US Internet providers will start throttling connection speeds for customers alleged to be pirating copyright-protected materials.

US Internet providers will start throttling connection speeds for customers alleged to be pirating copyright-protected materials.(RT). Starting this week, Internet Service Providers will start throttling connection speeds for customers alleged to be pirating copyright-protected materials.

Months after a controversial “six-strike” program was slated to be rolled out by the biggest ISPs in the United States, the Copyright Alert System (CAS) confirmed on Monday that the initiative has gone live.

The program, critiqued by Internet freedom activists and privacy advocates alike, will let ISPs take six steps of escalating severity in handling incidents where customers are believed to be illegally sharing material. Through the “graduate response” approach, suspected copyright criminals could be issued a series of warnings for illegally downloading protected content.

With the first strike caught by the CAS, a customer could be issued a warning. As strikes increase, however, “mitigation measures,” connection speed throttling and termination of service are all possible options.

“Practically speaking, this means our content partners will begin sending notices of alleged P2P [peer-to-peer] copyright infringement to ISPs, and the ISPs will begin forwarding those notices in the form of Copyright Alerts to consumers,” Jill Lesser of the Center for Copyright Information rights in a blog post on Monday.

“Consumers whose accounts have been used to share copyrighted content over P2P networks illegally (or without authority) will receive Alerts that are meant to educate rather than punish, and direct them to legal alternatives. And for those consumers who believe they received Alerts in error, an easy to use process will be in place for them to seek independent review of the Alerts they received,” she adds — neglecting to mention that the appeals process costs customers $35 a pop.

Previously, Time Warner, Verizon, AT and T, Comcast, Cablevision Systems and other ISPs have signed onto the program, which was last scheduled to start in July 2012.

When the six-strikes program was first introduced, the White House issued an official statement saying it should “have a significant impact on reducing online piracy.”Read the full story here.

Related: The Copyright Propaganda Machine Gets a New Agent: Your ISP.

Net Neutrality? Google Prods Users to Fight Copyright Law

Net Neutrality? Google Prods Users to Fight Copyright Law.(Spiegel).By Sven Becker and Marcel Rosenbach. Google is increasingly throwing around its power to improve its bottom line. The latest incident is a draft law in Germany that would force the company to share some revenues with newspaper publishers. Meddling in politics is certainly not illegal, but it could be risky.
At its core, the proposal concerns the headlines and short teaser texts indexed by search engines -- the so-called snippets.
The bill aims to protect copyrights that belong to newspapers and their publishers. When search engines display those snippets "for commercial purposes," the proposed law would allow the publishing houses to charge a fee. Bloggers, clubs, associations and even company press reviews would not be affected by the current draft version of the law.
Until last week, this somewhat arcane issue in copyright law caused little more than a ripple in the public consciousness.
But all that changed on Tuesday. That's when Google declared the skirmish over the info snippet as a major battleground in the big war -- namely the fight for freedom on the Web. Consequently, the roughly 15.6 million users who bombard Google Germany with search queries every day were presented with a link under the usual search mask that led them directly to a campaign website -- where the search engine giant called for resistance: "Defend Your Net." According to Google, the law would "make it significantly more difficult to find the information you are searching for on the Internet." Read the full story here.

U.S. Copyright Surveillance Machine About To Be Switched On, Promises of Transparency Already Broken.

U.S. Copyright Surveillance Machine About To Be Switched On, Promises of Transparency Already Broken. (EFFhttps://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/11/us-copyright-surveillance-machine-about-be-switched-on).By Mitch Stoltz.The "Copyright Alert System" – an elaborate combination of surveillance, warnings, punishments, and "education" directed at customers of most major U.S. Internet service providers – is poised to launch in the next few weeks, as has been widely reported. The problems with it are legion.

Big media companies are launching a massive peer-to-peer surveillance scheme to snoop on subscribers. Based on the results of that snooping, ISPs will be serving as Hollywood’s private enforcement arm, without the checks and balances public enforcement requires. Once a subscriber is accused, she must prove her innocence, without many of the legal defenses she’d have in a courtroom. The "educational" materials posted for subscribers thus far look more like propaganda, slanted towards major entertainment companies' view of copyright. And all of this was set up with the encouragement and endorsement of the U.S. government.

One of the mechanisms that was supposed to ensure some degree of fairness was independent auditing of the P2P surveillance methods used to identify alleged infringers, and of the ISPs' procedures for matching Internet Protocol addresses to actual humans. But last month, the group set up to oversee the system - the Center for Copyright Information - revealed that its "independent" reviewer was Stroz Friedberg, a lobbying firm that represented the Recording Industry Association of America in the halls of Congress from 2004 to 2009. Needless to say, RIAA's former lobbying firm is hardly an "independent" reviewer. And CCI could have discovered the relationship between Stroz and the RIAA – it’s on the public record, in reports that lobbyists must file with Congress every year.

It gets worse.

