There’s an interesting TechCrunch story published in the Washington Post today that reports record album sales are up 1% over last year, the first increase in album sales since 2004. For people who enjoy the encompassing arc of a record album as an art form, this is great news. Our relationship with music is deeper than singles can fulfill, so a swing back to richer musical experience was inevitable.
And surprise surprise, the holy grail of digital entertainment also came true today. Coincidence?
Internet service providers like AT&T, Comcast, CableVision and Verizon fell into line today with the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. They now have to allow private industry or their agents to watch you online. Yes, you read that right.
No longer will ISP’s be permitted to monetize illegal downloading of content stolen from the internet without responsibility. Going forward they must permit monitoring of your bit-torrent downloading habits, then begin a multistep process of warnings and education that leads to “mitigation measures” like sending you to an “education webpage" when you log on, or slowing the speed of your connection (called “throttling") or even blocking the web entirely for true pirates who just won’t stop.
Why should you care? Until now, no one has had a legal right without a warrant to know what you are doing online even if it was unlawful. Today that changed. Now with this agreement your ISP will have an obligation to allow others to know what you are doing online and to take steps to stop you from scanning and uploading books or unlawful TV streaming or bit torrent filesharing of music or movies. Your ISP has finally caved to be a content cop to avoid any liability to themselves.
Websites that point to infringing material or facilitate unlawful pirating can now be seized by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement under approval of Obama’s Justice department.
With this new surveillance coming online soon, pirates are likely to turn to Tor onion routing…..
...or to encryption and VPN’s (virtual private networks) to escape detection while stealing copyrighted files.
So we can expect governments to begin licensing and controlling the use of these anonymizing techniques as well. Our private internet of the early 1990’s is gone.
It’s amazing to me that people have actually traded away privacy and a freedom our military has fought and died for so they could steal copyrighted content online for awhile.
Even to the point where ISP’s now have an obligation to allow lawyers to watch us.
Just amazes me.
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