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Why 'Six Strikes' could be a nightmare for anyone with shared Internet

"Six strikes" is different from either SOPA or PIPA; it's an anti-piracy warning system managed by ISPs.
  • There's a new anti-piracy warning system designed to track copyright infringers
  • But "six strikes" is different from either SOPA or PIPA; it's a warning system managed by ISPs
  • Participating providers include AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable
  • But who's responsible for each infraction? It's a delicate, thorny issue

(Time) -- No, "six strikes" isn't a phrase from some esoteric version of baseball played on Mars — it's a colloquialism for a new anti-piracy warning system designed to track copyright infringers and help internet service providers (ISPs) take progressively punitive measures to discourage or prevent said infringers from engaging in further copyright-violating activities.

It's essentially an industry workaround, after SOPA and PIPA — bills designed to give the government increased power to battle copyright violators — failed or stalled last year.

But "six strikes" is notably different from either SOPA or PIPA. For starters, it's not a bill. Instead of empowering the government to blacklist sites deemed illicit, it's an escalating warning system managed by ISPs independently. It employs a third-party tool, MarkMonitor, to identify users engaging in copyright-violating activities, then leaves it up to ISPs to take action. ISPs participating at this point include AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable.

Say an IP address associated with your account is identified as a violator. Your ISP would first send you a warning, then send further warnings for each infraction, at some point rolling out actual punitive measures, from throttling your bandwidth up to — in theory, a possibility — termination of your service.

The system was supposed to go live this week, but was delayed at the last minute by the Center for Copyright Information (CCI), the group working with the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and several of the nation's biggest ISPs to roll "six strikes" out.

According to CCI executive director Jill Lesser, the delay, due to "unexpected factors," is mostly because of Superstorm Sandy, which "seriously affected" the group's final testing plans. CCI says it now expects what it calls the "Copyright Alert System" to kick off in early 2013, adding:



Regardless of when it goes live, I'm worried about some of those I's and T's — specifically what it's going to mean for me, speaking not as a copyright violator, but as someone whose somewhat unique residential situation poses some awkward, potentially nightmarish alert management issues.



You can probably see where I'm headed. With "six strikes," any of the residents in the complex who — knowingly or unknowingly — engage in an act of copyright violation, could incur an alert. Who's going to see that alert? Probably me, as the technical contact for the ISP (that, or our property management company, at which point it'll route back to me).



It's a delicate, thorny issue. Anyone who's been on the board of a housing association knows how tough it can be to promulgate policies to owners, much less policies where the repercussions of violations can't be controlled locally, and where the punishment extends to everyone.

We could put it to a complex-wide vote, but even if a majority were in favor of taking action, say somehow shutting off file-sharing activity entirely, now we're talking about an all or nothing "fix" that also blocks legitimate file sharing — sharing anything not copyrighted, e.g. game or application demos, some music (freely released albums, for instance), public domain materials (Project Gutenberg's texts, for instance, or public domain art).

I wouldn't vote for neutering my Internet service, would you?

I'm assuming this scenario applies, more or less, anywhere you'll find shared Internet provided by a "six strikes"-participating ISP. We've heard nothing about exemptions. So what about hotels? Restaurants? Coffee shops? Fitness centers? Libraries? Bookstores? RV Parks? Airports? What about municipal initiatives to beam free Wi-Fi to anyone at all, citywide?

Maybe the "workaround" lies in the acknowledgment portion of the process. According to reports, users found in violation of "six strikes" will have to somehow acknowledge they've received and read the alert explaining their account was engaged in illicit activity. Some ISPs are said to be rolling this out as pop-ups (don't ask me how). I'm not sure what that entails for shared Internet access. Does everyone get the pop-up? What happens if you ignore it? What happens if, for whatever reason, the pop-up doesn't appear in the first place?

Like the proverbial tree in the forest, does an alert count as a strike if you don't see (or acknowledge having seen) it?

I'd like to see the CCI and participating ISPs lay all the details about "six strikes" on the table, proactively, instead of letting them trickle out in leaked documents and casual interviews. Don't just backdoor the policy and expect users, especially where Internet's shared, to somehow reverse-engineer what they're responsible for, what happens if they fail to meet some new policy threshold and so forth.

Be upfront with customers. Sure, they already know (or they should) that copyright violations are no-nos, per the terms of their user agreements (and the law), but they deserve to know when policies for policing those terms change, especially when those policies could seriously impact them whether they're personally responsible for a copyright violation or not.

Maybe "six strikes" isn't designed to produce lawsuits. Maybe it really is just an "educational" campaign to raise violation awareness among users. Maybe it's just to remind us that someone's watching (and possibly storing information for potential lawsuits).

Whatever the case, there's a transparency issue here. I'm worried that the absence of public engagement may be intentional — an attempt to manage the perception of what's about to happen by keeping it quiet (or at best, confusingly disclosed), in hopes of preventing another public relations fiasco, like the bill-killing blowup over SOPA and PIPA.

If CCI really wants this to work as claimed — to educate users — then it needs to work with ISPs to lay out the parameters beforehand, addressing scenarios like the one I've described above, "I's dotted and T's crossed."