MPAA to Public: All your internets are belong to us!

The short version: music/movie lobbyists want "network monitoring" provisions in the broadband stimulus bill, to track what you're doing in the name of anti-filesharing.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/10/mpaas-beloved-networ.html

Even with "network monitoring", the pieces of movie will simply broken up into smaller pieces and encrypted better.

"Hollywood’s lobbyists are running all over the Hill to sneak in a copyright filtering provision into the stimulus package. The amendment allow ISPs to “deter” child pornography and copyright infringement through network management techniques. The amendment is very, very controversial for a couple of reasons:

1. First, infringement can’t be found through “network management” techniques. There are legal uses for copyrighted works even without permission of the owner.

2. Second, it would require Internet companies to examine every bit of information everyone puts on the Web in order to find those allegedly infringing works, without a hint of probable cause. That would be a massive invasion of privacy, done at the request of one industry, violating the rights of everyone who is online.

Right now, we need you to contact a few key Senators: Majority Leader Harry Reid, Chairman of the Appropriations Committee Daniel Inouye, and Chairman of the Commerce Committee Jay Rockefeller, Chairman of the Finance Committee Max Baucus, and senior member of the Appropriations Committee Senator Barbara Mikulski, and tell them to leave out this controversial provision."

They and their RIAA and BSA counterparts always have been stupid, but you'd think after years and years of putting on a display of the world's most sublime idiocy, someone would have caught a clue and, perhaps, hired someone with some technical knowledge.

The network monitoring scheme is rather easily defeated by the people they claim they want to stop. Sure, Joe and Jane College Student may get caught doing something dumb, just as high school students and moms and six year olds are occasionally served with court appearance papers and browbeat into submission because they can't afford the defense lawyer. But that's all this will ever do, and it won't stop a damn thing.

The encryption got tricker, and this only served as a challenge. The latest and greatest DRM scheme that was, again stupidly, advertised as unbreakable, was broken within hours.

This kind of thing is already done on a small scale with some private networks. People have known how to beat it, without even doing anything fancy, since minutes after those schemes were put in place.

Hell, I can think of a couple of ways off the top of my head that don't require anything more than a few keystrokes before the file transfer begins.

A lot of PC games now are coming with SecuRom on them, a program that will automatically install itself on your machine when you install the game. It's supposed to keep track of you and prevent piracy. The thing that's so stupid about it is that most of the pirated copies you get online have had it removed. It does nothing to stop piracy and only installs what is essentially a piece of data mining software (malware) on the machines of people that actually were "responsible" and paid for their copy.

Because of these gross invasions of privacy, (as far as I'm concerned what these companies are doing is completely illegal) I have torrented several games that I would otherwise have bought. Way to lose money you dumb asses.

A number of DRM schemes meet the definition of a virus. Some have even been abandoned because they were so blatant. Others, sadly, are still around.

The thing that really tripped my chord in the past year or so, though, was when RIAA started a scheme with their own version of P2P monitors to engage in DNS attacks. These are *clearly* illegal.

They've made enough mistakes with this, including targeting a state network and/or a university computer system IIRC and not even having the good sense to have determined that the traffic they shut down involved any pirated music, and they've been in some legal trouble of their own. Of course, none of that ever makes headlines.

the MPAA or RIAA, bunch of pricks on either side. Secretive assholes all.