Internet Blackout Threat for Music Thieves in AU

An anonymous reader writes "News.com.au is reporting that the ARIA [Australia's Version of the RIAA] is making plans to have ISPs cancel or terminate the accounts of those who download music illegally. If the user is on dialup, that's not a problem: their telephone line will be disconnected. 'Fed up with falling sales, the industry — which claims Australians download more than one billion songs illegally each year — has been discussing tough new guidelines with internet service providers (ISPs) since late last year. The music industry is lobbying for a three strikes and you're out policy to enforce their copyright. Under this system, people who illegally download songs would be given three written warnings by their Internet service provider. If they continued to illegally download songs, their internet account would be suspended or terminated.'"

Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[Ckwop]

Why would ISPs agree to this? I can imagine it now, a group of ISPs implement this and then customers flock to the small ISPs who aren't big enough to warrent attention from the ARIA. Faced with a slump in revenue the ISPs reverse course and try to win customers back.

Let's not get started on SSL encrypted DCC transfers on IRC channels or private FTP servers! That's going to be almost impossible to track. These kind of darknets (as I've seen them called) or going to be very hard to shut-down!

Does this even matter anyway? My friend from Canada brought over his personal collection on a 320Gig drive when he visited this week. This is getting more and more common, people now have so much portable storage that it's often easier to swap collections and cherry pick the songs you like (or take the whole collection if you prefer). Compared to downloading, this is a far safer way to pirate on a huge quantity of music.

At some point, their revenues will become so small that they start to lose credibility. A case in point, where are the blacksmiths' guilds today? This whole issue with trundle on for some time to come but the inevitable will eventually happen. Time is on our sides, my friends.

Simon

so, let's fight this with illegal tactics?

[yagu]

Maybe this is okay and/or legal in AU. Is this legal in the US? What about due process? What about overdue process?

Anecdotally, as an aside, I had on my mind about three artists (new artists, e.g., Paolo Nutini), and hence, three cds I set out to find and purchase. Circuit City, no dice (didn't really plan on buying there what with their recent employee abuse program) -- they had about 1/4 the number of racked cds than last time I'd looked there. Best Buy, sorry. And the local CD store, nope! No selection, nothing. I don't know which came first the chicken or the egg, I don't even know which is which, but my thirst for new music is about the same as before -- but recently I'm finding I can't buy cds as before.

I'm not buying the "pirates decrease sales" spiel. My cause and effect for buying fewer cds is strictly the continued unavailability of cds on display. It used to be a smörgåsbord, now the stores look like the cutout bins of years past. This (the RIAA, and others) is an industry that rather than weather a business model storm and changing business dynamics to adapt continues to insist on taking their ball home with them (hey, it isn't even their ball!) so we can't play. And somehow, they still want to demand we pay them. Please, please, please!, just let them become irrelevant quickly so we can get on with our music!

How...

[monkaduck]

How could they determine what is "illegal" and what is bought from a reputable online store? Or if a band offers a download from their website, would that be flagged as well? I don't see how there couldn't be any false positives with this agenda.

Scare tactics as usual

[redelm]

Sounds mostly like a "trial balloon", an idea floated up without any real expectation it will be implemented. Perhaps for scare value. The logic is quite erronious: labels have been losing sales not due to competition/substitution from downloads, but from a lack of new, fresh product to sell. They've cut their A&R budgets and are milking their catalogs. Sales would drop even with zero downloading.

In any case, the implementation is sure to be a nightmare: families with shared accounts, botnets, and false-positive identification will make enforcement difficult, even if the ISPs actually wanted to comply. Which I doubt they do. Do ISPs have "common carrier" status is *.au? If so, they will be loathe to jeopardize it.

Re:Monopolies prevent this

[owlnation]

That works both ways. If you cut off a (probably large) section of your customer base, you open the flood gates for competition in the longer term. Oh, as well as seriously damaging your brand.

I don't see why ISP's would agree to do this. It's right up there with... Load gun -> aim at foot -> Fire!

Out of their mind?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure the ISPs, phone companies will hurry to terminate their contracts and sources of revenues with their own customers, so that the recording industry can make more profit.

