Internet Providers To Begin Warning Customers Who Pirate Content 442
beltsbear writes "Welcome to the future that you warned us about. Starting soon, Verizon, Comcast and others will work with the Center for Copyright Information to reduce piracy. Customers thought to be pirating will receive alerts. '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,' If a customer feels they are being wrongly accused, they can ask for a review, which will cost them $35, according to the Verge."
Got one? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I should not have to pay $35 (Score:5, Informative)
Fair use used to be legal. I could share music and videos with you freely -- even copies, even copies of copies, or copies of copies of copies. The operative word is of course 'free'. I can't charge you for it, and you can't make a profit off it. But as long as you stayed within those boundaries, it was all good.
You do NOT get to make shit up. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
Look, I get it... you're pirating material.. and you're telling yourself all day long, it's ok... this *used* to be legal.
But it's NOT true. If you want to have a reasonable discussion about copyright law.. then YOU NEED TO STICK TO THE FACTS.
The first copyright law was the The Statute of Anne in 1709 in Britain. It did not apply to the colonies. The first copyright act in the US was the US Copyright Act of 1790.. it was similar to the Statute of Anne. http://www.copyright.gov/history/1790act.pdf [copyright.gov]
That from and after the passing of this act, the author and ... shall have the sole right and ...
authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed
liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books, for the
term of fourteen years
And be it further enacted, That if any other person or persons, from and after the
recording the title of any map, chart, book or books, and publishing the same as aforesaid, and
within the times limited and granted by this act, shall print, reprint, publish, or import, or cause
to be printed, reprinted, published, or imported from any foreign Kingdom or State, any copy or
copies of such map, chart, book or books, without the consent of the author or proprietor thereof,
first had and obtained in writing, signed in the presence of two or more credible witnesses; or
knowing the same to be so printed, reprinted, or imported, shall publish, sell, or expose to sale,
or cause to be published, sold or exposed to sale, any copy of such map, chart, book or books,
without such consent first had and obtained in writing as aforesaid, then such offender or
offenders shall forfeit all and every sheet and sheets, being part of the same, or either of them, to
the author or proprietor of such map, chart, book or books, who shall forthwith destroy the same:
And every such offender and offenders shall also forfeit and pay the sum of fifty cents for every
sheet which shall be found in his or their possession, either printed or printing, published,
imported or exposed to sale,
Re:Google Fiber (Score:1, Informative)
Hey does anyone in Kansas City have a REALLY long ethernet cord?
Anything much more than 100 meters and it's useless. First, there's capacitive, inductive, and ohmic losses -- all of which eat away at signal integrity. But even if you cryogenically cooled it so it had zero line loss, signal latency still puts an upper limit of only a few miles. The ethernet standard has certain timing requirements and links become unstable, if not totally unusable, if the signal become desyncronized. There are other high speed networking standards that are made to go over long distances. Some of them could even be run over a several mile length of ethernet wire (if you were feeling more Scotty than LaForge). But basic 10/100/1000-BaseT? Forget it.
Re:I should not have to pay $35 (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up. Although, there is a caveat (isn't there always?):
What you seem to be describing is the Shareware Concept. This isn't so much fair use as a licence to copy and distribute. For those of you born after the days of bulletin boards and floppy disks on the front of magazines, here's how it works:
You get a copy of a piece of software from wherever (I'll use a copy of FractINT 18.0 I got on the front of a magazine a few years before my oldest child was born). The licence that comes with it (in electronic form, a file named license.doc and another called vendor.doc) says I can distribute as many copies of the software as I like, to whomever I like, BUT:
1. I cannot charge for the software. I am, however, allowed to charge for the media and bare distribution costs such as postage and packaging.
2. If I distribute the software as part of a compilation I MUST get permission in writing from the copyright holder (they're usually very good about this).
3. The software must not be modified in any way. Ancillary files not essential to the software's functionality but included with it (such as the licenses) must be bundled with it. Usually the license documents include a list of the files that must be included (an exception to this is the example given, where the authors actually encourage community input into the program, great mods/additions make it to the next version).
4. If I find the software useful, I should consider paying the author. Sometimes, what you have is a locked-down version (a "demo") of the full program. Pay a small fee and you get the unlock key. Sometimes it's a 30-day period with full functionality then it locks down. Same thing. OR for some games, you get to distribute the first level or three, pay the fee to get the rest of the game sent to you in the post (what a weird concept these days!)
Now, I've been using FractINT for nigh on two decades, it's the most fantastic bit of geek porn. I've also made regular donations to the authors in time and development (as they say, "Don't want money, got money. Want recognition". Great philosophy!) and I've managed to sort of keep up with the latest developments myself (though I still prefer the DOS version).
What the Shareware Concept and associated licence does in these days of wireless broadband and "What's a CD-ROM?" is reduce the cost of distributing software attached to it, to almost zero. You're not buying media or envelopes, or paying postage anymore. You're opening a Bittorrent client and hooking up to a tracker. There's no effort involved anymore, and that is what is scaring the SHIT out of the big vendors and the associatives - their business model is COMPLETELY OBSOLETE.
Re:I should not have to pay $35 (Score:4, Informative)
The first copyright law was the The Statute of Anne in 1709 in Britain. It did not apply to the colonies. The first copyright act in the US was the US Copyright Act of 1790.. it was similar to the Statute of Anne.
If we're going to have a measuring contest over who can nitpick the best, I'm going to win. The first copyright law in the United States was common law, which our laws were derived from, and Clause 8 of the US Constitution. In other words, until 1790, all our laws were case law, decided by judges. After that, a small portion of copyright law was codified. That's the very small part you quoted. Fair use predates that and continued after the passage of that law in our common law system.
Now, if you'd be so kind, please reply with another wall of text only tangentially-related, as is traditional when someone pulls your pants down around your ankles and giggles at your ineptitude in a public forum...
Re:I should not have to pay $35 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I should not have to pay $35 (Score:2, Informative)
Spin.
The implication was that all corporations, by virtue of being corporations, will do anything to increase profit. That's false, but a common meme.
Independent ISPs are not taking part (Score:3, Informative)
I was curious whether a major regional ISP was taking part in this clusterfuck, and found an interesting interview from August [torrentfreak.com] stating that the only ISPs taking part are AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Verizon; independent ISPs are not involved and weren't even asked.
Relatedly, I highly recommend that anyone in the service area for Sonic.net [sonic.net] (their CEO/founder was the one interviewed) use them as an ISP -- they're the only one I know of that has been persistently doing what we've all been saying we want ISPs to do [wikipedia.org] when it comes to governmental & *AA demands and investing in fiber connections. No better way to show appreciation than voting with our wallets where we can...