RIAA's new internet 'program' rolling out July 1st

[PeeKnuckle]

Last week, RIAA CEO Cary Sherman confirmed that the country's largest ISPs will voluntarily roll out by July 1 a "graduated response" program aimed at discouraging unauthorized downloading. A Memorandum of Understanding published last summer outlines the program, which was developed without user feedback. Under the new system, a rightsholder accusing an ISP subscriber of infringment will trigger a series of ever-increasing consequences. The responses are graduated in the sense that they escalate after each accusation, beginning with steps aimed at educating users about copyright and culminating in the Orwellian-sounding "mitigation measures" -- bandwidth throttling or account suspension.

https://www.eff.org/...s-july-1-launch

The Six Ways You Can Appeal New Copyright "Mitigation Measures"

Under the new voluntary antipiracy regime agreed to this week by Internet providers, users who receive a first "alert" regarding copyright infringement on their account won't be able to challenge that alert. Nor can they challenge the second alert, or the third, or the fourth. They can only challenge the alerts when they move from "education" to "mitigation"—after the fifth or sixth alert, depending on the Internet provider.

At that point, before a user's Internet connection is throttled, curtailed, or otherwise hobbled, the account subscriber can pay $35 and appeal to a new independent body funded by the ISPs and the content owners. But the appeals process won't accept just any defense; indeed, the official memorandum of understanding (MoU) governing this whole process describes the six possible defenses the independent reviewer will even consider (they are incorrectly numbered in the MoU and so run up to "vii," but only six items are listed). Here they are:

(i) Misidentification of Account - that the ISP account has been incorrectly identified as one through which acts of alleged copyright infringement have occurred.

(ii) Unauthorized Use of Account - that the alleged activity was the result of the unauthorized use of the Subscriber’s account of which the Subscriber was unaware and that the Subscriber could not reasonably have prevented.

(iii) Authorization - that the use of the work made by the Subscriber was authorized by its Copyright Owner.

(iv) Fair Use - that the Subscriber’s reproducing the copyrighted work(s) and distributing it/them over a P2P network is defensible as a fair use.

(vi) Misidentification of File - that the file in question does not consist primarily of the alleged copyrighted work at issue.

(vii) Work Published Before 1923 - that the alleged copyrighted work was published prior to 1923.

What about the "open WiFi defense" ("unauthorized use of account")?

You can only use it once

.

Except as set forth herein, this defense may be asserted by a Subscriber only one (1) time

to give the Subscriber the opportunity to take steps to prevent future unauthorized use of the Subscriber’s account.

Should you win one of these challenges, you get your $35 back and the "alert" is taken off your account, though no other alerts are. Your next alert will therefore begin the "mitigation" process once more.

These alerts do eventually expire; any subscriber who makes it 12 months without receiving a notice has their slate wiped clean.

If you fail here, prepare to be mitigated with extreme prejudice.

http://arstechnica.c...ight-alerts.ars

[Skylark95]

Not real excited about this...

[PaNfOoT]

I don't pirate anything but still, **** the RIAA, and the ISPs for going along with it.

[PeeKnuckle]

I remember YouTube taking down several of our first uploaded videos on the Gamercide account. All due to copyright infringement. It's fixed now, but we had permission to upload those videos. Does anyone think people like the ones at Comcast, are always going to get it right? Hell no. There's going to be people throttled and fined for doing absolutely nothing wrong. I think it's complete bullshit that they can redirect your start page, too.

They knew this wouldn't go into law, so they made backdoor deals and the greedy companies opted in. Imagine the amounts of money they're going to start pulling in.

[Avahra]

OH hey,whatdya knwo Cox is doing something right

[PeeKnuckle]

I really worry about this new avenue of cash flow turning into more buyouts of smaller internet providers.

[Skylark95]

I have an idea...

If the RIAA wants to earn more money... how about they quit spending money to combat piracy. I do not condone piracy, but they are obviously spending more money to combat it than what they are getting back from their efforts to stop it.

They see their actions as providing profit for the future where in all honestly it's just going to be another expense for them with no return.

[Dateranoth]

This is a complete joke. Completely went around the law system and created their own laws with ISPs.

[Dungeoncrawler69]

The real issue is what is behind the isp's intent? For many years now the isp's have refused to subscribe to this because it could alienate consumers away from particular isp's. After all, customers attribute for an isp's profit(s) not the RIAA. However recently the isp's have wanted to establish certain bandwith caps to save money and extenuate profits. What better way to do this without encouraging the wraith of all their customers but by blaming it all on the bad guys, aka the pirates. If we allow this to continue unabated, soon we'll find that we are afforded a small monthly "crumb" of usage while competing companies to the isp's like netflix and other digital distributors have gone out-of-business because no one has enough bandwith to use their services.

[PeeKnuckle]

Yep. Welcome to the digital age. You can enjoy a small sample of it daily.