Re:What if I own the CD's with the songs I'm DL'in

[monkaduck]

The RIAA and other groups claim that shifting the format (from CD to mp3) constitutes a new license and therefore you need to pay again. I do the same thing as you do, especially if my girlfriend takes the CD and I haven't put it on my computer yet,

I almost hope something like this succeeds

[koreth]

(Almost.) If a system like this were put in place and rigorously enforced, and after a year the Australian music industry still saw declining sales, it would put a pretty big nail in the coffin of the "our industry is dying because of you filthy pirates" argument. The industry goons will not stop bleating that until it becomes such a ridiculous claim that any reasonable person reacts to it with derisive laughter instead of seriously considering it.

If, on the other hand -- unlikely though I think it is -- their sales shot up all of a sudden, then people like me would be forced to admit we were wrong. Which honestly I'll be happy to do if there are convincing hard numbers that contradict my point of view.

On the other hand, it's not worth causing so much trouble to so many people just to test a theory, which is why I'm only "almost" in favor of this.

fine if...

[nanosquid]

That's fine... if ISPs are held financially responsible for the losses they cause when they disconnect someone groundlessly. Losses includes lost productivity, time spent on trying to get the service reconnected, lost business, distress, etc.

"...more than one billion songs..."

[fuego451]

So, each Internet user [internetworldstats.com] in Australia is down loading more than 100 songs a year? Sounds like the usual hype, smoke, mirrors and bs the riaa uses in the US.

Slash-egos prevent this

[Anonymous Coward]

"I don't see why ISP's would agree to do this. It's right up there with... Load gun -> aim at foot -> Fire!"

Unsurprisingly slasdot wouldn't. Seeing other POVs isn't a strong point around here, so I'll help you out. Bandwith hogs* is a valid reason. Get rid of the illegal traffic clogging the networks and money is saved all around.

*And to cover the follow-up complaints. One people who abuse the networks aren't customers, and two no one else will want them either so running to someone else will not work. And last I don't think they're as big a group as chest-beaters would like to think. Oh and as far as the "competition" angle. Well all you abusers please feel free to start your own "pirates" ISP. A heavy dose of reality is long overdue for all of you.

Re:Luckily, the alternatives aren't that bad

[BoberFett]

Your indie music suggestions works, but old music? Unless you have it on a wax cylinder, chances are that's locked up by copyright and the RIAA members as well. Keep in mind that copyright has been extended retroactively.

Re:Monopolies prevent this

[Original Replica]

"If they cut you off, you're done."

In the States that's the fastest way to bring on an anti-monoploy suit. What are the legal ramifications of a non-government organization that could "cut you off" form a significant section of society? Will the ISP hold a "trial" to allow the customer to deny or defend the charges?

Re:so, let's fight this with illegal tactics?

[symbolic]

Ah, the ongoing saga of how to sustain a failing business model. Accuse everyone of stealing and demand a cut of the sales of other products that you *insist* are cutting into your profits. It's brilliant in a way - you never really have to be accountable for the quality of the stuff that you claim people are stealing. I wonder if the downward slide (that they claim exists anyway) might be due to the fact that it's very easy for people to gauge the quality of what's being offered *before* actually forking over their money.

They're dreaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia has a telephone supplier with a "universal service obligation" - there is no way anyone is going to lose their telephone connection. The basic telephone service that they are mandated to supply also has a *fixed* non-timed charge for local calls (ie. the ones you use for ISP connections), so that basic service is all you need.

Australia also has unbundled services - your internet connection is separate from your telephone service.

Bottom line:- if your ISP cuts you off, they can't stop your telephone (even if they are the same company)) and you just go elsewhere.

Re:Slash-egos prevent this

[kdemetter]

I disagree . people who download much (like pirates) will probably pay for higher bandwidth . So if they reduce your bandwidth , you should pay less . so they will lose money .

Re:Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[kdemetter]

parasites ? How is that possible when we pay for traffic like everyone else . and please tell me why i'm not allowed to download a new Linux distro via Bittorent ?

Re:What if I own the CD's with the songs I'm DL'in

[rtechie]

It's not the MP3 per se that's illegal in this case, at least under US law. In fact, personally ripping an MP3 from a CD you own is possibly (this is still not clear) illegal in the United States. Note that it's the ACT OF RIPPING that's supposedly illegal, the act of making an unauthorized copy. Just like making a direct copy of the CD (in CD-Audio format) is also supposedly illegal. Now that MP3 or CD copy may be technically "counterfeit merchandise", but OWNING it is not illegal per se. So it's really up in the air whether PURELY downloading an MP3 (from an FTP site for example) of a track on a CD you already own is illegal. Probably not. But UPLOADING even a tiny part of that MP3 to anyone (even people who own the CD) IS ILLEGAL as it's "distribution". Due to the way most P2P programs work, downloading MP3s through P2P is illegal because you're "distributing".

