MPAA Shuts Down Town's Municipal WiFi Over 1 Download 323
nam37 writes with this BoingBoing snippet "The MPAA has successfully shut down an entire town's municipal WiFi because a single user was found to be downloading a copyrighted movie. Rather than being embarrassed by this gross example of collective punishment (a practice outlawed in the Geneva conventions) against Coshocton, OH, the MPAA's spokeslizard took the opportunity to cry poor (even though the studios are bringing in record box-office and aftermarket receipts)."
Re:There must be something more (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Geneva Conventions (Score:5, Insightful)
Safe Harbor (Score:4, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_Harbor [wikipedia.org]
Re:Wasn't the MPAA who shut down the network (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it's an example of elected officials doing their job poorly.
Deciding to which public services the county does and does not want to offer is a legitimate function of government. Choosing to end one is not a "punishment".
Re:Wasn't the MPAA who shut down the network (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, talk about misrepresenting the facts
Well, it is boingboing after all, which is the 'Net's equivalent of Orwell's "Two Minutes Hate": the editors post inane stories in the most inflammatory language possible, the crowd all goes apeshit for a short time, and then moves on to the next thing, having done nothing, accomplished nothing, and learned nothing.
Re:There must be something more (Score:4, Insightful)
(Or for that matter, lack of accuracy doesn't slow those rabid vultures down either...)
Re:Wasn't the MPAA who shut down the network (Score:5, Insightful)
While that clears up the mechanics, it still points to the MPAA being too powerful since it is an example of a private company being able to control a public government though simple fear of ending up in the crosshairs.
When governments fear corporations, we have gone through full circle though capitalism and can arrive on the other side of communism.
Re:Wasn't the MPAA who shut down the network (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed that for you.
Re:Wasn't the MPAA who shut down the network (Score:2, Insightful)
Denying people a public service such as Wifi hardly seems like "Collective Punishment".
Someone who was deemed to be doing something that is disapproved of had some favorable condition, and it was taken away in order to discourage the behavior that is disapproved of. That is the definition of negative punishment.
And this punishment was imposed on a collective of people because of the actions of a single person, so that seems to imply that it was a collective punishment in the same way that p -> p in logic.
So yes, it was collective punishment by definition.
Re:Geneva Conventions (Score:4, Insightful)
well, yes and no. Normally during a war, all bets are off - if you can't keep, in peacetime, to the minimum standards expected during wartime, you're doing something wrong.
In a sense, yes, but that's hyperbole. (Score:5, Insightful)
So the MPAA is clearly then allowed to treat civilians worse than people being occupied in wartime by any country that has signed the Geneva Convention?
Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention only applies to "protected persons."
Art. 4. Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.
Nationals of a State which is not bound by the Convention are not protected by it. Nationals of a neutral State who find themselves in the territory of a belligerent State, and nationals of a co-belligerent State, shall not be regarded as protected persons while the State of which they are nationals has normal diplomatic representation in the State in whose hands they are.
In short, a state can punish its own citizens collectively, at least as long as there's no actual war -- and all you smarty-pants who think the "War on Drugs" is an actual war are impressing no one, least of all an international criminal court. (It's worth nothing that the US doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC either.) This is why, no matter how much I still resent her, my 4th grade teacher isn't a war criminal.
It's also worth noting that turning off a service one party provides for free to multiple third parties is not generally recognized as a punitive act towards the third parties in the US. "Punishment" is reserved for actions taken directly against an individual or group. So closing a soup kitchen for health code violations is not "collective punishment" of the homeless nor is imprisoning a father collective punishment of his family.
Lastly, I think you've got a really sad sense of entitlement and pathetic, comfortable ignorance if you think that cutting off free Wi-fi at the park is equivalent to the kind of collective punishments that happen during war. Read up on Stalin's Order 270 [bentcorner.com] or Sherman's March to the Sea. [wikipedia.org]
And then stop your whining about Wi-fi. The MPAA is being a bunch of jerks, but they're not engaging in war crimes. People need to get some goddamned perspective.
okay (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Safe Harbor (Score:3, Insightful)
How is municipal wifi different from any commercial ISP? Would a commercial ISP shut itself down if it found one of it's users engaging in illegal activity? No. Of course not. And why not? Because of the safe harbor provisions, no ISP is liable for the illegal activity of its users. Just like the phone company isn't liable when someone calls up a hit man and orders an execution.
