RIAA to Stop Piracy Mass Lawsuits

Terry Olaes

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
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Nov 27, 2006
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WSJ reports that RIAA is ceasing their mass lawsuits against users and look for more effective ways to combat online music piracy. Instead of going after the individual, RIAA is working to build agreements with ISPs and encourage the ISP to do the policing.

Depending on the agreement, the ISP will either forward the note to customers, or alert customers that they appear to be uploading music illegally, and ask them to stop. If the customers continue the file-sharing, they will get one or two more emails, perhaps accompanied by slower service from the provider. Finally, the ISP may cut off their access altogether.
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What I want to know is, how will they know that the individual is sharing illegal files? All they're going to know is larger-than-usual amounts of bandwidth are being used. I mean, torrenting is used for legal sharing as well, right? I.E. Linux installers?
 
It'll be the ISP calling balls and strikes for every bit of data that passes through their network. I don't see that being possible without putting a major dent in the end users bandwidth. It then sparks privacy issues as some people use their home internet for confidential business use.
 
HydroBudz said:
It'll be the ISP calling balls and strikes for every bit of data that passes through their network. I don't see that being possible without putting a major dent in the end users bandwidth. It then sparks privacy issues as some people use their home internet for confidential business use.
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The problem is that the ISP can put any disclaimer they want on the user agreement.

They talked about doing this some time ago & I believe there was only one provider that actually did anything with it. I also believe that they have pretty much given up the practice with the exception of extreme cases.
 
In the end, this may prove more effective against piracy.

However, there will be a few providers who will decent from the ranks, and embrace those who leave other providers. Whoever these are will see a Ginormous increase in business and the rest through fear and ignorance of the general public will see marked decline in business.

People tend to head toward freedom, even if they do not plan to exercise the freedom they are seeking.
 
I really the ISP's are going to be able to police this. I'm afraid that in the end the RIAA will start suing ISP's for not policing their bandwidth for illegal file sharing. We're either going to see an increase in fees for our bandwidth or decrease in our current bandwidth amounts.

I'm all for the RIAA stopping mass lawsuits, but there has got to be a better way.
 
Sounds silly. ISP's can't tell if your excessive bandwidth is legal or illegal purposes. You can easily use a ton of bandwidth with streaming audio/video and there are plenty of legal uses of torrents. It'll be an invasion of privacy if they poke around to find out.
 
necrosis said:
And how the hell do they expect ISP's to do this?
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Well they do like the always do, they pay lots of money to senators and congressmen, get them to pass favorable laws for them, something along the line of the ISP will be responsible for piracy lawsuits, and all will work itself out.

Of course if in some magical future world piracy is all but eliminated and they see music sales are STILL in the shithole they're going to look really fucking stupid for saying piracy was the reason all these years.
 
They are 6 days early, but I'll let it slide because this is a super good gift.
 
fss69 said:
Sounds silly. ISP's can't tell if your excessive bandwidth is legal or illegal purposes. You can easily use a ton of bandwidth with streaming audio/video and there are plenty of legal uses of torrents. It'll be an invasion of privacy if they poke around to find out.
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Isn't this where the RIAA tells the ISP to DPI everything and the whole interwebs slow to a crawl and our fees go further skyward? (but it's ok cause we stopped .002% of piracy)
 
fss69 said:
Sounds silly. ISP's can't tell if your excessive bandwidth is legal or illegal purposes. You can easily use a ton of bandwidth with streaming audio/video and there are plenty of legal uses of torrents. It'll be an invasion of privacy if they poke around to find out.
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I got this idea from the article:
1.) RIAA sees your IP in swarm.
2.) RIAA sends an email to ISP with offending IP.
3.) Your ISP notifies you the RIAA caught you.

None of that involves anyway "poking around" in your traffic. From my understanding its nearly impossible to download Torrents without handing out your IP to anyone who wants it, unless you use a proxy obviously.
 
did they run out of broke college students and deathbed hospital patients living off social security to sue?
 
TheCAD said:
I got this idea from the article:
1.) RIAA sees your IP in swarm.
2.) RIAA sends an email to ISP with offending IP.
3.) Your ISP notifies you the RIAA caught you.