In response to criticism of this obvious conflict of interest, CCI acknowledged that "[r]ecent reports that a former employee of Stroz Friedberg lobbied several years ago on behalf of RIAA on matters unrelated to CCI have raised questions" about the group's impartiality. In the name of “maintaining transparency,” CCI released the Stroz report to the public last week.

But it turns out the CCI has a funny definition of “transparency.” Nearly every significant detail of how the massive P2P monitoring scheme will work is redacted out of the public version. What remains is this: CCI hired a company called MarkMonitor, which will join BitTorrent networks and collect the Internet Protocol addresses of computers that are sharing certain movies and songs (MPAA and RIAA members supply the lists). Their software, described only as "collection mechanisms" and "scanning systems" in the public version, compares the beginning, end, and some of the middle of the file against a reference version, and, if they match, emails the ISP with the IP address of the accused file-sharer. The ISP then sends an escalating series of warnings and punishments to the subscriber, including mandatory "copyright education" and potential bandwidth throttling or blocking of popular websites.

There's a lot we simply can't tell from this heavily redacted report. Most importantly, we have no way of knowing if legal, non-infringing uses of copyrighted movies and music will be flagged as infringing, leading to escalating "mitigation measures" for law-abiding Internet subscribers. We don't know what, if any, protocols other than BitTorrent the system will be snooping on. And we don't know how, or how accurately, the ISPs match IP addresses to the names of actual human beings. That process, says CCI, was described in another Stroz Friedberg report that hasn't been released.

CCI and its backers have made every effort to portray the system as fair and balanced. But subscribers are rightly wary of a copyright surveillance machine that dispenses warnings and punishments based on a secret process. Hopefully CCI will go to greater lengths to find an “independent” reviewer next time – but we’re not optimistic. According to CCI, this fatally flawed system, created via a backroom deal with no subscriber input, will start spying on U.S. subscribers' Internet usage, and sending out warnings and punishments, before the end of 2012. In light of what we already know, the better course would be to press reset.

Please visit The Electronic Frontier Foundation for the latest copyright, privacy, and digital surveillance news

Canada-EU Trade Agreement Replicates ACTA’s Notorious Copyright Provisions.

Canada-EU Trade Agreement Replicates ACTA’s Notorious Copyright Provisions.(EFF).By Carolina Rossini.The shadow of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is back in Europe. It is disguised as CETA, the Canada-European Union and Trade Agreement. As reported by EDRI, a rather strange and surprising e-mail was sent this summer from the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union to the Member States and the European Commission. The e-mail explained that the criminal sanctions provisions of the draft CETA are modeled on those in ACTA.

A comparison of the leaked draft Canada-EU agreement shows the treaty includes a number of the same controversial provisions, specifically concerning criminal enforcement, private enforcement by Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and harsh damages. These provisions are particularly problematic, and were the key reasons why the European Parliament rejected ACTA.

However, given the lack of transparency associated with the CETA discussions (both Canada and EU insist that the draft text remain secret), the concerns that CETA may replicate ACTA appear to be very real despite denials from some members of the European Commission.

CETA is a trade agreement designed to strengthen economic ties between Canada and the EU through “free” trade and increased investment. However, hidden within this treaty are provisions that were essentially lifted from ACTA word-for-word. And just like its close cousins, ACTA, KORUS, and TPP—and other trade agreements that are applauded by the entertainment industry for carrying expansive intellectual property provisions—CETA is being negotiated in secret.

Jérémie Zimmermann declared:

The only hard evidence on which we can base our analysis suggests the worst: once again, the European Commission and the EU Member States governments are trying to impose repressive measures against cultural practices online. (…) This trend of sneaking repressive measures through negotiated trade agreements must stop.

This cut-and-paste strategy was confirmed yesterday by La Quadrature du Net, which had representatives present in a workshop on October 10th, where Philipp Dupuis, the European Commission negotiator, bragged that ACTA-like criminal sanctions were still in the CETA draft. Following the workshop, La Quadrature du Net sent letters to Mr Pierre Moscovici, Minister for Economic Affairs and Finance, requesting clarifications and demanding that the criminal measures be removed from CETA.

The 92% of the European Union Parliament who voted against ACTA in July 2012 demonstrated that the EU was overwhelmingly against provisions like this, and many expected that it would be the end of the matter. Sadly, that assumption appears to have been unfounded. Despite this there are encouraging signs of resistance—including that the Dutch government has stated that it would not accept CETA moving forward this way.

Civil society, which has mobilized and filled streets of France, Poland, and others, is calling on citizens to demand that their governments remove copyright provisions from CETA during the upcoming round of negotiations next week in Brussels.

The Consolidation of Policy Laundering and Increasing Secrecy in International Negotiations

The copyright lobbies have consolidated on the use of foreign and international forums as an indirect means of pushing policies—a strategy known as policy laundering—like those ones in CETA that might never win direct approval through the regular domestic political. The move from fora like the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) or the World Trade Organization (WTO) to bilateral and regional trade agreements confirms it. Policy laundering takes advantage of the fact that the institutions nations have created for ensuring democratic control and input into the bureaucratic policymaking process have not yet been instituted into most international bodies and negotiation venues. And of course, the entertainment lobby applauds this. It is well known for instance, that provisions of the US DMCA were the result of policy laundering. This should not be the way we build 21st century agreements.

