Ganging up on Pirates...

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Hellmark

My ISP is inept, and if I can't rely on them to offer consistant service, there is no way I can rely on them to make sure they have the right person when punishing for pirating (and as I've said, they've fingered me for it already, when it wasn't me).

You're lucky you don't live in England, we had guilt upon accusation written into law earlier this year. Our version of the RIAA drafted that part of the law.

[FatDog]

I don't suppose you have specific references to the law itself do you?

It's part of the tax law which is huge.

A few years ago I tried to get a copy of the US budget to try and find the dollar value sent to the recording industry but it was difficult to get and some exerpts I found show the dollars encoded with the name/number of the tax law, senate bill number, etc. You have to have a massive listing of laws to cross reference and find the rules behind the budget item. More work than I wanted to do on a casual weekend.

About 2 months ago, I get a letter from charter, accusing me of downloading several episodes of Boardwalk Empire..

I can explain this:

When you boot your cable modem - you are dynamically assigned an IP address. All your internet traffic is tagged with this number. All the records per day are tagged with this address. If the guy who did download Boardwalk Empire cycled power on his modem, then you cycled power on yours - you now have his old IP number. When they searched - they found HIS activity weeks earlier but that you now have this number.

The computer-savvy pirates cycle their power every few days to help obfuscate the tracking of their activity. The smarter pirates use VPN services which encrypt their packets and their ISP only sees activity between their PC and the VPN service so they cannot see what sites you are accessing because the VPN server is really hitting the sites.

The assigning of IP addresses is automatic but logging the re-assigning of IP addresses go into files that only network engineers see and typically toss out after a few days/weeks. It's not part of the normal billing system that ISPs track. They usually can only see who has each IP address at this moment - not what you had a few days or weeks ago.

[theducks]

USA: Whatever happened to the 'Secrecy of Communications Act'?

When I worked for Ma Bell (that should date it ), The act allowed us to listen on a line just long enough to determine if it was in use, If so, we had to disconnect immediatly. Period.

You were not allowed to repeat anything you may have heard during that time.

Actually, this last technically applied to any 2-way radio transmission (even though anyone could intercept it) if it was not an 'All Stations' call.

So How are these 'net police' monitoring traffic without getting a warrant to monitor a Named individual? (My name is not 'John Doe')

[Fbone]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Good point! I wouldn't say that gives one the right to pirate things(e.g. break the law), but I would say it's time to revisit that law and or change it if it is still on the books.

I don't suppose you have specific references to the law itself do you?

It appears to be 2% of transfer price for devices and 3% for media.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1004.html

This only applies to "digital audio devices" and not computer discs or computer peripherals such as mp3 players.

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by Fbone

It appears to be 2% of transfer price for devices and 3% for media.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/1004.html

This only applies to "digital audio devices" and not computer discs or computer peripherals such as mp3 players.

Thank you, I'll check it out.

[lestatar]

If this does move forward, I for one prays that this gets:
- HUGELY messy;
- MASSIVE media attention;
- watched MICROSCOPICALLY by the ACLU and every other watchdog group [especially tech] out there;
- concerned CITIZENS/NETIZENS up in arms and they make an enormous stink about this.

Fair is fair. As much as we may not like it when real criminals get off scott free because of botched warrants and illegal wiretaps, in America at least, the presumption of innocence still exists. Theoretically I mean.

This smells a lot like profiling to me at this stage as well...think auto insurance in the states and how your premiums rise with every accident. You end up being classified as an "assigned risk" and this heavily impacts your ability to get competitive rates for a very long time. The difference is that there is tangible evidence of auto accidents. The monitoring system had best be 1gazillion percent bulletproof and indisputably accurate and for those of us in tech, we know that there really is no such unicorn.

Piracy is wrong. No doubt at all. But don't you frickin' mess with my privacy and snoop on me and negatively impact my ability to engage the net when I am doing 100% legal things online.

