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Comment by tomku | Hacker News Reader

The headline is a flat-out lie. The monitoring is being done by content owners, using publicly-available information from torrent trackers and other peer-to-peer networks.

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[Citation Needed]

Everything I've heard about this is that the monitoring is being done by the ISPs themselves, not the content owners.

Sure, straight from their FAQ[1]:

"Can this system see what sites I visit online?

No. There is no monitoring of any Internet traffic by ISPs. The identification of alleged infringement is done by Content Owners on peer-to-peer networks only. The Copyright Alert System applies only to peer-to-peer networks and not to general Internet use."

There's a lot of misinformation going around, spread by people who probably have good intentions but don't understand that by arguing against a straw man, they're actually making it easier for their opponents to discredit them. There are plenty of valid reasons to dislike this plan, we don't need to be making up fake ones.

[1]: http://www.copyrightinformation.org/resources-faq/copyright-...

Edit: Fixed quoting.

people who probably have good intentions but don't understand that by arguing against a straw man, they're actually making it easier for their opponents to discredit them

That's what I think whenever an Internet lynch mob forms (TCPA, SOPA, etc.) but somehow it never matters. There's hardly any backlash against the hyperbolic scaremongering.

Just because the weakness hasn't been exploited doesn't mean it isn't there.

sometimes i feel like thats the beauty and fatal flaw of our system. people are gonna basically do what they're gonna do. if it benefits enough of us (with relative/proportional amount of power) it'll happen but if it pisses enough of that demographic off it will get stopped eventually.

Why would ISPs monitor for content they don't own? They have no incentive to kick their own customers off their network for content the ISPs don't own. I'd love to see a source for "everything you've heard".

The whole system is about the RIAA/MPAA trying to force ISPs to do their bidding and how much of the cost they can offload to ISPs. I'm sure ISPs doing the monitoring was on the table at some point and then the parties "compromised" on letting the AA pay for the monitoring.

"[CAS] will use an analysis system called MarkMonitor to identify infringing activity. That system 'uses both trained professionals and automated processes to identify illegal downloading of whole movies, TV shows, and musical recordings, and the system is designed to eliminate false positives.'"

Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/10/six-strikes-syste...

I'm curious, what does this do to account for trackers randomly listing fake IP addresses? Seems like trackers could bring the whole thing to its knees with a couple weeks of mass spoofing. After about the millionth false positive the customers will start lawyering up.

They would just follow the torrent swarm. If the tracker gives an address that doesn't have a client behind it, then assume it is fake. You'd also cause a lot of traffic to the spoofed addresses, which is suboptimal.

"The monitoring is being done by content owners"

My ISP owns a number of entertainment companies...

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