International negotiations are abstract and it’s hard to see how they may eventually affect one's life. When a trade agreement or treaty is signed by a country and later ratified however, it does manifest itself into national law. Therefore, the time to act is from the very beginning of such initiatives, not later. Secrecy around negotiations is not democratic, violates the open government principles many of the negotiating countries have signed onto, and purposefully makes taking action much more difficult.

Secrecy impacts civil society’s ability to comment or analyze agreements, just as it does with the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) and other FTAs. It’s hard enough to work within the participation system at places like WIPO, but at least there we are given some opportunity to observe and participate in the official discussions. When trade negotiators and copyright maximalists get together to launder IP rights expansion through secret agreements, we lose that small but vital voice that lets us speak truth to power.

Additional Resources:
Europe: La Quadrature du Net: http://www.laquadrature.net/en/CETA
Europe: EDRI http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number10.17/ceta-acta-criminal-sanctions
Canada: Michael Geist blog on ACTA http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_tags&task=view&tag=acta&Itemid=408

RIAA chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 1.

RIAA chief: ISPs to start policing copyright by July 1.(CNet).Comcast, Time Warner, and Verizon are among the ISPs preparing to implement a graduated response to piracy by July, says the music industry's chief lobbyist.The country's largest Internet service providers haven't given up on the idea of becoming copyright cops. CNET broke the news last June that the RIAA and counterparts at the trade group for the big film studios, had managed to get the deal through--with the help of the White House.
  Last July, Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, Time Warner Cable and other bandwidth providers announced that they had agreed to adopt policies designed to discourage customers from illegally downloading music, movies and software. Since then, the ISPs have been very quiet about their antipiracy measures. But during a panel discussion before a gathering of U.S. publishers here today, Cary Sherman, CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America, said most of the participating ISPs are on track to begin implementing the program by July 1. "Each ISP has to develop their infrastructure for automating the system," Sherman said. They need this "for establishing the database so they can keep track of repeat infringers, so they know that this is the first notice or the third notice. Every ISP has to do it differently depending on the architecture of its particular network. Some are nearing completion and others are a little further from completion."
The program, commonly referred to as "graduated response," requires that ISPs send out one or two educational notices to those customers who are accused of downloading copyrighted content illegally. If the customer doesn't stop, the ISP is then asked to send out "confirmation notices" asking that they confirm they have received notice. At that time, the accused customers will also be informed of the risks they incur if they don't stop pirating material. If the customer is flagged for pirating again, the ISP can then ratchet up the pressure. Participating ISPs can choose from a list of penalties, or what the RIAA calls "mitigation measures," which include throttling down the customer's connection speed and suspending Web access until the subscriber agrees to stop pirating. Read the full story here.

U.S. Six Strikes Copyright Infringement Scheme Delayed Again

U.S. Six Strikes Copyright Infringement Scheme Delayed Again.(GP).And it's one, two, six strikes you’re out at the old ball game - but the ball game has been delayed. And when I say ballgame, I mean the agreement between rights holders in the United States and Internet service providers which would institute a "six strikes" system for those naughty people that infringe on copyrights while using the Internet...
In an undetermined (at this point) number of months, the Center for Copyright Information (CCI) will begin the process of tracking down copyright infringers as part of an agreement all major U.S. Internet providers struck with the MPAA and RIAA. All of the parties involved eventually agreed to a system where copyright infringers would receive a series of warnings from their service providers telling them that that their behavior is unacceptable and would offer some form of "education" to show those individuals the error of their ways. After six warnings ISPs can decide what kind of action to take against repeat offenders including slowing down connections or temporary disconnections.
The agreement was called "Copyright Alerts" when it was revealed in July of last year and some ISPs were expected to send out the first warnings before the end of 2011. But something happened and that deadline passed by without a peep from all involved. The one thing that was revealed was that there was a new deadline: July 1, 2012, but it looks like that one will be missed too.
Web site TorrentFreak recently asked the CCI about the upcoming target date:
"The dates mentioned in the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) are not hard deadlines but were intended to keep us on track to have the Copyright Alert System up and running as quickly as possible and in the most consumer friendly manner possible," a spokesperson told the publication. "We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly and able to be implemented in a manner consistent with all of the goals of the MOU. We expect our implementation to begin later this year."
The CCI went on to tell the publication that the group has selected a third-party company that will be responsible for monitoring BitTorrent swarms, but did not reveal the name of that company.
"The technology partner we have identified and begun working with is an independent and impartial expert and we expect to have an announcement about the independent expert shortly," TorrentFreak was told.
This could be why the six strikes plan has been delayed, because the unnamed technology partner is being doubly scrutinized to make sure their data collection methods are accurate.Read the full story here.