sniffing anything.
  - 15y ago
toyg 15y ago
IANAL, but from what I understand, a consumer is not guilty of watching illegally-duplicated media; it is whoever makes the content available who is breaking the law. So ISPs would only have to stop people uploading content. This is relatively easy for P2P and streaming sites, but I don't see how you could ever hope to police "file lockers" like MegaVideo; users would just upload encrypted files (even just password-protected zip files) and distribute the password. If it starts to be a cat-and-mouse game, I expect offshore filelockers will start providing privacy-protecting features for uploaders, coupled with a lot of fun and games with DNS records.
- wmf 15y ago
  That's why they wanted to use SOPA to shut down cyberlockers completely; it's much easier than playing wack-a-mole with individual files.
quanticle 15y ago
>What kind of traffic inspection are these ISPs doing that would enable to identify infringement as it's happening? As I understand it, there's no actual monitoring being done by ISPs. The monitoring is done by the record and movie companies. When they see a torrent of their content being shared, they record the IP addresses of everyone seeding that torrent and then send warning requests to the ISPs whose users are uploading. Those IPs then relay that warning to the actual users associated with those IPs. Once a user gets six of these warnings, the ISP is obligated to cut off the user. At least, that's the way it was reported last summer, and that's how Ars Technica is describing the enforcement system now.

drucken 15y ago

Are US ISPs being paid to do this by the entertainment industry? If so, is there any transparency on this? Why would the ISPs choose to do this with no legal requirement for it and strong restrictions in how they can achieve this now or in future any infrastructure business around it due to net neutrality and other regulator issues? This would directly alienate their own broadband customers...

wmf 15y ago
It looks like the ISPs are actually paying half the cost of the system. The mind boggles. Everybody in the thread please read the MOU; it's probably totally different than you think: http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momorandum%20of%20Understanding.pdf http://www.copyrightinformation.org/sites/default/files/Momo...
- jostmey 15y ago
  Actually, the ISPs have incentive to play along! Under these rules, the ISPs will be able to throttle back peoples internet connections, which will save the ISPs money.
angrycoder 15y ago
Many ISPs in the US are the entertainment industry. My ISP is comcast, which not only owns their own TV networks and sports teams, they just bought NBC. Same thing with Time Warner.

MikeOnFire 15y ago

sounds like a bullshit article, thought up to scare people. go fuck yourself PR firms, i'll believe it when i see it

batista 15y ago
So, you'll believe it when it's too late. Nice attitude, bro. Also, PR firms? This is cnet. And it's not it talking about something obscure, the program is common knowledge. How about doing your research?

jostmey 15y ago

It does not take a leap of the imagination to see how ordinary, law-abiding citizens might accidently be affected. Here is a hypothetical scenario of how things might play out. People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future. Then coders like me who use SSH/SFTP heavily will be flagged as pirates too. Then my internet will be cut off.

spindritf 15y ago
> People pirating music will be caught. These people will start encrypting their web-traffic to avoid getting caught in the future. Which won't really help since they're being tracked by their peers, I don't think anyone is wiretapping random Internet users' connections to bust them for piracy.
- Zirro 15y ago
  I'm assuming he means hiding behind a VPN, which encrypts traffic and masks your IP. If enough people start using them, I suppose they'll be the next to feel the heat from the media-companies.
orbitingpluto 15y ago
Quite a while ago my ISP threatened to shut off my Internet as I had a port open for SSH. I suggested that they should be more concerned that they had admitted to either scanning my system without permission or snooping on my traffic. That was enough to end that. Unfortunately I don't think asserting an expectation of privacy is enough anymore.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
nextparadigms 15y ago
They might get a lot of false positives for people who just stream videos a lot from the web or something. But I think I know how they will propose to "solve" this later on. They will just "allow" content websites to enter a "whitelist", and as soon as that list gets big enough, just throttle everything else.

