

A very clever idea to enforce copyright with minimal lawsuits. - amichail
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/targeted-copyright-enforcement-deterring-many-users-few-lawsuits#

======
DenisM
_Eventually, all of the clueless players will learn not to cheat._

It may actually take forever to get through the "clueless", slower than new
ones are being born.

Most people do not act rationally and do not compute probabilities in their
head - they simply do what others do and expect to get the outcome in the same
ballpark. An infringer will stop infringing if three of the people he knows
personally are caught and punished, feeling that this sort of stuff is
probably dangerous. That's the only way probability theory figures into normal
people's lifes - through numbers.

More effective punishment strategy would be to punish someone on TV - a
popular character on TV screen tends to be "one of the people I feel close to"
so a punishment of such person will have effect.

Of course another strategy is to make it convenient to comply - I started
buying my music from online stores after all the DRM stuff was taken down.
When people put work into making my life better I don't mind paying for that,
unless they make it difficult.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Reminds me of the paradox of the unexpected hanging:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexpected_hanging_paradox>

Also, I believe research has shown that the size of a fine has relatively
little effect, and it is the perception of the certainty of being caught that
is most effective as a deterrent.

I agree with the others, people won't care, they'll do it anyway and feel
secrure that they won't get caught. The few who do will have no effect on the
vast majority.

Mass behavior isn't rational.

~~~
hxa7241
> Also, I believe research has shown that the size of a fine has relatively
> little effect, and it is the perception of the certainty of being caught
> that is most effective as a deterrent.

The original paper does note that the principle is limited to circumstances
where catching is easy.

What the paper _doesn't_ account for, though, is _response_ : which allows a
straightforward general counter-strategy:

The 'resistance' place a dummy wherever the 'police-state' target next -- to
deceive or take the hit harmlessly. This simply turns the attack against
itself: The police-state's strategy relies on: 1. announcing their next
target; and 2. keeping that promise. The resistance exploits and completely
negates that. To defeat that counter, the attack must disable itself.

The critical assumption behind the police-state's strategy is that the
resistance is powerless, that they have no ability to respond. But there is
enough evidence this would be foolish in the internet world. If the police-
state has technical means to find targets, the resistance has technical means
to fool or dodge them.

------
smanek
People have (severely) bounded rationality and don't continue the induction to
its logical conclusion.

As proof simply see the 'guess 2/3rds of the average' game
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guess_2/3_of_the_average>).

As a quick summary: Put a bunch of people in a room and tell them to each
guess a number from 0 to 100 - and whoever guesses 2/3rds of the average of
everyone's number 'wins.'

Logically, no one should guess above 66 (since 2/3rds the average can't exceed
66 even if everyone guesses 100). Then, no one should guess above 44 since
2/3rd the average can't exceed 44 even if everyone guesses 66. Continue on,
and the only logical move is for everyone to guess 0.

But, in real life, the winning guess is almost always around 20 (which implies
most people only carry on the induction for 3 or 4 steps).

~~~
Confusion
Your example proves nothing about the boundedness of the rationality of (most)
humans. It tells you something about what people _expect_ about other people:
others are not expected to carry an argument to its logical conclusion.
However, taking that knowledge, or educated guess, into account, makes '10' or
'20' a fully rational guess, based on lack of complete data.

------
jrockway
This won't "enforce copyright", it will just push the sharing even farther
underground. Compare Bittorrent today (with distributed trackers and every
byte encrypted) with Napster from the beginning of the file sharing era.

The good news is that if you are planning terrorist attacks (via Skype) or
distributing child porn (via Tor or Freenet), your chances of being caught are
much, much lower than they were in the late nineties. Back then, the only
people that needed the strong protection provided by modern file-sharing
protocols were people trying to do things that most people would consider
illegal. But now, you get that when you call your Mom on Skype or when you are
downloading the latest linux ISO -- meaning that the "real criminals" are just
noise now. There's nothing suspicious about having no cleartext coming out of
your 'net connection anymore.

Suing people for sharing music makes the job of the terrorists much easier.
(Can I have my Senate seat now? I'm from Illinois and am willing to pay for it
with the money I've saved from downloading _The Simpsons_ every week instead
of buying the DVDs.)

