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Your ISP may soon punish you for downloading any material it thinks may be illegal.

hbenthow

hbenthow

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Having failed to push through bills such as SOPA and PIPA, the MPAA and RIAA have taken on a new tactic. Instead of merely trying to pass new laws, they have decided to convince Internet Service Providers to spy on their users. AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are now working hand-in-hand with MarkMonitor, a company that uses a combination of people and automated systems to spot alleged illegal downloading. Each of these ISPs is working at its own pace, so some are implementing the system faster than others. Some (such as Comcast) have already implemented it, others (such as AT&T) are set to implement it within a month or so.

Anyone who downloads a file that the "experts" (both human and mechanized) at MarkMonitor has decided looks like copyrighted material will receive a message from their ISP, informing them that their Internet connection is being used to illegally download copyrighted material, and telling how to download copyrighted material legally from pay sources, and how to make sure that no one else is using their Internet connection to illegally download copyrighted material. The customer is then made to acknowledge receiving the message, making it impossible to claim ignorance. If the user continues to download allegedly illegal material, they will receive various punishments, including being forced to read "educational materials" about online piracy, and having their Internet connection throttled so it is too slow to download large files. The system is called Six Strikes, because after the fifth or sixth warning, your ISP sics the law on you. Oh, and you're presumed guilty until proven innocent from the get-go. If you believe that you have been wrongly accused of illegal downloading (any time from the first warning through the sixth), it costs you $35 to have your case reviewed.

So, you may be thinking, if I don't download pirated materials, I'm fine. There's where you may be wrong. MarkMonitor doesn't have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a file is illegal. They are given free reign. All they (both machines and hired personnel) have to do is say "hey, that looks kinda sorta pirated, let's punish whoever downloads it". The Center for Copyright Information has assured us that they have hired an “independent and impartial technical expert” to review the “accuracy and security” of the technology used. The problem is that the "impartial" expert is Stroz Friedberg, a former lobbyist whose firm made $637,000 lobbying for the RIAA. Also, MarkMonitor is now controlled by Reuters, who recently purchased it.

We all know that, while fanedits are not intended as copyright infringement, many people in the entertainment industry and, most importantly, Internet censors, stubbornly refuse to see them as anything but. Thus, these developments could have huge ramifications for the fanediting community, as MarkMonitor is free to mark any file they like as illegal.

So far, details about exactly how the system marks files as illegal and how it figures out who is downloading them are scarce, but here are a few articles that tell more or less what is known about Six Strikes at the moment:

http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/18/tech/web/copyright-alert-system/index.html

http://torrentfreak.com/isps-and-tr...-start-six-strikes-anti-piracy-scheme-120928/

http://torrentfreak.com/six-strikes-independent-expert-is-riaas-former-lobbying-firm-121022/

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/04/idUS154850+04-Sep-2012+HUG20120904


Does anyone here know much about this? So far, the articles emphasize Peer to Peer methods of file-sharding, such as torrents, as the primary targets. But are Usenet and filehosts such as Rapidshare also affected by this system? Is any kind of downloading safe from MarkMonitor's scrutiny?
 
This is a horrible thing, but everything that I've read indicates that they are going to be monitoring peer to peer connections (exclusively.)

They can only monitor things that are sent in the clear. If a packet is sent through a tunnel (TOR or a VPN) or is encrypted, then they cannot monitor it.

The rules by which they are abiding do not appear to specify if they are going to treat encrypted and untraceable traffic as piracy out of hand. It would be incorrect of them to do so, and possibly illegal, but I wouldn't put it past them to try.


If you're really concerned about them also monitoring your regular web connections there are some things you can do to improve your privacy. Note: I am not advocating for piracy, only privacy.

You can: Browse via TOR. This is the cheapest method (free) and is one of the easiest. All web traffic is anonymized. They don't know it came from you. This is only good for Web traffic, not peer to peer.

Purchase access to a VPN or Proxy. There are many VPN providers that do not keep access logs. This would work much like TOR does, but in addition to web traffic, it would also provide an anon way to use peer to peer software (For legitimate purposes.)

The second method requires a bit more effort from the user.