If you think about it for a minute, this is basically pure extortion by the labels against the ISPs "Do what we say (read: Give us money.), or we will put you out of business." The ISPs really have no choice but to fight, because if they continue to pay blackmail to the labels they'll eventually be forced out of business. Again, make no mistake, the labels want the ISPs to give them a pile of money. This isn't about "enforcement" of any "laws". They simply see the ISPs as a juicier target that's easier to sue. This strategy hasn't worked in the USA, where telecom companies have a lot of power, so they're trying it in Australia were media is considerably more powerful.

Re:What if I own the CD's with the songs I'm DL'in

[cpt kangarooski]

No they don't. They may argue that it's not a fair use (though I haven't heard that one for a while) with regard to format shifting, but that's all. Virtually no works other than computer software and internet-downloaded media are even claimed to be licensed routinely. And in fact, they aren't. I've never even heard of a regular CD in a record store where the copyright holder claimed that it was being licensed, not sold. So don't assume that everything works like software, and better yet, don't assume that anything should: EULAs are anachronistic and provide no benefit to anyone, really. The only reason they're still around, (other than to allow abuses by licensors that no one should be tolerant of) seems to be inertia.

Re:I almost hope something like this succeeds

[Anonymous Coward]

You can guarantee the RIAA would make sure the figures "proved" this new lockdown was working ... just like they now "show" that p2p is killing sales.
Noone can understand RIAA (ARIA/etc) "creative accounting" as currently practiced - so the figures are easily fudged.

Re:The RIAAs Rights

[Gastrobot]

I am not necessarily opposed to reforming copyright law. My point is simply that while it is illegal to pirate music it should not be done. You're certainly correct that copyright law should be fine-tuned to benefit society, but right now it is what it is. People seem to say that because the law is bad they should be able to pirate music and hopefully someday the law will be changed. I don't think that that is a right way to look at it. My statements that pirating music is immoral are based on the law granting ownership of copyrighted material to the copyright owners, thus making it stealing to pirate music, and on it being moral to follow the law and immoral to break it (when the law itself is not inherently immoral).

Re:Say goodbye to the Blacksmiths of this century

[Eivind]

Dunno about that. The thing is, it's the product of how many you swap with and how much you swap. Disc-sizes are growing exponentially to the point where atleast when it's about music (which it is in this article) you're going to be able to trivially storing huge libraries -- just on the hunch that you may be interested in a small fraction of it.

We already see this. There's a clear trend from sharing a single song by a single artist, then to sharing a complete album by a single artist, and then onwards to sharing complete discographies of artists, aslong as discs keep growing this trend will continue. I can easily see "every-album-that-was-in-the-charts-this-year.zip" and it's not even that much of a stretch to imagine "every-album-that-was-in-the-charts-this-decade"

For that matter, hard-disc-sizes only need to keep growing like they do for a few more years to make "every CD released in USA in the 1990ies" a completely practical thing to store and swap around.

At 200kbps (more or less the needed bandwith for indistinguishalbe-from-cd sound for most people) one hour of music takes up 90MB. An average song perhaphs 7MB. Which means that, for example, the complete content of iTunes (the store, not the program), will take up around 7MB times 3.5 million, which is about 25TB.

Today that's nontrivial, common discs today hold only half a TB or so, so you'd need 50 discs. But discs double in capacity (for the same price) about every 2 years, so that means it's about a dozen years until that entire library, 3.5 million songs, fit on a single standard consumer hard-disc. (yeah yeah, we don't know that the future will play out like that, but it seems a reasonable guess, even if it slowed down it's hard to imagine it'd take more than double that or so)

If RIAA et al think they have a hard time with simple copying now, wait and see what happens when 25TB is a trivial amount of disc-space. They are *so* fucked. I'm not saying its rigth or wrong. I'm just saying it IS so.

Directly contradicts this report...

[trawg]

...titled "CD sales rise despite downloads", right here [smh.com.au]:

AS DIGITAL music hogs the headlines, the humble CD has made a comeback at the cash register. However, music retailers may still be feeling the pinch. Figures released by the Australian Recording Industry Association yesterday show an increase of almost 8 per cent in the volume of wholesale physical music products, such as CDs, in 2006 compared with 2005, despite a decrease of more than 5 per cent in overall revenue.