Anyway, let's say we implement the system the article describes. Judgements of
millions will be issued against people without that money. They won't pay. It
will go to collections. They still won't pay. (You can't get blood from a
stone.) They will be arrested and have another trial (at my/the state's
expense) be sentenced to prison. Except wait, there is no room in the prisons,
even for violent criminals. So society will have to build more prisons, at
great expense, and pay to house these deadbeat file-sharers. Or, in the real
world, they won't be sentenced to prison, and will do community service or
something. They won't show up for that, and nobody will be care, because it
costs society a lot of money to punish these people. Oh, and there's that
whole Constitution thing too.

The "deadbeats" might also take a hit on their credit score, but there is
nothing anyone wants to buy with credit anymore, so this is not much of a
deterrent. Oh no, you mean I can't get a loan on a house that will decrease in
value over the 30 years I live in it? OH NOES.

Basically, there is no way the Content Creators can win by playing the "punish
the criminals" game. Society is already tired of it, and the strategy isn't
even remotely close to being effective yet.

No, they will just have to adapt. Sites like Hulu probably took a bigger bite
out of piracy than the threat of punishment ever will.

~~~
rsheridan6
>This won't "enforce copyright", it will just push the sharing even farther
underground.

That amounts to reducing the number of pirates to a manageable level. The
MPAA/RIAA can live with piracy by the members of Slashdot, but if Aunt Tillie
gets into it they're screwed.

> Judgements of millions will be issued against people without that money.
> They won't pay.

If you get a judgement against you, depending on what state you live in your
bank account can be frozen or your wages can be garnished. Maybe worse in some
states. They don't have to collect millions to hurt you.

>They will be arrested and have another trial (at my/the state's expense) be
sentenced to prison.

Charles Dickens, is that you? You don't go to prison for non-payment of debt,
unless it's child support or taxes.

>The "deadbeats" might also take a hit on their credit score, but there is
nothing anyone wants to buy with credit anymore, so this is not much of a
deterrent. Oh no, you mean I can't get a loan on a house that will decrease in
value over the 30 years I live in it?

That's a hell of an overstatement, and a hell of an extrapolation from a
bursting housing bubble that will be forgotten by most people in 30 years.

~~~
jrockway
_You don't go to prison for non-payment of debt, unless it's child support or
taxes._

You do go to prison when you ignore a court order, however.

Just sayin', it is going to be too costly to society to deter people from
committing piracy this way. You may be able to deter businesses (there is no
Web 2.0 for-pay piracy app yet), but not individuals.

The best way to deter people from piracy is to listen to them and give them
what they want. People _want_ to pay $1 for a high-definition DRM-free
download of that just-released movie. The problem is, the industry won't let
them pay, so they have to steal instead. It would be hilarious if so many
lives weren't being ruined by lawsuits.

------
SwellJoe
This idea assumes a higher level of knowledge in participants than the real
world can provide. Even with an absolute media blitz, there will be millions
of people who don't know about the 8:00PM EST file sharing apocalypse. Even
with persistent hammering of the point, repeated lawsuits, etc. it would take
months and millions of dollars worth of lawsuits for every file sharer to know
about and understand the rules of the game.