nextparadigms 15y ago

I believe this is the "6 strike" system. They agreed to do this last July, and it seems to go into effect a year later. Also, I'm not so sure how "voluntary" this was, considering the Obama administration was involved to "mediate" the deal. My guess is the White House tried to pressure the ISP's into agreeing with this, though I wouldn't exactly call the ISP's innocent considering pretty much all of them now have their own content services, and it would benefit them to cut down on piracy somehow.

ekianjo 15y ago
You can only get a benefit if one is willing to pay for content. Piracy does not equal one lost sale.
- rabidsnail 15y ago
  The equation is different for cable companies than it is for content producers. Cable companies (I'm including phone companies that provide TV service) are competing with the internet itself, in aggregate. They're thinking much longer term. If they can get people to make a habit of watching TV through them instead of the internet, they win.
  - rwmj 15y ago
    I'm wondering on which planet cable is going to beat the internet. Presumably it's a planet where the people prefer inconvenience, cost and poor usability.
    - rabidsnail 15y ago
      Cable is more convenent if you don't care what you're watching and don't want to be made to choose. It's optimized for passive consumption. Most people want a morphine IV drip, not a wine cellar.
  - eftpotrm 15y ago
    If they can get people to make a habit of watching TV through them instead of the internet, they win. Yup, but surely even a basic viewing session of Internet-based TV would convince even the dimmest bulb that they're fighting a losing battle to keep scheduled broadcast as the primary means of video consumption.

18pfsmt 15y ago

They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are in the clear? I imagine port 563 may see increased usage. Anyway, I've been considering a service to allow people to swap modems (i.e. cable -> DSL, or vice versa), to minimize switching costs. This move may make the idea more viable.

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
They specifically used the words "web access," does that mean other ports are in the clear? That's engineer thinking, not lawyer thinking. Do you really think, just because packets went over port 9999 and, let's go further and say it wasn't even HTTP, that any attorney, judge or jury will even understand, much less care that it's not the "web"?
- etherael 15y ago
  Yes, because those protocols will never be bought to trial. This is about targeting the lowest possible hanging fruit that your average joe random idiot can click a big blue button and pull down the last version of whatever schlock big content is pushing out. Some guy using a bitcoin purchased usenet account over SSL from a VPN through tor to a remote data dump and then grabbing the booty is never going to get caught in this net.
  - batista 15y ago
    Don't bet on it.
    - stcredzero 15y ago
      Actually, I'd like to see this question on a prediction market.
    - EricDeb 15y ago
      I'd bet on it
    - etherael 15y ago

Cieplak 15y ago

What if you share an IP address with several other families? Does this imply that internet would be cut off to the IP address if it were found to be infringing?

batista 15y ago
What do you think? That the random guy assigned to this at the ISP would stop and investigate the issue? Maybe also send their best detectives to see if it was some random guy breaking into the WiFi from across the street? They'll cut it, and have you appeal.
frederico 15y ago
who ever has the name on the bill seems to be the one responsible.
- Jach 15y ago
  It'd be a great way to shut out schools and businesses from the internet. Unless the way to opt-out of this is simply to get a business connection.

EricDeb 15y ago

I get the impression that a lot of people who are "heavy pirates" are the types that simply wouldn't listen to music otherwise. I was into pirating music simply because I could... then I realized I never listen to any of it. Since then I rarely download.

incongruity 15y ago
Well, if they are, they're also wasting their money: http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-tons-more-music-than-average-folks.ars http://arstechnica.com/media/news/2009/04/study-pirates-buy-... & http://www.pcworld.com/article/236214/study_casts_pirate_site_users_in_good_light.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/236214/study_casts_pirate_sit... Just say'n, is all...

