When Microsoft and other companies try to fight copyright infringement, they essentially made the law that "making the product available" constitutes the infringement. It doesn't matter if anyone has actually downloaded the copyrighted material or used it in any way that might be illegal, the fact that the product was "made available" is a violation of the law and implies under hefty statutory damages without the owner needing to prove any damages. The corporations were successful at crafting the law that punishes such the behavior of sharing and essentially makes an individual who shares go bankrupt.

How would the same principle of overzealous punishing for "making available" work in the proposed case of personal data and DRM? Actually very simply. Only in this case the health care provider is the one who potentially "makes available" the personal data. Just as it doesn't matter whether the downloaded copyrighted material has ever been played/installed/used, the fact that it was made available is punishable. With personal data, once anyone's data is "made available" it would be irrelevant if it was used or misused, the mere fact of making it available should be punishable. And I don't mean a small fine. I mean jail time for those who approved the decision, the architecture, or made errors in code. As it is difficult to impose the same severity punishment that individuals face for sharing onto a corporation, it should be either a corporation to go bankrupt or responsible people going to jail. What will happen if such law gets passed? Since many executives will not like to end up in jail for proposing a stupid solution, the silly ideas will die out. So, if some provider decides to implement Microsoft's solution with DRM and an error in Microsoft DRM causes the data to be leaked, the Microsoft executives would face felony charges for not providing the appropriate safeguards and making the data available. Yes, I mean, you, Craig Mundie would become a felon! I completely support such a reciprocal implementation of the law.

Absolutely not true. When the number of players in a game is limited, then to reach the people outside of the game would require the "conversion" to some more accepted form of payment that is used by the outside group. Once more people start playing the same game, the conversion becomes less and less necessary. That is true for any type of monetary exchange.

Think of this as people in Europe are playing their game and exchanging Euros, but once a European comes to the US, using the same Euros is significantly more difficult without exchanging them to the US Dollars. However, if you find a person at the garage sale who frequently travels to Europe, he might be happy to accept your Euros without converting to dollars. The same becomes true of the Bitcoin, the more people join the "game" the easier it becomes to use it as real currency without doing any conversion.

The summary of the book seems to focus too much on the “criminals” and claims that the end of the internet is in the “unregulation” of the internet. While it is a factor, let’s not forget that the growth of the internet was also attributed mainly to the same factors. Internet gave power to ordinary citizens and it’s not possible to have that power and not to have anonymity. But with anonymity comes the criminal side as well.

The web is changing now. With every day we have less and less privacy. Large companies got to be very good at tracking everyone’s move on the web. Practically nothing remains anonymous on the web any longer. Getting an internet service in the US requires presenting a government-issued ID and SSN (wasn’t the case a few years ago). The ISP now start the deep packet inspection where everything becomes monitored and certain undesired connections are dropped. Welcome to the world of censorship where no lists will be provided of what exactly is censored. And that, not the “wild west,” will be one of the causes for the death of the internet.

There was an interesting article in Wired magazine on the topic: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/ It provides insights about how we, as users, choose the closed platforms (e.g. google, facebook). And the more we turn away from the true open and anonymous internet, the more irrelevant the internet becomes.

Just have a /. comment voting system where readers/writers can "vote" on the articles. Very quickly there will be a select group of readers providing valid ratings, so give them more mod points. The good articles will bubble up to the top having higher rating. The "prestige" factor will be in having a high rating on such a site. And the karma will improve!

I have a dashboard camera and had similar thoughts about the encryption. I don’t care to stream the video somewhere else -- this is not my concern, I just don’t want the video to end up in the hands that I didn’t approve. Current cameras store several hours of most recent footage and even if I decide to share the last 5 minutes, who knows what could be there during previous hours if my card is copied in full.

Even if the camera manufacturers are not making the camera with built-in encryption, having a public-key encryption can be achieved on a separate tiny device. With current technology the device could have a form-factor of an SD-card. Imagine you have an SD card to which you record a public-key. Every following write to the card will be done through a built-in encryption using that key. All reads will return the encrypted content and it will appear as garbage. But for the purpose of most cameras (that only need to be able to read directories and file names) this will work. If the device is not as small as the SD card, I’d be ok to have wires sticking out of the SD slot that go to my “encryptor”. I can totally see such card to be useful for general photography too.

A better analogy: A bank has a web server that takes person's name and returns that person's SSN. A "hacker" sends your username and gets your SSN. He does that for several people from the phone directory. Hacker goes to prison for the BANK'S FAULT of exposing SSNs.

I assume you try to increase the convenience of browsing and not to restrict anyone of the information (the latter I don’t think is possible). Any blocking will have some unintended effect. Router dns poisoning works relatively well. I had it for a long time and enjoy it. I like that all my machines, including any mobile clients connected to my wi-fi, have less ads displayed. My main purpose is to block tracking sites, rather than disable the ads. I also like the fact that the page content does not change, no scripts get inserted or modified, only the third party sites are blocked.

But... There were cases when I had to disable or modify the blocking. Hulu detects that the ads are blocked and takes a couple of minutes for a timeout to happen. It might be OK to allow a 30 second ad to show in that instance. A checkout in a few online shops may not work at all if the tracking is blocked. Yes, it is the problem with the sites, but I had to enable tracking a couple of times so that I could complete the checkout. Many of the referral sites stop working by clicking the products directly, as the case with goodgle shopping.

While doing some investigation I was shocked to see how much data is shared with third parties even by the big name stores. Every single product you view on a shopping site may generate notifications to facebook, twitter, pinterest, etc. Everything that gets placed in a shopping card may generate “likes” behind the scenes if you have another instance of the browser with logged in profile open. The amount of tracking is phenomenal, and it is my right to restrict it.