If this is something that you are interested in, or worried about, I highly suggest spending some time reading the privacy and encryption documents on the EFF website.

Seriously, spend a few hours going through their documents and suggestions. Check back when they update for the six strikes BS. I am willing to bet it will be within a few days of it going in to effect.

They have some good suggestions, and a healthy dose of paranoia.





And, of special interest to fan editors, Cory Doctorow has recently released a (quite good) young adult novel called Pirate Cinema. It is about fan editors fighting back against overly tight copyright legislation. An interesting idea, yes?
 
Not bothered I use SSL.
 
Well, I guess I won't be using [REDACTED] anymore. Probably use TOR as a browser, I guess. I hate the idea of the government spying on people. It's just plain creepy, not matter what or how they are spying. I'm fine since I have nothing to hide. I never even heard of p2p until learning about fanedits.
Plus, seriously they should spend more money and time getting pirated/pornagraphic materials or sites, not the people using them. You don't pull a plant from it's top; you grab it from the root and pull it all out. And they wonder why the US national debt is so high...
 
[REDACTED] is totally my favorite [expletive deleted] [REDACTED] ever.
 
emanswfan said:
Plus, seriously they should spend more money and time getting pirated/pornagraphic materials or sites, not the people using them. You don't pull a plant from it's top; you grab it from the root and pull it all out.
Click to expand...


Most sites that are hosting "pirated" materials aren't actually doing anything wrong, from a legal standpoint. There are either hosting files that, to the best of their knowledge, actually belong to the person uploading them (file lockers, like the ones info uses to host our work) or they are hosting link and identifiers for pirated material on other people's machines; they aren't, in fact, hosting pirated material themselves.

In the former case, it would place an unreasonably large operating burden on service providers if they had to police the content that their users upload. Sites like Rapidshare and Youtube and Vimeo would struggle to stay open if they could be held directly responsible for the content that their users submit to them.

In the later case, do we really want to make it a crime to link to content? Most links are generated by algorithms in software. If we made it a crime to link to infringing content, search engines would stop. They wouldn't be able to continue nearly as efficiently. Not to mention that, until the infringing content has actually been downloaded (and even then until the content has been downloaded by someone who doesn't already own it) no crime has actually been committed. We live in a society that tends to shun punishing someone before they do anything wrong.

As for the pirated materials, I don't really want them to go after those that are producing materials that infringe copyright, especially not as heavily handed as they go after those who distribute it. If they do, if the decide to, it would be all of us that were taken down. It would be the small time operators, the easy targets.

It would be the kids that upload video clips to youtube. They would be punished along side remix artists, fan editors, fan film creators, fan fiction writers, and anyone else that uses someone else's characters without giving them thousands of dollars first. (And lets be honest, I've spent thousands of dollars on Star Wars, but even that isn't enough.)

There isn't much that can be done about the big time pirates. They are making sue of technology that makes them invisible to most tracking measures, they are breaking DRM that prevents them from copying files. They are setting up servers in countries with no copyright treaties.

The rights-holders know that there isn't a thing that they can do to stop all of these people, so they try to scare consumers and creators like us.




Please, please, complain. Call, write a letter, change providers. Don't take this sitting down.
 
Goodbye internet. I'll be out in the woods.
 
Unknown.

We operate in a fairly grey area, even at the best of times.


This is going to make things interesting, at least. There isn't going to be any punishment for a first offense, so we'll experiment and see what happens.
 
BladeRunner391 said:
So how specifically would this effect us?
Click to expand...

Basically, MarkMonitor has carte blanche over what is or is not marked as pirated material. So, let's say they find links to Sunarep's fanedit "The Avengers Initiative" (just for an example, this could apply to almost any fanedit). Since it has the name "The Avengers" in the title, and since it is made from several copyrighted movies, they could easily mark it as pirated material, and anyone who would download it would get in trouble.
 
ajroach42 said:
This is going to make things interesting, at least. There isn't going to be any punishment for a first offense, so we'll experiment and see what happens.
Click to expand...
I think it would be a good idea for everyone to post any new developments they find out about, any effects they get from the Six Strikes system, and any reports of the effects of this system they happen across (which are bound to start pouring in once the system goes into effect, which it already has with some ISPs.)
 
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