SoftwareMaven 15y ago

I'd be really interested in seeing a list of ISPs that have chosen not to sign. Even though I don't pirate, I would jump in a heartbeat if its feasible (e.g. I can actually find a non-signed ISP) and my ISP isn't on the list.

cgarvey 15y ago
That's not to say that those currently not on the list won't be in the future, they're probably just waiting to see how things pan out.
- mistercow 15y ago
  That would make it even more important for customers to leave ISPs who have signed on.
equalarrow 15y ago
I left Comcast in Jan because of SOPA. This is just another reason why these 'ISPs' are a bad choice. I live in San Francisco and chose Sonic.net because they don't cap or do any kind of traffic shaping. I did take a hit in my speed (from 20mb to 10mb), but their service is top notch and I feel good about where I put my money every month. Sonic's also been doing a fiber rollout in some areas north of SF and in one section of the city. I won't ever go back to Comcast. I'm interested to see how this will affect people. Will there be an exodus from these guys for other ISPs that don't cap or police the line?
- jimray 15y ago
  +1 in support of sonic.net in the Bay Area. They are total pros on everything from installation to customer service. Plus, they're building a last-mile fiber network in SF!

rabidsnail 15y ago

At what point will they lose their DMCA safe-harbor protection? Can we discourage them from actively policing copyright by suing them for copyright infringement?

jrockway 15y ago
Yes. And when they lose their common carrier status, they'll be responsible for trafficking in child pornography if any of their customers do. I anticipate failure.
- ceol 15y ago
  I don't believe ISPs are considered common carriers.
  - AutoCorrect 15y ago
    but by doing this they ARE giving up their safe-harbour provisions.
    - wmf 15y ago
      Why do you think so?
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]

incongruity 15y ago

How does this mix with major ISPs offering VOIP bundles – what happens if they cut off your internet access and you are no longer able to call 911? Is there any potential liability there?

trotsky 15y ago
They don't actually cut off your network connection, they just filter it so that you can only reach a subset of their own addresses like dhcp, dns, trouble resolution website etc. I'm sure they just include the voip servers on that list. That traffic is often provisioned totally separately (outside of your commit, possibly to a separate mac) so that it might not be an issue in the first place.
- simcop2387 15y ago
  That would only work if you're using their bundled service. If you were using Vonage for instance it could easily interrupt that. They can whitelist all they want but they can never get all of them.
  - trotsky 15y ago
    yeah, but the third party voip providers all tell you that they aren't a replacement for a landline providing E911 service because of the (many) problems that can occur with an unmanaged pipe.
- incongruity 15y ago
  Thanks – that all makes sense... of course, the lesson there is just grab the mac of your voip box, right? =) (this is mostly somewhat academic for me – I don't pirate, but I do wear a tinfoil hat at times)
- cbs 15y ago
  >I'm sure they just include the voip servers on that list. That traffic is often provisioned totally separately (outside of your commit, possibly to a separate mac) But I don't use Comcast's VoIP service. And if they whitelist SIP traffic, well, people will just tunnel piracy over RTP.

maeon3 15y ago

I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4 across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it). If they get one thing wrong which they will, I'm going to piss and moan about it to no end. On the plus side, net neutrality will be gone, and ownership of the internet secured by the United States congress. I suppose it's better than falling into the hands of some other country, which will also lay claim to it. Let the Internet be divided into a million pieces with import duties for every bit and byte transmitted across an infinite number of versions of the internet. This is how evolution works, a good idea grows too big, then it compartmentalizes and specializes. Most will suck, but some will be better, and the better ones will be on the receiving end of the goods and services of the enlightened masses. If we can promote freedom to choose which internet to live under, we should be ok to Stamp out the subnets that are used for enslavement of man in favor of the "more free" versions.

freehunter 15y ago
>I will raise holy hell for any ISP that blocks my transmission of avatar.MP4 across their ISP to my own device. If I own Avatar.mp4, the ISP's need to understand that I am sending it to my own device, or a device of someone who has "pair bought" avatar with me (we both split half the money to buy it). Like it or not, you can still be sued for that. You bought a license to watch the movie, not to copy the movie to another device. I'm not sure if there's a legal concept of joint ownership of the license to watch a movie. It's not the ISPs that need to change. This is like raging to the states who voted to lower their max driving speed to 55 in the 70s. Yes, it was their decision, but they were heavily coerced by the federal government with stiff penalties if they didn't. I highly doubt the ISPs signed on to lose customers just because they believe in IP that much.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  they were heavily coerced by the federal government with stiff penalties Perhaps this should become a campaign issue?

