Pirates

[Agoraphobic]

So was surfing the net and came across this interesting piece. All these things the companies are doing, seem to drive people to want to pirate more. I was just curious what everyone thought.

My thoughts after reading this were;

- You will be educated.

- You will be fined.

- You will conform.

- You have no rights.

- We're watching.

[http://www.cnn.com/2…stem/index.html](http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/18/tech/web/copyright-alert-system/index.html)

or read it here

>! **(CNN)** – It is about to get a bit more difficult to illegally download TV shows, movies or music online.
>! A new alert system, rolling out over the next two months, will repeatedly warn and possibly punish people violating digital copyrights. The Copyright Alert System was announced last July and has been four years in the making.
>! If you use AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner, or Verizon as your Internet service provider, you could receive the first of one of these notes starting in the next two months.
>! The Internet provider is delivering the message, but the legwork is being done by the copyright owners, which will monitor peer-to-peer networks such as BitTorrent.
>! They use a service called MarkMonitor, which uses a combination of people and automated systems to spot illegal downloading. It will collect the IP addresses of offenders, but no personal information. The IP addresses are turned over to the Internet providers, which will match up the address with the right customer and send the notification.
>! The warning system is described as a graduated response. First the Internet provider will let the customer know that their Internet connection is being used to download content illegally. The note will include information to steer them away from their life of crime, including tips on how they can download content legally.
>! There will also be tips on securing Internet connections, just in case you were unaware that your neighbor was downloading season three of "Dexter" using your unprotected wireless network.
>! "The progressive series of alerts is designed to make consumers aware of activity that has occurred using their Internet accounts, educate them on how they can prevent such activity from happening again," the CCI [said in its announcement today](http://www.copyrightinformation.org/node/709).
>! After the educational phase, the customers will be asked to acknowledge that they received the warning. If they continue to download content illegally, the alerts will threaten mild punishments, such as forcing the copyright violator to read "educational materials," or throttling their Internet connection so that it is slow, making it harder to download large files.
>! Today's announcement claims that terminating the Internet service is not one of the options.
>! If a customer feels they are being wrongly accused, they can ask for a review, which will cost them [$35 according to the Verge](http://www.theverge.com/2012/10/18/3521714/isp-copyright-alert-system-launch).
>! The entire system will be overseen by an organization called the Center for Copyright Information, which includes content owners, such as the Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America, as well as individual members including Disney, Sony Pictures, Fox, EMI and Universal.
>! Each ISP will have a slightly different version of the system.

[Anna Comnena]

Gotta love businesses that are too stupid and bloated to compete in a free market having to use the state to protect their inflated monopolies.

Piracy is so overrated in what is considered losses. Cue that image that correlates RIAA's claims of monetary loss to actually be higher than the actual amount of currency in circulation on the planet, due to "pirated" content.

One problem is there is little way to avoid a lot of this because of the near-monopolies of the telecom and media companies; there are very few competing options to legitimately purchase. Although I got sick of new media in general so I don't even bother pirating it anymore; what's the point? Every video game that's come out is basically dumbed-down streamlined easy mode version of games I've played for 20 years now. And music? Hell I almost never get through the playlist of legitimate songs I own, and anything recent is played to death on radio/pandora/etc. anyway.

So again, it's nothing but dinosaur monopolistic media companies still unable to adapt to the change in communications the developed world has been trending toward for the last 30 years or so, whiney to mama state to protect them.

[Infuriated]

Sounds like they can still only detect suspicious activity through torrents and not directly downloaded content, so this will probably not effect me a whole lot. This battle against piracy is just dumb, It's like trying to prohibit anything, people will ALWAYS find a loophole so all of these funds basically just get dumped into oblivion.

Honestly, I think piracy may even be a good thing ultimately. People who would have otherwise not paid for it (for lack of funds or whatever reason) get a hold of it and if it's a quality product they'll turn into worker bees in the big internet hype machine. Plus, at least for games, I can't really think of a case where a game got pirated to death because if it's being mass pirated that usually means it's already got a huge gathering waiting to acquire it legitimately anyway.

Overall I can't really say much on the Music/TV scene as I don't really download that kind of stuff very often. I just know most piracy protection (DRM) in games hurts the legitimate audience more than it does pirates, lol.

[Greendude120]

I do believe there will be ways to bypass this. Possibly some new torrent program that is more private than bit torrent. Or using proxy apps that u install to use a different ip. Even programs like hamachi can temporarily change ur ip. You could turn it on to download then off to play.

Also, what if the user calls the company and says "Okay if you are going to slow my internet, i'll switch to XYZ company that doesn't have this system". This is actually easy to do because laws in certain places (i know its like this in Quebec) make it impossible for companys to charge u for terminating a contract before the end. Thus some companies will choose not to adopt this system in order to steal some of those clients.

I'm not worried about the system stopping pirate downloads. What i am worried is that people get scared and stop uploading the files. There will be a shortage for pirates to download from.

[SawQuart]

> Also, what if the user calls the company and says "Okay if you are going to slow my internet, i'll switch to XYZ company that doesn't have this system". This is actually easy to do because laws in certain places (i know its like this in Quebec) make it impossible for companys to charge u for terminating a contract before the end. Thus some companies will choose not to adopt this system in order to steal some of those clients.

The problem is that a lot of companies own monopolies on the wires. The only affordable and fast option for me is either Comcast or Verizon. Both of those will probably add those piracy rules, so I don't have much of choice. The whole system is extremely ducked up.

[azkanan]

There are only two things I pirate;

- Sims 3 expansions. Because they are overpriced and lack of content. Plus I hate EA.

- All other games. However, if I like the game, I will then go out and buy it. Pirating for me is basically receiving a demo disc. The good old days.

…I still recall playing the Suikoden 2 demo to death for about a year when I was younger... There was only 2 hours of gameplay on the damned thing...