None of that involves anyway "poking around" in your traffic. From my understanding its nearly impossible to download Torrents without handing out your IP to anyone who wants it, unless you use a proxy obviously.
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I feel bad for the people who cant lock their wireless connections... (Or should I?)
 
wait. isn't this like demanding store clerks to not accept payment if they are told a product is being purchased with drug money?

i don't really think it is the ISP's responsibility to inspect every packet when some bully pokes them on the shoulder. sounds like the RIAA is expecting somebody else to do their "dirty" work. the industry is changing and they still haven't woke up. :)
 
TheCAD said:
I got this idea from the article:
1.) RIAA sees your IP in swarm.
2.) RIAA sends an email to ISP with offending IP.
3.) Your ISP notifies you the RIAA caught you.

None of that involves anyway "poking around" in your traffic. From my understanding its nearly impossible to download Torrents without handing out your IP to anyone who wants it, unless you use a proxy obviously.
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So after the RIAA suing several innocent people, including sending DMCA takedown notices to a PRINTER (the IP of the printer was "caught" downloading music :rolleyes:), you want to trust the RIAA to not abuse thier power. :rolleyes:
 
Why do so many of you think this can't be done, or not be done in a cost effective manner.

First, it doesn't have to be every bit over the network being inspected, just whatever metric seems correct. Perhaps just doing inspection of p2p packets, or packets for ports X, Y, and Z of users whose bandwidth is over some magic number. Since ISPs are looking at segregating p2p by region to keep throughput high and hops short and load low, why wouldn't they have the opportunity to check those packets for patterns?

The odds of me zipping and encypting some music files and sharig with a couple buddies drawing notice is pretty low. They guy sharing out a thousand dsongs to the world will probably get nabbed. The only sure thing is that whatever they do, someone will find a way around it and the battle will ensue.
 
well at least they're gonna stop suing people. but of course...the music is still shitty enough that i wouldn't even wanna pirate it in the first place.
 
raz-0 said:
Why do so many of you think this can't be done, or not be done in a cost effective manner.
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Because any raise in cost to the ISP is sent on to the customer. We will essentially be paying the RIAA to keep a fingerhold on our ISP, and on us as customers. I personally don't want to be paying the RIAA (and our ISP) to monitor all of our web traffic to see if somebody is "illegally" listening to a song... The line has to be drawn somewhere.
 
I would like to thank my neighbor who has an unsecured wireless connection. It is much appreciated!
 
raz-0 said:
Why do so many of you think this can't be done, or not be done in a cost effective manner.
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I'm not a business guru by any means, but I have seen and worked in the professional world long enough to know that any change that's levied comes at some sort of cost. ISP's will create new jobs for folks to work or act as liaison's with the RIAA, contracts will be developed between ISP's and marketing/survey groups to determine the impact their work is having with their subscribers and ensure their subscriber's happiness, not to mention any new hardware upgrades they may deem "appropriate." Countless man hours will be justified in some way to ensure that this plan works. More man hours will cost the company money and that cost will be directed back to the consumer.
 
now... theoretically speaking, couldn't an isp effectively then tell the riaa to piss off and then advertise themselves as an isp of freedom...like use that as their marketing? To my knowledge there is nothing that stops them from doing it save for riaa trying to muscle them.
 
Charter is in the new system, i just got contacted. MediaSentry sent them the information, charter sent me a letter in the mail.

Wanted to get Batman early ;) BTW, i have a LEGAL DVD now, just couldn't wait till the 9th.
 
ISP's would be more than happy with this, they will just flag users and content as they see fit in order to save and upsell bandwidth
 
Manaknight said:
now... theoretically speaking, couldn't an isp effectively then tell the riaa to piss off and then advertise themselves as an isp of freedom...like use that as their marketing? To my knowledge there is nothing that stops them from doing it save for riaa trying to muscle them.
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I imagine they could, but the RIAA could go back to lawsuits.

My guess is that this will all pan out anyway when the labels all realize that paying for music has become irrelevant. They'll need to generate revenue from ads like everybody else.
 
Ockie said:
ISP's would be more than happy with this, they will just flag users and content as they see fit in order to save and upsell bandwidth
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Exactly. ISPs will be more than happy to cut off heavy bandwidth users running a home bittorrent server. "The RIAA says so" is just another excuse that ISPs can use.

Of course, it's good that the RIAA is ending their lawsuit carpet bombing. On the other hand, I'm apprehensive about the extent they'll coerce the ISPs into being Internet cops.
 