frigite 15y ago

This has already been going on as others have noted. ISPs send email citing that X external organization representing Y media company says that you have been sharing Z content, then the ISP shuts off or redirects all web traffic from your location except that which is allowed to go to a webpage they specify in the email where you must acknowledge that you got their communication and will cease and desist. It is pretty Orwellian. We all need to switch to mesh wifi internetworking as soon as possible. With some work, it could become a better solution than our current net, and there would be no monthly cost to an ISP, and no MPAA, RIAA, or government interference. Granted, there is value in rule of law and protection of adequate compensation for created works. But when Big Brother comes down on you and your neighbors, is that ok? These guys would have cuffed you for the cassette mixtape you made for your girlfriend in the 10th grade if they would have known about it. The longer you let the ISPs or the government rule the net, the less of a chance you will have to ever get it back.

stcredzero 15y ago
We all need to switch to mesh wifi internet working as soon as possible. With some work... "Some" work? There are serious problems with scaling mesh networks. Private citizens are not going to replace the internet backbone with mesh networks. The best we could hope for are low bandwidth metro WAN. That said, this is something we should put in place ahead of time, so we can turn it on if the government ever wants to black out media and internet access. As far as combating this latest outrage, how about additional widespread encryption, so all the traffic is effectively on a VPN? If keys are distributed via smartphone networks, it will be hard for the ISPs to do things like mount MITM attacks. Combine this with some honeypots -- as mentioned elsewhere, have people engaging in legal sharing and sue the ISPs when they interfere.
- wmf 15y ago
  this is something we should put in place ahead of time, so we can turn it on if... But people won't put it in place unless it provides some advantage immediately, which it doesn't.
  - 15y ago

einhverfr 15y ago

Move to central Washington state, where you have a hcoice of a dozen or so high-speed ISP's across fiber...... This reminds me. I wonder if the change during Reagan/Clinton to pro-consolidation, anti-competition has anything to do with making an industry easier to control in this way.....

EricDeb 15y ago
Dear god I hope you aren't suggesting moving to Ellensburg...
- cullenking 15y ago
  or yakima....
- einhverfr 15y ago
  Chelan or Douglas counties would be best, so Chelan, Wenatchee, Waterville....

tim_h 15y ago

If an ISP starts openly inspecting content like this will it become liable for all content that passes through it's network? Edit: I'm surprised to see this downvoted. Care to comment why?

wmf 15y ago
ISPs aren't common carriers.

ilaksh 15y ago

I don't think its really that important for everyone to be able to get all movies, tv shows, music and stuff for free, but the fact that the internet is controlled by a fairly small number of companies does seem to be a problem. To me its similar to general problems with over-centralization and/or monopolization in many areas. There is one water company, not very many large entertainment distributors, food production is handled by an increasingly small number of companies, electricity comes from one company, web search results mostly controlled by one company. We should do a better job of using shared knowledge exchange formats to be able to get an accurate holistic picture, but at the same time I think things would be more robust and we would be more secure if production, distribution and control was generally much more localized. I actually think that we should aim for producing water, electricity and food inside of individual homes/apartments or buildings, and also create alternative fiber, laser and wifi mesh networks for communications.

freehunter 15y ago
I don't agree with lumping the RIAA in with municipal water or electricity. Utilities can be much cheaper and more efficient with a local monopoly than if they were in competition. Imagine if water delivery was a free market: you'd have a half dozen or so companies pumping water to you, and unlike with rotatable Internet protocols, they wouldn't be able to use each others lines. You'd have to have the same amount of water lines run to your house as there were competing companies. Same with the choice of electricity: they can all use one line, but in the end it has to be traceable back to the one company who shilled out the watts for your benefit. Imagine if there were three or four competing power plants serving your neighborhood, all running at 1/3 capacity (plant efficiency doesn't scale down nicely). No, utilities need to be monopolized for efficiency. With rotatable protocols though, you can trace who sent what to whom. That's where competition is a good thing. That's why local monopolies on ISPs are ridiculous, same with monopolies on content distribution.
- ilaksh 15y ago
  I don't want companies competing to send me electricity or water. I want to produce my own electricity and water.