Not to be insulting, but your argument simply makes no sense. It shows that you don't understand the purpose of the safe harbor provision, how it operates, or what terms like 'in good faith' mean.
Geneva c onvention? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yet another zealot can't oppose bad behavior without exageration. I have to wonder if the moron who submitted this understands the term "human rights violation". Suffice it to say the Geneva Convention's prohibition on collective punishment was not written out of concern that you might not have the internet connection you want.
It's not that you shouldn't want the **AA's abuses to stop. It's that you shoudln't be trivializing real crimes against humanity by comparing them to weak-ass shit like this.
That is all.
Original article gives the solution (Score:3, Insightful)
LaVigne has done some homework and found a program that would prevent the illegal downloads from happening in the future; however, it would cost the cash-strapped county about $2,900 to implement, $2,000 for equipment and then $900 annually for the filtering program
There you are then. The MPAA pays for the hardware and the software subscription. The cost to the MPAA and its members is readily offset by the potential millions upon millions of profits that could be lost from illegal downloads from this small town's one-block-radius municipal's WiFi connection. Everybody wins!
Re:There must be something more (Score:3, Insightful)
Bear in mind that politicos can get voted out very easily, so tend to be nervous types when accused of something that smacks of scandal. (Widespread fraud is one thing, but accusations in the press of sponsoring pirates or spending tax dollars in bringing down Hollywood... No sane politician would take that kind of risk.)
Also bear in mind that most politicians are technically ignorant and are unlikely to know the difference between aiding and abetting in an electronic crime versus being a common carrier.
Finally, you need to also consider that these places are full of backstabbers, some likely in the pay of ISPs that would be competing with the municipal system. (If the public sector is corrupt, it's the private sector that is corrupting it.)
Re:There must be something more (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There must be something more (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wasn't the MPAA who shut down the network (Score:3, Insightful)
Uuum, you apparently don't no a thing about psychology. No problem, I did think all my life, that humans are not the weak spineless obeying losers that they are.
Most humans will with a high likeliness, obey whatever you tell them to do. Even torture and murder a person.
As long as they think it must be right, because someone who dominates them with his strong (view of) reality, thinks it's right.
So it is an entirely expected strategy for intelligence people and similar professional spin doctors, manipulators, etc, to just draw others into their reality, and thereby make them act in their will. There is an entire industry for that out there. Social engineering. The hackers of the human mind. Grown from a fusion of psychology, con men, marketing firms, etc.
What do you think how many average people quickly break under the pressure of "devastating consequences" for them (that never really happen, buy hey...)?
County government workers are no different. I bet I could get them to shut down the power system, if I took it really serious, and would create really scary "high official" letters, etc.
I know someone who had genuine federal watermarked paper that the federal police used in Germany. And he was able to forge the signature of the director of the federal police. So to put it into perspective for Americans: It was like he could forge letters from the FBI director that were indistinguishable from genuine ones. Which he used to remove its nurses and get him out of the madhouse. (Luckily he now is in a closed facility where he can't even make a call. Which is also sad, because I prefer to actually heal people.)
But it shows how powerful social engineering is.
Re:There must be something more (Score:3, Insightful)
From the tone of the article, it seems like the courthouse maintained an unprotected access point. The article talks about it being available in the streets immediately surrounding the building. There is a huge leap from that to being an ISP.
Oh, I don't know.
There is a safe harbor (17 USC 512(a)) that protects service providers from being liable for indirect infringement on the basis that one of their users directly infringed, and the service provider (by providing Internet service) helped. The definition of an eligible service provider (subsection (k)(1)(A)) is:
Granted, they will have to have met the conditions required by subsection (i), but this is not particularly difficult. Given that there still are no "standard technical measures" and likely never will be, it's basically just a matter of having a policy for offenders in place, and not utterly ignoring it (though it may be possible to get away with mostly ignoring it).
So by providing the access point, they're a service provider. If they met the low standard for eligibility in 512(i), they're protected by the safe harbor. They may not have done that -- I haven't heard either way -- but how is this a huge leap?
That's why you don't build centraliced networks (Score:3, Insightful)
You don't build munchipal networks in a centraliced fashion, you make meshed networks which are in the hands of their users. That way there is no way anybody could turn them off. Maybe someone would decide to not offer Internet anymore, but turning of the network as a whole is impossible.
You can get cheap routers, install the Freifunk firmware and off you go.