So, now they are appointing the ISP as their police.

Do these jackels have to follow ANY sort of laws?
 
Did anyone actually read the article?

The RIAA is going to make the ISP "police" anything. They are sending the ISP an IP address and telling the ISP to contact the person associated with it.

lol...this actually protects your privacy. No one is doing any snooping, your IP is being given out freely and no one is obtaining your identity that didn't already have it.

Thinking the RIAA is going to ask ISPs to monitor traffic is just ridiculously stupid. The entire reason for the change is to improve their image. Do you think blatantly violating people's privacy will help?
 
Can someone tell me why ISP's occasionally don't get the right person when they are subpoenaed by the RIAA? The ISP's keep logs of the data, so I don't see why they can't just look at the data to make sure it is the correct pirated file, then look at which of their customers was given the IP address at that time. Are these mistakes clerical errors?
 
E.E.L. Ambiense said:
What I want to know is, how will they know that the individual is sharing illegal files? All they're going to know is larger-than-usual amounts of bandwidth are being used.
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They have the ability to packet sniff and can tell what type of files you're downloading, and in come cases what files you're downloading. If the digital fingerprint matches known files, they'll flag you. They can also tell when you're sending encrypted packets along as well, and will likely flag your account for further investigation. Higher bandwidth usage only scratches the surface, and many ISPs already have this monitoring in place and use to throttle P2P traffic.
 
Sorry for the double post, but the lack of an edit button is retarded.

"Part of the issue with infringement is for people to be aware that their actions are not anonymous," said Mitch Bainwol, the group's chairman.
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This right here is the key, make people aware that they aren't anonymous on the internet, that they're being watched, and are engaging in illegal activity and it will effectively combat piracy. Accountability is the crux of the entire piracy issue, and this is good step in making that happen.
 
TheCAD said:
Did anyone actually read the article?

The RIAA is going to make the ISP "police" anything. They are sending the ISP an IP address and telling the ISP to contact the person associated with it.

lol...this actually protects your privacy. No one is doing any snooping, your IP is being given out freely and no one is obtaining your identity that didn't already have it.

Thinking the RIAA is going to ask ISPs to monitor traffic is just ridiculously stupid. The entire reason for the change is to improve their image. Do you think blatantly violating people's privacy will help?
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lol, the act of enforcing a policy or carrying orders is "policing".


Now onto your silly comments. How many static IP's does the ISP's give out to your average consumer? None. All of it is dynamic. So how many of these cease operations are going to be accurate? A few. How many are going to be inaccurate? Many.

Not violating your privacy? Is cutting off a "suspect" or a "potential" or even an "innocent" not a violation of your rights?
 
Isn't there a single ISP out there that simply acts as a dumb-pipe provider in the US? How about the world?
 
I love where this is going "Come on guys, we now realize how pointless all this work is, so how about you guys take over and do a bunch of shit that will require massive amounts of money?". These guys are smart.
 
is it even possible for ISPs to do anything ??

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markt435 said:
well at least they're gonna stop suing people. but of course...the music is still shitty enough that i wouldn't even wanna pirate it in the first place.
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I don't think it's cause they're being nice though. ...remember, their huge "making available" arguement is getting shot to hell everywhere. I think they've run out of ignorant judges that'll support them and they can't show enough evidence to actually win now that the precident is set. ...I'm sure they're just stopping because people are starting to win the judgements against them and it'll cost them more in the longrun if they start losing more cases.



On a sidenote, anyone else scared that Obama's right-hand man (Rahm Emmanuel) has a brother that runs one of the largest Hollywood agencies in the US?
 
PynkFloydd said:
I don't think it's cause they're being nice though. ...remember, their huge "making available" arguement is getting shot to hell everywhere. I think they've run out of ignorant judges that'll support them and they can't show enough evidence to actually win now that the precident is set. ...I'm sure they're just stopping because people are starting to win the judgements against them and it'll cost them more in the longrun if they start losing more cases.



On a sidenote, anyone else scared that Obama's right-hand man (Rahm Emmanuel) has a brother that runs one of the largest Hollywood agencies in the US?
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It always did cost them more from the start with all the lawyer fees im sure. Now that people are winning against them it's counter active because they no longer have a "message" to send to people who pirate.
 
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