jrockway 15y ago

Good news, everyone. Nobody told the ISPs about cryptography!

rabidsnail 15y ago
Unless everybody moves to freenet (or some other friend-to-friend network) you have to exchange keys at the beginning of every session with a peer. The ISP can see that, and MITM you. SSL/TLS gets around this with a central certificate authority that vouches for the public key of the other party. That's damn difficult if not impossible to pull off in a decentralized system.

beloch 15y ago

Reasons why this is a waste of resources: 1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive. You have to design algorithms to detect infringement and you have to implement them in a way that can keep up with a respectable portion of your backbone bandwidth without significantly degrading performance for consumers. 2) File sharing protocols can adapt rapidly and will most likely make more and more extensive use of encryption. Distinguishing legal file sharing from illegal file sharing will only get more and more difficult. Even if there remain ways to detect infringement, this arms race with file-sharers will feed back into 1 in a big way. 3) As Neil Young famously put it, "Piracy is the new radio". Those who adapt to the "new radio" first will reap the rewards. Those who spend massive amounts of cash fighting the inevitable progress of technology will just fall behind. What should these dinosaurs do if they want to stay competitive? Stop treating users of the "new radio" like criminals and win them over by providing a superior experience to what the pirates can deliver. e.g. Stop loading DVD's and bluray's up with annoying advertisements, anti-piracy messages, and warnings. Online stores shouldn't sell 720p videos or lossy music files when pirates are giving away 1080p videos and lossless audio for free. Above all, minimize the payment barrier. Make it cheap enough to feel like value is high and make it at least as easy and fast as pirating. In short, stop spending money to treat your customers like criminals and, instead, spend it to ensure that legal purchases are the path of least resistance to the highest quality experience.

quasisimple 15y ago
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THEY PASSED THE CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES ACT?!?!
gurkendoktor 15y ago
> 1) Detecting piracy is resource intensive People who torrent 24/7 just because they can are also resource intensive. I think there might be a real incentive to kick Joe Leecher out of one's customer base and keep people who only check their email.
- gcb 15y ago
  but no one would pay $120/mo for 328MBPS DSL⁕ only for checking email. So there's still incentive to make P2P seems a possibility. ⁕ only 0.0001% guaranteed

deleted 15y ago

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acuity12 15y ago

The moment a provider throttles my internet based on "piracy" is the moment I begin investing all of my free time into making a free and invincible p2p solution.

mindslight 15y ago
Given how things currently are and the hypothetical tense of your comment, I can only conclude you're bluffing yourself.

Cieplak 15y ago

"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

pjscott 15y ago

I got hit with a dire legal warning in college from these anti-piracy-crusader guys. Apparently I had been heavily uploading Beyonce songs on Limewire. This was strange, as I have never used Limewire and don't much like Beyonce's songs. I had to go to some office and fill out papers to say that I was innocent, because someone made a completely spurious (and probably automated) accusation against me. These people are scum.

aklofas 15y ago

Interesting. I'm just waiting for the ISP's to get sued for breach of contract for throttling customers internet. If a neighbor (for example) logs onto router and starts downloading, I can imagine there'll be lots of false positives. And lawyers love false positives.

gcb 15y ago

So, no ATT? or does one of those mentioned in the article is the consumer name for at&t and i'm clueless even though they get my money every month?

dangrossman 15y ago
AT&T is participating. > During a panel discussion held for U.S. publishers today, RIAA chairman Cary Sherman said his association and a number of ISPs—including AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon—will begin policing traffic to crack down on piracy starting this summer. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-isps-to-police-your-traffic-starting-july-12.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/03/riaa-and-isp...