People will not only not know the rules of the game, they won't even know
they're playing.

~~~
MichaelApproved
The numbers are just too massive to matter.

Forget something complicated like IP address. Lets go with something simple
like east coast to west coast. If only 1,000 people can be sued I'll actually
think I'm protected from being sued since I live on the west coast. I'd be
willing to bet that there are 1,000 people between me and the Atlantic Ocean
still willing to cheat.

This is a _great_ concept but it seems to only be effective on a much smaller
scale.

------
memetichazard
It brings to mind the rationality taboo puzzle you get on one of your CS
Algorithms assignments. You know, the one whre all the tribesmen with blue
birthmarks commit ritual suicide or cuckolded wives kill their adulterer
husbands, all because an outsider came in and said something that all of them
knew.

Of course, the puzzle has some hidden requirements without which the whole
logical arguement falls apart - Everyone is rational, everyone knows that
everyone is rational, everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone is
rational (I think this much meta is required...), and everyone has perfect
information except to that one blind spot as specified by the puzzle (and of
course, people know that people know that everyone has all that
information...).

It's a carefully balanced house of cards that blows apart quite easily, when
people are not rational, or knowledge is incomplete.

Same problem will apply here. Although, it's possible that lack of knowledge
and irrationality could actually help a little bit.

------
alan_p
Bullshit.

Copyright has a lot of problems and the lawsuits aren't doing anything, no
matter HOW you decide who to sue.

Professional copyright infringement (e.g. companies using pirated software) is
easy to spot and easy to persecute. It's also a serious issue because you're
really talking about lost sales here, not just hypothetical sales.

Private copyright infringement (e.g. mom downloading some MP3s) is hard to
spot and even harder to persecute. You can't talk about lost sales because the
amount pirated is in no relation to the amount that could have been sold -- if
you've got a 80/20 distribution between pirated and sold, it's absurd to claim
80% lost sales.

If you're talking about real profit losses for the actual producer (i.e. the
artist, developer or whatever), private copyright infringement is negligible.

In fact, the low cost of private copyright infringement could be soothed even
more if the producers would allow for easy ways of donation (PayPal,
whatever): in many cases the "lost sales" were lost because the would-be-
customer wouldn't have paid the amount asked or was simply not willing to take
the risk of paying for something before knowing they like it.

Whether you like it or not, private copyright infringement is here to stay
(and has been here ever since the invention of copyright law). You can't stop
it. You only have the choice between accepting it as a fact of life and trying
to work with it (viral marketing, commercial support for Free software, live
concerts, etc etc), or ignoring the social costs of your actions and trying to
punish all the "evildoers" one-by-one making examples of the students and
grandmas you actually manage to draw into courtrooms.

Publishing companies are not going to die over this, but their role will
deflate back into what it had been before the record industry / Hollywood
boom: as a service provider to the real artists, offering to do the marketing
for them, arrange concerts and publish their work in physical form. It's only
natural for RIAA and MPAA to try and tear down civil rights in their dying
throes, but that doesn't make it any more ethical, no matter what the legal
situation says (which they have nicely shaped according to their interests in
the past, I might add).

Vive la révolution!

------
shalmanese
I think a more effective "alphabet" would be amount downloaded by that IP.
Start with the people who download the most first and then publicly announce
what the limit was each week. The people who download the most are the most
likely to be aware of this scheme so you mitigate against the problem of
ignorant users.

Also, in this scheme, the inability to track every download is a virtue, not a
vice. Say they announced that the limit last week was 600Gb and you downloaded
500Gb last month. you decide to download 250Gb this month just to be safe but
of the 500Gb you downloaded, they only tracked 300Gb so you're bringing the
limit lower for next month even though you're nowhere near the boundary case.

------
plesn
This seems nice game theory but I don't see it practically unforcable for
copyright laws.

\- Punishment is not automatic: people are innocent unless proven otherwise
(spoofed ip address, pirated wifi network, etc...).

\- People are finding and adopting more and more sophisticated ways not get
caught (like the transition from napster to emule/bittorrent).

\- Majors are powerful, but adding more pressure requires the right propaganda
to legitimate their action, imho this would be percieved as too autocratic,
arbitrary, unfair.

~~~
moultano
Frankly, being sued at all is a pretty big punishment. It's not fun.

------
Dove
It works okay with speeding -- in places where police consistently pull over
the leading car in a pack of speeders, I tend to slow down when I'm in front.

I don't think it'd work as well in this situation. It would have to be
immediately obvious to everyone what the rules were, whether someone had
already been caught that day, and if they were about to become the first in
line. Given the casual and distributed nature of the crime in question, I
think that'd be difficult.

------
nkohari
This strikes me as an idea that is useful and interesting as a sociological
theory, but in practice it's pretty pointless. Imagine the terrible press that
the RIAA would get if they announced that they would start suing based on such
ridiculous criteria as IP addresses or time of day. The RIAA is already seen
by many to randomly submit lawsuits en masse, and a tactic like this wouldn't
exactly add credibility to their effort.

------
yason
Some people mentioned defense funds.

Defense funds could be a business model in itself, if RIAA/MPAA/??AA just got
the clue. They could establish their own defense fund and channel the money to
themselves.