For sure there will be heavy reprisals against the corporate entities when some totally innocent grandmother in Idaho becomes erroneously accused of pirating TBs of copywrited content and ends up having her net access cut, which denies her the ability to interact online with her grandkids in Europe.

This is what I am looking forward to because it WILL happen.

[linux_author]

all this means is more leeching, less seeding

as an author of more than 20 books i can sympathize with the concerns of copyright protections, but after my 15 years of experience and looking at how the system works in the favor of publishing houses, middlemen corporations, and distributors, i side with the pirates and choose to publish all my future works under Creative Commons

[wyndslash]

Originally Posted by Tome Keeper

They are talking about a similar thing for the UK.

no, what i meant was, american media, meaning media produced by americans. for example, in singapore you're allowed to download whatever, as long as it's not JAPANESE anime, because apparently singapore and japan have an understanding.

so i was wondering if you could download anime in america

[Ransom]

Originally Posted by FatDog

When I was talking to one distributor and asked how come these were so expensive he told me that every blank Audio Cassette, VHS tape and blank CD had a special tax. From that $13 - nearly a full dollar went to the Motion Picture and Recording industry to offset their possible losses from piracy.

If you have ever bought blank media - you have already paid a fee to the industry in case you pirate.

A price increase to offset shrink is fairly common in almost any industry though. When I was a grocery store meat cutter years ago at Kroger, I remember their prices always being higher in ghetto stores than the more up-scale neighborhoods because they were trying to make up for all the theft that took place in those ghettos stores. And yeah, I watched a LOT more theft happen in the poor nieghborhood stores, so I understand the company wanting to get some of that money back. It's just sad that the innocent people in those neighborhoods were paying more too because of the guilty ones.

Look at it this way though, if the ISPs and entertainment industry people DON'T get together to do what this article says, the alternative will be to raise prices on entertainment products even higher. The music industry found a way to get back their money lost from illegal online downloading and copying. They just raised concert ticket prices several times over. I can't remember the last time I went to a concert though (and I'm a musician!). Who can afford it? twenty years ago I could go see just about any band for less than $20, and many for less than $10. Now it's often a hundred bucks. Imagine if movie theater tickets and DVDs started charging ten times more. Right now I'm using an over the air antenna along with watching Hulu Plus for $7 per month. Just watch the online movie content providers get forced to put their prices through the roof too. I wish people would get it into their heads that crap like illegal torrents are hurting us all.

[lestatar]

Originally Posted by linux_author

all this means is more leeching, less seeding

as an author of more than 20 books i can sympathize with the concerns of copyright protections, but after my 15 years of experience and looking at how the system works in the favor of publishing houses, middlemen corporations, and distributors, i side with the pirates and choose to publish all my future works under Creative Commons

kudos and continued success!

[kennyc]

Originally Posted by linux_author

all this means is more leeching, less seeding

as an author of more than 20 books i can sympathize with the concerns of copyright protections, but after my 15 years of experience and looking at how the system works in the favor of publishing houses, middlemen corporations, and distributors, i side with the pirates and choose to publish all my future works under Creative Commons

Good for you!

[DianNC]

I don't get it. And, at the risk of sounding uninformed, why don't they go after the websites that are providing the material?

Monitoring a private individual's internet usage seems inordinately intrusive to me. Are the sites that are making these downloads available not also complicit in illegal acts???

[kennyc]

One would think, but that hasn't worked very well for the consortium

[Ransom]

Most of these sites are out of the country.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by DianNC

I don't get it. And, at the risk of sounding uninformed, why don't they go after the websites that are providing the material?

Monitoring a private individual's internet usage seems inordinately intrusive to me. Are the sites that are making these downloads available not also complicit in illegal acts???

Here in Australia the front end for the entertainment industry (AFACT) have unsuccessfully sued a major ISP for assisting pirates to download. It is now going to trial for the third time (second appeal).

Meanwhile they still sit their on their backside bleating, make up statistics to suit themselves and outpouring millions of dollars suing individuals that catch their eye, often with the most flimsiest of evidence to back their claims.