Copyright monitoring firm flags HBO.com for pirating HBO content

[Newsjock]

Source: Daily Dot

The company that will soon start naming which Americans should have their Internet speeds reduced for piracy just ratted out a website for allegedly pirating HBO's content.

The site? HBO.com.

In a few weeks—the date still isn't official—major U.S. Internet service providers will launch the Copyright Alerts System (CAS). Under the CAS, U.S. citizens who get online with AT&T, Cablevision, Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and Verizon will have their Internet speeds slowed if they're thought to be pirating copyrighted content. The judge of that is an independent company, MarkMonitor, which has developed a program designed to flag users who share copyrighted material on the peer-to-peer filesharing service BitTorrent.

... It's not as if the CAS's creators gave MarkMonitor utterly free reign. They hired an independent consultant, Stroz Friedberg, to check the system. The only problem? Stroz spent years as a paid lobbyist for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), one of the CAS's founding members.

Read more: http://www.dailydot.com/news/hbo-pirating-markmonitor-copyright-alerts/

[zappaman]

1. You can't make this up!

[Lint Head]

2. No conspiracy but... we are controlled.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. "free reign"

when they meant..."free rein"

Sigh...Idiocracy is the new normal.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

4. Wow. It threw in sites that just wrote about HBO, too.

From the linked article:

Invoking the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), the oft-criticized copyright law that governs how copyright holders get their content taken down from others' sites, MarkMonitor's DtecNet software sent out a long report to Google, asking it to not show a number of sites in its search results because they linked to HBO content. Not only did it name eight URLs on HBO.com, it also threw in pages that simply wrote about HBO shows on sites like Perez Hilton and Hitfix.

For an added laugh read this statement from last October.

The Center for Copyright Information has revealed more details about its "six strikes" system, which it calls the Copyright Alert System (CAS). In a blog post published Thursday morning, the program’s head, Jill Lesser, announced that the CAS “will begin in the coming weeks.”

Lesser added that it will use an analysis system called MarkMonitor to identify infringing activity. That system “uses both trained professionals and automated processes to identify illegal downloading of whole movies, TV shows, and musical recordings, and the system is designed to eliminate false positives.” Finally, the CAS has given further details on its review process that will take place at the “mitigation stage” (strikes five through six), which will be administered by the American Arbitration Association.

Jill Lesser admits in the above article they're going after Joe Consumer. They don't anticipate the little guy down the line understands enough about the process to have very many appeals to their accusations.

[Egalitarian Thug]

5. One of their latest crimes, claiming copyright for material they don't own.

It's growing into an epidemic on YouTube & other social media sites, these companies are claiming copyright infringement of content they don't own and YouTube automatically pulls it until the poster can prove there is none. Obviously, most don't bother.

Once again, we're heading down a very bad road and nobody has the public's back.