I still think that having two somewhat insecure systems is better than one insecure system + biometrics. A card+pin is a perfect example and the dual piece authentication is better than a single piece. What would be better though: a card+RFID or card+biometrics? RFID is inherently insecure, it can be cloned relatively easily. Even then, I would argue that a card+RFID is more secure than a card+biometrics. Why? Because if the biometrics is hacked, your NEXT card will be vulnerable and other places that use your biometrics will be vulnerable and you will not be able to do anything about it. Where is in case of card+RFID, both can be cancelled if any is hacked, so RFID, even if it is a joke of security, in combination is more secure than biometrics.

It surprises me that many debate the “security” of the fingerprint scanners while omitting the major flaw of any biometric system – it is not revocable. You cannot simply reset someone’s fingertips if the system for that instance has been compromised. With pretty much all other authentication there’s some mechanism to delete the bad entry: a password can be reset, a certificate can be revoked, a compromised key can end up in the black list, etc. None of this is possible with any biometric system. Even if it takes an elaborate trickery and a lot of resources to duplicate a finger, a hand, or a mockup of the retina scan, once it’s done, it cannot be “cancelled” at the biometric system level.

Completely agree about giving money to EFF. Some may remember the days when browsers with strong encryption were restricted (some for using within the US and some could not be exported). Yes, it was THE LAW and, OMG, people were doing something illegal by writing the strong encryption that the government could not break. Anyway, this issue ended up in court and EFF fought for consumer's right and the law was reverted based on the freedom of expression and now strong encryption is allowed. This has tremendously benefited many industries and the secure banking that we all enjoy need to say a big thanks to EFF. Please support them.

As an alternative measure to infringing copyright, I see buying used movies and sharing your copies as a great model. A boxed set of some show can be purchased used for $50, instead of $150 new, so buy that, watch it and resell it again for $50. Use Craigs List to buy/sell content. This way you can watch legally (under the current law) and not pay a dime to the copyright owners. Internet allows taking that sharing to the next level of efficiency. The law that fights the efficiency will not survive in the long run.

A sure way to avoid the enforcement of rights is not to produce the work that requires the enforcement.

Bear with me here for a second. The "Happy Birthday" song is under a copyright and any public performance of over 6 people requires a payment of royalties and expressed permission under the current copyright law. Now, your question is still valid, "how can a copyright holder enforce?" Guess what, technically the copyright holder can deploy agents at every playground at every restaurant to see if anyone sings Happy Birthday, or hums along (which requires a license for derivative work). That's the only way, but realistically it shows how broken the copyright law is. The copyright law is the reason why most restaurants ditched singing Happy Birthday song. Are we really better off with that? What benefit to the society was achieved? Someone may say that "the composition work performed requires compensation" but the reason why Happy Birthday became popular in the first place is BECAUSE sharing was possible without complications with a compensation. That's how all knowledge was spread.

Idea is interesting, but it doesn't work under the current copyright law. The fact that anyone is downloading any material does not make that an infringement. "Making available" or sharing the copyrighted work is the only infringement that is a violation. In your case, only the server that hosts the file might be infringing on the copyright, not the people downloading.

Yes, I absolutely would like to rather get a notice from the copyright holder. However, given the nature of the Internet connection, I cannot ever agree to my ISP giving out my details to any third party at their will. I also cannot assume any responsibility for some IP address that was leased to me by my ISP and was not spelled out as a part of my contract. That also means that when I have the internet connection, I should be able to share it to whomever I want to share and not have some artificial anti-competitive limitation that states that for some wacky reason I cannot share my connection. I'm also not an IP address, I'm a human being, unless RIIA has some specific evidence that I (and not some arbitrary technology) somehow infringed on it's precious rights, do not even bother me sending some notices.

This game of blocking the sites cannot be won. Let’s say it takes, at best, one month from BPI or copyright holder to figure out that one site is infringing the copyright, file a suite and have a verdict against the infringing site. That process takes time and money. On the other hand, duplicating the site’s content on some other IP and the alternative name can happen overnight and is virtually free. So there will always be sites providing free access to any works.

What is more concerning here is that none of the sites blocked hosted the copyrighted works. This is something that only few really consider as a serious shift in the court system. None of the sites blocked for copyright infringement host copyrighted works! What will be the next step? Someone will create a site that will list all the blocked sites along with the new mirrored sites that can be accessed within the UK. Should this new site be blocked? Based on what? It doesn’t host any copyrighted works, nor provides an index to the copyrighted works. Let’s say that the UK block-thirsty judges will issue a new verdict to block the sites that list mirrors. What next? Someone will write a browser plugin that will automatically redirect to the current working mirror of the blocked sites and users will continue to use the sites without even noticing any blocking and without using any VPN. Should browser plugins be blocked or any sites that host browser plugins? Someone will say that it will be good enough if less people are aware of the options. But how did we get to the point that more users are aware of thepiratebay than about the legal ways of obtaining the same material? The reason is that thepiratebay does better consolidating all the media (even that that cannot be purchased anywhere) in one spot at an attractive price point. Offer something better and people will pick the alternative. Otherwise, blocking will not solve any problem that BPI thinks exists.

From the TFA, the message from Comcast reads:

There are absolutely no details about who the copyright owner is, what specific content was infringed, when the alleged infringement was made, what details identifies MY "Internet service", etc.

A more legally correct wording could state "Someone who claims to be the copyright owner, claims that the copyright was infringed from the specific IP which we, Comcast, claim to be belonging to your account at the claimed time of the infringement." But that would be just too many "claims"!