MPAA/RIAA Sidestep Govt.

[Khrymsyn]

Originally Posted by Ox

Fair enough. I happen to think it's a fundamental failing of government that a group of people (content owners) have a legal right (the right to control the distribution of their IP) that, as a practical matter, cannot be enforced (because piracy is easy and almost never has consequences). Unenforceable legal rights are dead letters, and that's what copyright is rapidly becoming.

On the flipside of that coin, I think it's a failing of a government that a group of people (citizens), have a legal right "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause", and that right also seems to be losing enforcing support.

I do not disagree that Copyright is becoming a trickier and trickier spot, and that prevailing climate is a lack of respect for that law. But at the same time, we're basically now saying it's ok to watch what someone does in their own private home, without probable cause. Unless you feel that the fact that just someone having an internet connection is probable cause?
And, what makes an internet connection "tap" different than a phone tap? Hell, you can USE a phone to make an internet connection. Do does that mean it's legal to tap the line for the digital piece, but not for the analog?

I also have concerns over the fact that these calls to watch connections, and shut them down, do not come at the behest of law enforcement. They are coming from the ISP and/or queries by the MPAA/RIAA. Since many ISPs are actual content providers for the MPAA/RIAA, doesn't this pose a possible conflict of interest?

[DarkDay]

Team America....World police...thankyou for this and whatever else you have up your sleeve...hell of a democracy.

[LordDon]

Originally Posted by c0m3d14n

copyright math

It's true, he has Excel.

[MagGnome]

Great post, Khrymsyn. There's also the fact that the content owners spend millions of dollars to change the laws in their favor time and time again, extending copyright far beyond it's original terms. The people who actually created something may be long dead, but Corporation X (Disney, Viacom, Universal, Fox, Time Warner, etc.) apparently need to be protected to ensure that they can still wring money from it. Heaven forbid anyone "misuse" their valuable content. Treat all of their customers like criminals in the name of protecting "their" IP. The whole system is messed up.

It's an even bigger joke when a company like Disney pushes this sort of bull, considering that most of the movies that made them a household name are adaptions of the works of others. Disney would be nothing without the public domain.

[DoctorFinger]

Originally Posted by Vigil80

I certainly hope you're right. Where's net neutrality when you need it?

Net Neutrality - even the strongest form of it - wouldn't have prevented this.

[Vigil80]

Well hell, give me something that would, then.

[MagGnome]

Total nuclear annihilation.

[Gwinny]

You know, if there was a way I could subscribe to the BBC Iplayer, there would be nothing illegitimate passing over my intertubes. Just lots of Netflix and iTMS and Amazon Video. Why don't they spend their money on making that a possibility, the legal-ese and whatever technological infrastructure it would require.

Of course my provider will still be out to get me, because they hate people who stream HD video from perfectly legal services, too.

[Xerxes]

Well I don't bother with movies and music as it is. Do the TV folks have dogs in this fight?

Key and Peele, Porlandia, and Archer are all on Netflix. Even Doctor Who. That would just be a matter of waiting these folks out.

[Widgetcraft]

Originally Posted by JRR006

You know, if there was a way I could subscribe to the BBC Iplayer, there would be nothing illegitimate passing over my intertubes. Just lots of Netflix and iTMS and Amazon Video. Why don't they spend their money on making that a possibility, the legal-ese and whatever technological infrastructure it would require.

Of course my provider will still be out to get me, because they hate people who stream HD video from perfectly legal services, too.

The cable companies, who are part of this conspiracy, are doing everything in their power to kill Netflix. This whole thing is an attempt to backslide progress.

[digitalErich]

The conflicts of interest in this setup are just mind boggling. I have to think if they swing this ax one too many times they'll end up having to dissolve programs like this, less they run the risk of governments forcing a breakup between their content creating arms and their service provider arms.

[Ox]

Khrymsyn, you quoted the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment has never restricted the behavior of private entities unaffiliated with law enforcement. There are laws that restrict what private entities such as ISPs may do, of course, but the Fourth Amendment would only be implicated if the ISPs were acting at the behest of the government.

Moreover, as I understand it, the type of monitoring that will happen here will be examining the IP addresses a user goes to and measuring total amount of traffic that is made, not inspecting the data itself. Even if the Fourth Amendment applied to ISPs, this would probably not be a "search" and would therefore not require any level of suspicion.

[Widgetcraft]

Originally Posted by Ox

Khrymsyn, you quoted the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment has never restricted the behavior of private entities unaffiliated with law enforcement. There are laws that restrict what private entities such as ISPs may do, of course, but the Fourth Amendment would only be implicated if the ISPs were acting at the behest of the government.

Moreover, as I understand it, the type of monitoring that will happen here will be examining the IP addresses a user goes to and measuring total amount of traffic that is made, not inspecting the data itself. Even if the Fourth Amendment applied to ISPs, this would probably not be a "search" and would therefore not require any level of suspicion.

That is even worse. There is all kinds of legitimate content on sites that also deal in piracy. Open source software, public domain works, collections of things assembled by users for conveniance-sake that have no real copyright holders... etc. How would it even track torrents by this method? If you download a torrent from The Pirate Bay you aren't downloading a bunch of information from The Pirate Bay, you're downloading it from other users, who have a bunch of entirely unrelated IPs. This sounds the people who came up with the idea have no clue as to what is going on.

[J Arcane]

Originally Posted by Heretic Machine

That is even worse. There is all kinds of legitimate content on sites that also deal in piracy. Open source software, public domain works, collections of things assembled by users for conveniance-sake that have no real copyright holders... etc. How would it even track torrents by this method? If you download a torrent from The Pirate Bay you aren't downloading a bunch of information from The Pirate Bay, you're downloading it from other users, who have a bunch of entirely unrelated IPs. This sounds the people who came up with the idea have no clue as to what is going on.

It gets worse.

Pirate Bay switched to magnet links. There are no longer actual torrent files to download even, nothing you acquire through Pirate Bay's search engine is actually hosted anywhere on their servers.

Which means the only way to track that shit is building a blacklist of civilian IPs and logging anyone who connects to them as possible pirates.

If the RIAA scrapes my IP from a list of peers on an episode of Community, you could find yourself sanctioned without cause for connecting to my IP to play a peer-to-peer game like Space Marine.

[Widgetcraft]

Hell, let's not forget dynamic IPs. You get an IP that was once used for filesharing and has been 'flagged', you decide to send me a big file over an IM client (let's say a home movie or some shit), and suddenly my IP is flagged for piracy.

[Ox]

These are good points, and I feared for a bit that I had misunderstood the way the monitoring works. I went looking for more detail, mentally drafting an "I screwed up, sorry" post.

Nope.

Copyright holders will scan the 'Net for infringement, grabbing suspect IP addresses from peer-to-peer file-sharing networks. If they see your IP address participating in a swarm for, say, Transformers, they will look up that IP address to see which ISP controls it, then fire off a message.

ISPs have committed to forward such notices to subscribers—though, crucially, they won't turn over actual subscriber names or addresses without a court order. This is a one-way notification process.

[LordDon]

Or, y'know, they could make it easier and more reasonable to purchase their content. (daggers at HBO)

[Widgetcraft]

Well, the $35 blu-ray set for A Game of Thrones was a good deal... too bad it took a fucking year to come out.

[LordDon]

Exactly. I may or may not have procured GoT as it aired, but I sure as hell spent money on it when they made it available.

[Bandango]

Isn't most of this illegal? I dunno, but isn't it?