Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistercow | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but notice that I am confused[1] by this six strikes deal. So they're going to invest millions of dollars in a system to monitor and notify ISPs for the purpose of... educating people about copyright? With no significant repercussions? And you can avoid those education steps by just not being with one of the top 6 ISPs? Doesn't add up.

But if you read these articles, you'll notice that they sort of gloss over the fact that this appears to be a system for getting IP addresses of infringers to the copyright holders. Once they have that, we already know what they can do with it. The boilerplate suits stopped because they weren't economical, but who's to say that the big content owners haven't found a way to change that equation. MarkMonitor itself could even be that extra term.

I think the six strikes education system is a smokescreen. We're being misdirected from a pretty scary fact: the MPAA, RIAA and major ISPs have apparently pooled their resources to create a monolithic peer-to-peer monitoring system. Then they've sent everyone who should be freaking out about that on a wild goose chase of speculating about how the "six strikes" are going to evolve into full-on censorship. But that's not where we need to be focusing our attention. We need to ask what else they can do with the data they collect from MarkMonitor.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/if/your_strength_as_a_rationalist/

I would not be too surprised if action were taken to create a new law which makes it illegal for content creators to sell content directly to consumers. Such laws already exist that prevent car manufacturers from selling directly to the public, and they exist for no reason other than to create an artificial market in which car dealerships can pretend to offer a valuable service. Content distributors are now in the same position. They need to have an artificial market constructed to make it look like they are doing something of value.

Consider the viewpoint of a typical person in power today. They see these gigantic social institutions that provide a measurable portion of the nations GDP which might soon be torn apart and replaced by a decentralized, unorganized system with unknown economic value. Much of the history that they believe is worth knowing consists of the creation of massive centralized systems to aggregate supply and demand to solve the problem of distribution (both physical distribution of product and logistical distribution of work). To them, a move to a system where content creators distribute and sell directly to consumers is, at best, a horrifying step backwards.

The first step to making sure content creators can't sell directly to consumers, of course, is to insert themselves in the new means of distribution in order to wedge the old distributors into some new place created for them.

Economic Analysis Group Competition Advocacy Paper by Gerald R. Bodisch, US DoJ Antitrust division

http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/eag/246374.htm

Exactly how do you propose that any statute could be devised to forbid the sale of "content" to consumers? If you can do that, you can just as easily forbid the sale of anything colored blue, or of books containing the word "prickleberry". The Constitution has something to say about that.

If you're going to argue that the content industry --- which is significantly smaller than the Internet industry, by the way --- is so powerful that it can simply disregard the Constitution, what's left to argue about? Here, allow me to win the resulting debate: "the content industry is going to get a law passed that will establish the death penalty for piracy". Oh no!

> The Constitution has something to say about that.

It has some say, but lately it's been repeatedly ignored.

> which is significantly smaller than the Internet industry, by the way

Unfortunately, I feel that the content industry lobbies way more than the Internet industry as a whole. This is slowly changing, but we still give far less political contributions than they do.

If you're going to say the content industry can ignore the Constitution, then what's to argue with? If they can do that, they can do anything. Disney can charge you not only for copying Mickey Mouse, but for also for simply having mice in your house.

> If you're going to say the content industry can ignore the Constitution,

I didn't say that. I was implying that the gov can, and it has been. Guess who lobbies the gov with more money?

Nobody is going to pass a law outlawing the direct sale of "content" to consumers. That was an extremely silly argument.

You never know. With the current trend being the sale of licenses and not the actual content, maybe one day in the future people can only sell licenses through approved license sellers. If you think that's ridiculous, what do you think people 50 years ago would think of what's happened to our airports? It's not that far fetched unless one thing changes: techies as a whole start lobbying harder and with more money.

The example of airport regulation does not make the idea of content sale regulations less ridiculous.

Can you explain your reasoning in a way that does not also lead to the conclusion that nobody would ever pass a law outlawing the direct sale of automobiles to consumers?

Those laws exist. They have no basis. They are ridiculous. They are nothing more than protection for the business of car dealers, and no claim is even made that they provide other protections to consumers as far as I know.

Also, laws are not programs. They do not specify their goals with absolute precision. They are generally broad, and get solidified through established case law. The DMCA is a perfect example. It outlawed 'circumventing copyright protection mechanisms' and did not define what such things were. If I set a single bit in a proprietary file format that I believe indicates content is copyrighted, is that such a mechanism? No one knew. Then came RealNetworks v Streambox. They faced the exact situation I described, a single undocumented bit in a file. Their product provided a capability that was well protected by case law in other situations - they let you schedule recording and time-shifting of streamed video content. You could not copy that content or transfer it to anyone else, it was locked to the machine which recorded it. They won their case. And they won every appeal by RealNetworks. Until they ran out of money. So they couldn't respond to the Nth appeal, and it became established case law by default.

