The latest salvo in the war on digital piracy

[StarSword]

NPR: "Piracy Alert System Raises Concerns About Fair Use, Misidentification"

Short version: Content providers are partnering with ISPs to provide real-time consequences to digital pirates. You get five warnings of escalating severity. First two are a pop-up saying, "You know that's illegal, right?" Warning #3, you have to go to a website and click through a bunch of stuff to say, "Okay, yes, I understand this is illegal." IIRC warnings 4 and 5, the ISP throttles back your connection speed, and on the sixth strike they kill it entirely.

My thoughts: It's not a bad idea, but they need to make sure that the burden of proof is on the content provider rather than the consumer. Other concerns are people snarfing your Wi-Fi, not to mention the constant war over "fair use" justifications.

[Mr Bean]

There's already talk about spoofing the system in order to generate false reports to make the system worthless by making it constantly cry wolf. Alternatively this just means a faster move to full on encrypted communications.

[Thanas]

This system is a pretty idiotic way to go about it and violates about six different German constitutional rights alone on face value.

[Stark]

There's already talk about spoofing the system in order to generate false reports to make the system worthless by making it constantly cry wolf. Alternatively this just means a faster move to full on encrypted communications.

Are there people who use non-encrypted torrents? Seriously?

[Mr Bean]

Are there people who use non-encrypted torrents? Seriously?

This is a lot broader than you think, torrents is not the only thing they are looking at. Everything from posting stuff that's behind a paywall to watching illegal streams or the big thing, watching copyrighted content on video sites. Want to watch the new episodes of Walking Dead but don't have cable? Okay fine you'll find 12 uploads of it on Youtube, oops this system gave you a strike for that.

Hence the reason why the push back, the method by which you can acquire a strike are many, the methods by which you can protest a strike are limited and the appeals process has not been detailed.

[Darksider]

So has anything been announced about how long these "strikes" stay on your record? Some articles mention fines, do you pay to re-set your warnings when you get to six or something?

None of the articles i've read seem to have concrete information about how you appeal or reverse the decision once your internet gets locked down.

[StarSword]

This system is a pretty idiotic way to go about it and violates about six different German constitutional rights alone on face value.

Fortunately for you, near as I can tell it's only on our side of the pond.

[Covenant]

What an absurd circumstance, but I can't say I blame them, they've exhausted a lot of options and this probably seems like a reasonable alternative to endlessly trying to kill video streaming. It isn't as if I wouldn't love to watch My Favorite Show or whatever the network's website or Hulu or whatever, and watch it with advertising as well, but I don't have a TV and I don't have cable. I have a Netflix account and I'd consider some alternative viewing options too. But they just stonewall content, make it so damned hard to watch it, and I end up just never watching TV and never getting into any of their series. A lot of people actually show that piracy helps generate word of mouth, if not sales, and the thing is you don't BUY a tv show, you watch it. Word of mouth is huge. If I can't ever watch a TV show on TV then I'll never see it now, so damned if I'm going to ever see any of the commercials they want to charge advertisers for.

If this is their first step into creating a market for their own content, I can say they were probably better off making the market first, then killing competition. If they're not, well, geez. Was nice knowing you, television networks.

[Dominus Atheos]

This system is a pretty idiotic way to go about it and violates about six different German constitutional rights alone on face value.

Fortunately for you, near as I can tell it's only on our side of the pond.

France has it and the UK is getting it.

[RogueIce]

Are there people who use non-encrypted torrents? Seriously?

This is a lot broader than you think, torrents is not the only thing they are looking at. Everything from posting stuff that's behind a paywall to watching illegal streams or the big thing, watching copyrighted content on video sites. Want to watch the new episodes of Walking Dead but don't have cable? Okay fine you'll find 12 uploads of it on Youtube, oops this system gave you a strike for that.

Hence the reason why the push back, the method by which you can acquire a strike are many, the methods by which you can protest a strike are limited and the appeals process has not been detailed.

Whoa there, where did you get that from? All the articles I've seen on it are saying it's just the torrents, because they can sit and seed and catch IPs of anyone who uses certain torrents because that's the way it works. Nowhere have I seen mention of them getting traffic data from YouTube, Daily Motion or any other streaming/downloading/whatever website and passing that along. I'd like to see at least a couple of reliable and recent sources stating as much, please.

I think there are some legitimate concerns here:

- People using somebody's wifi without permission. Yeah you should secure it but how many people get beyond whatever default protection their ISP provides, and how easy is said protection to bypass? Should the ISPs then be responsible for beefing up the security on their routers? And will they shut down, say, a Starbucks where people go in to abuse their free wifi by downloading, or will Starbucks and similar places just set some kind of restrictions of their own?

- False positives. Similar to the above, but will the ISPs check to make sure a copyright notice is actually valid and that the copyright owners didn't mess it up somehow? IE: that it was a legitimately illegitimate torrent? I think if they're going to throttle and/or cut off your internet service the ISPs at least should do some due diligence of their own and not adopt YouTube's stupid 'standard' of "guilty until proven innocent".

[Sharp-kun]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013 ... -like/#p3n

How are these popups being generated?

If someone is doing their online banking and they decide to send one because of bittorrent running in the background, will it hijack the browser to display it? If so, this will go bad fast.

[bilateralrope]

- How will this popup bypass the popup blocker built into every single web browser worth talking about ?
- Who gets the popup if multiple people are sharing the internet connection ?

[Sharp-kun]

- How will this popup bypass the popup blocker built into every single web browser worth talking about ?
- Who gets the popup if multiple people are sharing the internet connection ?

Its possible they don't actually mean popup in the normal sense and are just generalising.

I suppose they could force traffic to go to a specific page via DNS until you accept, much like some public wi-fi won't let your browse until you sign in.

[atg]

How will this popup bypass the popup blocker built into every single web browser worth talking about ?

I suppose they could force traffic to go to a specific page via DNS until you accept, much like some public wi-fi won't let your browse until you sign in.

This.

GRIMMELMANN: So after you get past the first two steps, they make it a little more serious by making sure they have your attention. So now they need you to acknowledge that you've actually seen the warnings. So you go to a kind of mini copyright jail where you have to actually click through to say I've seen this. It's kind of like when you're at the airport using the WiFi there, you have to click through the terms and conditions before you can get online. And part of this is building a record so that people can't say, I had no idea what was going on.

It could be DNS or it could just be responding to your browsers internet traffic with the 'popup' page rather than the actual page you were looking for. DNS could be gotten around by manually putting in your own DNS settings into your PC or router (google's public DNS servers for example), though some ISPs have been known to hijack dns traffic. I suspect if they are injecting into your browers requests (which run on TCP port 80) then running your traffic through a proxy server (at least if its not also setup on port 80) would allow you to never 'see' the warning and possibly claim ignorance to all this.