snambi 15y ago

Well, if web policing is enforced by ISPs, it may give birth to the next generation of internet. I'm not kidding. I'm serious. Let me explain. Today everyone has a wifi router. Imagine, one wifi router sending request to the next wifi router, which routes to the next router towards the destination. It is theoretically possible to reach the destination and get back. It may be a million hops. But, it is possible. Today's wifi routers are designed to talk to CABLE or DSL. But they can be made to talk to a nearby wifi router also. If we do that the entire world will become one giant network. That would be the real internet. At that time, we won't need ISPs. Today majority of traffic goes through ISPs. If this type of wifi routers come to existence, even countries like Iran cannot control internet. This may be a blessing in disguise.

chrisballinger 15y ago
Do you have any technical background in this area? The usability (latency) of such networks is ridiculously bad, and the whole idea is based on the assumption that the average guy will have a wifi router capable of supporting this new protocol. The bridge nodes to connect back to the global internet are also some easy points of failure. Not to mention that anyone stupid enough to not be using a VPN or HTTPS over such a connection will have their information leaked to a ton of cool hacker kids running a custom build of DD-WRT on their Linksys router. I don't mean to be a buzzkill, but the way around the copyright cops isn't a janky 2.4 GHz "mesh network" using 802.11. It's going to require a lot more than that.
- snambi 15y ago
  It is just an idea. You are right, the current wifi routers doesn't have capability. However, this is done by the backbone routers at present. If we go back to the 80s, the PCs of that time cannot handle the computing needs of a large website. However, today nearly all datacenters are run using PC hardware. In other words the business of big servers got commoditized in the early 2000s. In the same way, the big network backbone business will be commoditized at some point in time. The restrictions such as this, will only accelerate the commoditization.

noonespecial 15y ago

We sure are turning chinese fast. In the end, does it really matter what ideology underpins the censorship? Users say to themselves, "I have to be really careful not to even appear like I'm doing something 'bad' on the internet or I could lose my access or worse." It doesn't matter where you got on the train or why, once it pulls into that last station, you're done.

deleted 15y ago
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ttt_ 15y ago
It seems to me that this whole endeavor is just a doorway for more control/censorship a couple of years from now. Once the technology is set up and the practice is sanctioned, more and more 'bad practices' will start being policed and punished.
- noonespecial 15y ago
  I don't believe that that's intentional. If if was that might be better because we might have a chance at stopping it. Its an emergent behavior. The tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the type that use it for evil later. It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front. You sometimes have to fight the good intentions now to prevent the evil later. That's an impossible political sell.
  - ttt_ 15y ago
    >> The tighter control, even enacted for "good" reasons now, attracts the type that use it for evil later. Are you so sure that those good reasons aren't conceived by ill intented guys knowing what you have just described: It sucks because you can't fight the evil up front. More commonly refered to as wolf in sheep's clothing. Big power players are not naive.
  - intended 15y ago
    Unfortunately its an essential political sell. In essence you've called out the fact that its the slippery slope. In this case though its intentional. These structures affect the power structures, so the power structure will react to it in order to either minimize/control/remove its effect. Sadly you have to play ball in a manner that shows that the power on the other end (the anti RIAA portion of the spectrum) has the ability to create/co-ordinate voters. The RIAA supports its cause by spending tonnes of money to 'educate' legislators. If you can influence their voting base though, that education is pointless, since voting power is far more important.

mistercow 15y ago

> Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers According to the official Copyright Alerts site[1], the only "other bandwidth provider" that has signed on is AT&T. [1] http://www.copyrightinformation.org/about http://www.copyrightinformation.org/about

yaix 15y ago

> [...] notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, [...] Stop of being accused?

joejohnson 15y ago

Can anyone recommend a good VPN or other solution to encrypt all of my traffic?

ohashi 15y ago
get a free ec2 instance. How I got web in china.