A law against circumventing the publishing industry would go the same way. It would forbid authors from directly selling books, music, videogames, and any other form of content they could come up with to consumers. I would hope that this would be seen as harebrained and insane, as it is... but consider the viewpoint of those in office. The Internet is seen by them as a bustling marketplace filled with the rabble. They see the publishing industry (really the distribution industry) as a centuries-old pinnacle of our culture representing a noticeable portion of the GDP. And they see the rabble tearing it down. They have no faith that an entirely decentralized anything can function, it goes against their very nature. They likely see protecting the existing industry as a choice between being a world leader in the publishing market and being worthless chaos bordering on anarchy, sacrificed so a bunch of shortsighted peons could get movies, books, games, music, etc for almost nothing, devaluing the entire market.

system for getting IP addresses of infringers to the copyright holders

That's not how it works.

How does it work?

The other way around, I'm going to assume he meant "get the home addresses of file sharers from their IP addresses"

No, I did not mean that, because that's not what it does. It pretty clearly monitors p2p networks, finds the IP addresses, and then notifies the ISPs. If you read closely, you'll see that it also passes the IP along to the content owners.

In other words, it sounds like this does exactly what they did all along to catch people on BitTorrent. The difference is that instead of hiring various independent companies to do the policing (which ended in a lot of false positives, probably because those companies were trying to turn over as many IPs as possible), they've pooled their resources to create a single streamlined process.

Now there are a couple of reasons they would want to downplay the real purpose of this system. First, ISPs aren't going to get on board with a "help us sue your customers" plan. But "help us educate your customers about copyright" is probably appealing to an ISP. And as far as the public is concerned, it's a good bet that some details of this would have gotten leaked if they had tried to just keep it under wraps. Talking about it openly, but downplaying its primary purpose, is an easy way to solve that problem.

Whenever you connect to a P2P system you are advertising your IP address publically, so it requires no conspiracy to get them and certainly no violation of privacy.

They want to educate customers about not running open wireless networks etc so they find it more difficult to argue "oh, my wifi was open so it wasn't me".

>Whenever you connect to a P2P system you are advertising your IP address publically, so it requires no conspiracy to get them and certainly no violation of privacy.

I'm not sure what your point is. Content holders have mostly stopped suing people, and the generally accepted reason for this is that it wasn't profitable to do so. My point is that it looks an awful lot like this program is the result of an effort to make that process profitable again, in which case we can expect the lawsuit engine to crank back up. If you'll recall, that engine ended up screwing over a lot of innocent people last time it was running, so you should be against that happening even if you think suing illegal filesharers is a good thing in principle.

Nobody's talking about a "conspiracy" in anything but the most pedantic and technical sense. What I'm talking about is simple dishonesty, which is something we have come to expect from the likes of the MPAA and RIAA.

As for the violation of privacy, that's a trickier subject, but not one that is important to my point. An open home WiFi with unsecured servers on it is advertised publicly too, but if you go and poke around someone's PC, you're still violating their privacy. IPs are exchanged on p2p services for the sake of communication, not identification. So pretending to be an ordinary peer so that you can find someone's identity (i.e. through a subpoena) is arguably a violation of their privacy (although obviously not an illegal one). Again though, this is a tangent that isn't really important to my point.

>They want to educate customers about not running open wireless networks etc so they find it more difficult to argue "oh, my wifi was open so it wasn't me".

As far as I know, that defense has never even been attempted in a copyright case in the US, and nobody really thinks it would work if it were. It has been used in a child pornography case, and the courts didn't go for it.

But even if that were the point, why would they need six strikes to tell you to close your WiFi?

OK, they're pretty nebulous about the exact process, but you can piece it together. First we have this:

* Stroz Friedberg has completed its initial review of MarkMonitor’s methodologies and found that the system is accurate and works properly. Importantly, the methodology for identifying infringed content and the IP address from which it has been distributed is based on a review of peer-to-peer networks and publicly available information.*

So MarkMonitor is running a system that monitors p2p networks and collects IP addresses.

And we have this:

CCI has also retained Stroz Friedberg to review the technical processes used by each ISP to match subscriber accounts with IP addresses forwarded by the content owners.

So content owners forward the IP addresses. You can't forward something you don't have. So clearly, MarkMonitor's system sends the IP addresses to the content owners, who can then do with them as they please.

If you have some other information that contradicts what this article says, please do tell.

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