??AA establishes a defense fund: pay a $5 insurance a month and you get the
right to download and share any (of their) content as much as you like as long
as you're listed. Or maybe you won't get the right but you'll be guaranteed to
not sued.

Then they proceed to sue non-listed downloaders and sharers in as large
numbers as it is required to deter people from getting listed and as it
doesn't consume too much money. Maybe they want to use Felten's ordering
system, too.

Yes, some people would still not pay, some people would still be sued, but
they would make lots of money pretty much "for free" because people would pay
to avoid the potential hassle.

Ideally the online sharing culture would florish in open and that would bring
more innovations to the field. Yet I'd like to see the world without
copyright.

------
voxcogitatio
This strikes me as an (at least theoretically) smart way to solve a very
stupid problem.

There is an unspoken assumption in this article that piracy is actually a
_crime_.

Well, if it is indeed a crime then the only victims are various MAFIAA execs,
and the lawyers they supply.

And this article writer of course, who is almost assuredly being paid to write
this dreck.

------
jacquesm
This is fatally flawed, there is such a thing as a defense fund. All the
'cheaters' could pledge to each other to help out in case of a fine.

~~~
tptacek
Yeah. That's what's going to happen. Uh-huh.

Let's modify the scheme just a tiny little bit:

"We're going to sue the first 1000 people we see violating our copyrights
starting at 8:00, and we're not going to count people who we find during
discovery accepted money from a 'defense fund'".

I'm pretty sure that leaves 99.999% of the original target population to sue.

~~~
jacquesm
[http://freeculturenews.com/2009/01/27/jammie-thomas-
receives...](http://freeculturenews.com/2009/01/27/jammie-thomas-
receives-3000-from-fsfs-expert-witness-defence-fund/)

~~~
tptacek
I forgot if that case ever resolved itself fully, but, isn't $3000 like less
than 1% of what she wound up liable for?

~~~
jacquesm
Yes, but that wasn't the point, defense funds exist, they're being used, and
it won't take much to institutionalize them where people will simply set them
up pre-emptively.

Such indemnification schemes can be made illegal by the authorities though.

It's a reverse lottery, if you play and you end up losing then the pot covers
your losses.

~~~
tptacek
What I said was, even if defense funds actually happened --- and the only
example you have is a large organization defraying a tiny fraction of the
legal costs for a hugely publicized case --- they wouldn't interfere with this
recovery strategy.

------
gojomo
If the cheaters can collude in an enforceable way, they'll each pay a small
amount to A to cheat, giving A slightly more than $10, making A happy to take
the enforcement hit. The cartel of cheaters still earns a net $16 by cheating.

~~~
DenisM
I think the cartel would be ruled illegal and shut down. Otherwise a business
would have stepped up already to provide insurance coverage.

~~~
lmkg
Enforcing the anit-collusion laws runs into exactly the same problem as
enforcing the original anti-copyright laws, so that's not really a solution.

~~~
euccastro
Colluders would be a subset of copyright infringers. Also, there wouldn't be
that many insurance companies willing to do outlawed business, so it wouldn't
be a problem to take a significant part of them to court.

------
marvh
Sueing your customers and potential customers in proportion to their devotion
will never be clever and only sustainable by virtue of abhorrent damages and
societal control.

How about introducing a blackmailers charter for music fans ? Or just F __ __
__shoot them ? Federal PYITA Jail ? Racial profiling. Prohibition.

I listen to more music than I own. Copying is now free. Humanity is
universally enriched. Make money from a joyful future.

------
cmars232
This is fundamentally flawed, because the sources for infringing content are
many. Piracy doesn't line up for the counting. Not even all torrents could be
watched, let alone all protocols, and darknets abound. This would only create
an arms race of more darknets and new protocols.

------
diN0bot
this feels ethically wrong, though i can't exactly state why. calling out who
you're going to punish doesn't feel right, though the fact that it is a
prioritization not a direct singling-out makes it a little bit better.

what if the enforcer said "i'll punish the person with the darkest skin tone"?

~~~
euccastro
Ethical or not, it is certainly a PR disaster to be perceived as picking
victims arbitrarily, almost playfully.

~~~
tptacek
They're not "victims". They're "defendants".

------
dustingetz
this assumes the players have full awareness and are mostly rational.

