logo
  • Entries
  • Comment
  • Popular
Recent Posts
  • YouTube’s Double-Dip in Quality
  • Traffic Spotlight: iOS 7 Launch
  • Traffic Spotlight: iOS 7 Pre-Launch
  • Tough Choices: To HD or not HD
Recent Comments
  • KillerDAN in Does Speedtest.net deserve a failin…
  • vijaypp in Super Bowl XLVII: The Return of the…
  • Tatiana in Olympic Update: What Events Owned t…
  • Sandvine’… in Olympic Update: False Starts and Ne…
Popular Articles
  • Behind the Scenes of the 6-Strikes Copyright Alert System (10)
  • The Case for Device Awareness (4)
  • Subscriber Quality of Experience: “Measuring the Quality of the Internet” Part III of III (3)
  • Home
  • About
  • Contributors
  • Subscribe for Updates

Behind the Scenes of the 6-Strikes Copyright Alert System

icon1 Posted by Don Bowman in Regulatory/Legislative Developments on July 19th, 2012 | 10 comments

Bookmark this article!

Del.icio.usDiggFacebookFarkGoogleRedditSlashDotTechnoratiYahoo

On July 1, 2012 television, movie, music businesses, as well as major Communications Service Providers (CSPs) in the US (including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner Cable) started implementing a voluntary Copyright Alert System, often referred to as the “6-strikes rule” to reduce online copyright infringement in the US.  The agreement seeks to create balance between rights to privacy as well as rights to content, an argument which had put the CSPs in the middle.

Previous to this agreement, using the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a content holder would typically go to a CSP and request the identity of a suspected infringer, and then notify them directly.  This had lead to a large number of blanket lawsuits and a large amount of work for the CSP to lookup who had a specific IP address at some time, which is why the Copyright Alert System was created.

So how does the identification of suspected copyright infringement occur? Is your ISP snooping on you? In a nutshell:  the detection is done by a 3rd party, not by your ISP and it is done off the network.  To answer this question more thoroughly, let’s first look at how that information is collected, by examining how one of the most popular P2P filesharing networks works – BitTorrent.

With BitTorrent there are several key components. The ‘tracker’ is an entity which acts like a phone book: it knows who has what pieces of a file. A ‘seed’ is a computer that has completed the download of a file and is sharing it with others. A ‘leech’ is a computer that is still trying to download the file. As shown in the figure  below, the communication flows are:

  1. Seed to Tracker: notifies tracker that it has 100% of the file, of the IP address & port of the seed computer
  2. Leech to Tracker: notifies tracker what segments it has, of its IP and port
  3. Seed to Leech: Leech connects directly, downloads missing chunks
  4. Leech to Leech: Leech connects directly, downloads missing chunks

Typically the communication between the peers (Seed & Leech) is encrypted and cannot be seen by anyone except the two computers communicating with each other. Even if that data stream could be intercepted in some way, files are only identified by an undecipherable ‘hash’, meaning instead of seeing a file being transferred as ‘boxofficehit’, they would see an alphanumeric string of characters like ‘350df1e49804608d65ef7769b0430cb6’.

Prior to the implementation of the ‘six-strike model’ (or for CSP’s who are not participating in the agreement), companies generically termed ‘media defenders’ such as Peer Media Technologies  played a key role in attempting to enforce copyright law. These companies follow torrent websites such as The Pirate Bay or Demonoid that are known to index large volumes of torrent files. Using the content on these sites, they obtain the ‘hash’ names of the files, then connect to the trackers in order to obtain a list of the IP/port for the seeds and leeches to create a database of what IP/port is sharing what hash, from what web-site and its filename.

The media defender companies would then take the IP and port addresses obtained, lookup the CSP (using Whois) and then send a letter to them asking to provide the subscriber’s contact information. The CSP would, if they agreed, look in their internal database of who was using that IP and port at that time and then provide the information. In instances where the CSP did not volunteer to provide subscriber contact information, the media defenders could then go to court and attempt to obtain a Doe subpoena in order to find the identity of the accused infringer.

Under the new ‘six-strikes model’, the CSPs who are participants in the system now agree to notify their subscribers who have been identified as downloading infringing content on behalf of the media defender, but not to provide the identity of the subscriber to the media defender or attempt to determine what content is potentially being infringed. Once a subscriber has received a sixth-strike they may face mitigation measures that could include a temporary reduction in Internet speed or a redirection to a landing page with educational material. 

Throughout the entire escalation process, the copyright owner still maintains their right to pursue legal action under the DMCA, although both CSPs and copyright owners who are participants in the alert system feel that there will be very few subscribers who after having received multiple alerts, will continue to infringe on copyrighted works.

There have been a lot of mainstream press articles recently that have fundamentally misunderstood the data flows and the participants involved with this new Copyright Alert System.  As more subscribers begin to receive copyright notifications in the coming weeks, I expect this to get even more attention, so I just wanted to take to shed some insight on how the identification process works.

If you have any questions, feel free to drop a question in the comments, and I will do my best to answer them for you.

Tweet
pixelstats trackingpixel

Bookmark this article!

Del.icio.usDiggFacebookFarkGoogleRedditSlashDotTechnoratiYahoo

10 Comments »

  1. Sandvine’s Better Broadband Blog : Behind the Scenes of the 6-Strikes Copyright Alert System | txwikinger-law | Scoop.it Says:
    July 19th, 2012 at 11:39 pm

    [...] http://www.betterbroadbandblog.com (via @juliandibbell) – Today, 10:40 PM Rescoop [...]

  2. Michael Dundas Says:
    July 21st, 2012 at 8:39 am

    Nicely written!

  3. Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless | eWebmaster Says:
    July 23rd, 2012 at 10:39 am

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

  4. Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless | Good-review here your way Says:
    July 23rd, 2012 at 10:41 am

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

  5. Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless | SEO Facts Says:
    July 23rd, 2012 at 10:54 am

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

  6. Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless Says:
    July 23rd, 2012 at 1:55 pm

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

  7. Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless | Kent Web Design Says:
    July 23rd, 2012 at 10:04 pm

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

  8. Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless | TechDiem.com Says:
    July 24th, 2012 at 3:25 am

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

  9. Noah Zimmerman » Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless Says:
    July 24th, 2012 at 4:03 am

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

  10. Copyright Alert System, Widely Feared, Is Toothless | Tech Toinks! Says:
    July 24th, 2012 at 9:05 am

    [...] how would copyright holders find those IP addresses? As a blog post from Sandvine explains, third-party companies known as media defenders monitor activity on peer-to-peer [...]

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Welcome!

Welcome to The Better Broadband Blog, providing timely information, analysis and commentary on all topics that relate to making the Internet better; better for consumers, better for content and application developers and, better for the broadband and mobile data service providers who aim to provide the best quality of experience.

Recent Posts

  • YouTube’s Double-Dip in Quality
  • Traffic Spotlight: iOS 7 Launch
  • Traffic Spotlight: iOS 7 Pre-Launch
  • Tough Choices: To HD or not HD
  • The time is now: Sandvine and Dell collaborate on a virtualized SDN architecture

Categories

  • Applications
  • Major Events
  • Network Policy Control Market
  • Networking
  • Regulatory/Legislative Developments
  • Service Innovation
  • Uncategorized

Control panel

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries RSS
  • Comments RSS
  • WordPress.org

What We're Reading

  • Ars Technica
  • Broadband Traffic Management Blog
  • Cable Digital News
  • CED – Communications, Engineering & Design Magazine
  • GigaOM
  • Light Reading
  • Multichannel News
  • Telephony Online
  • Total Telecom: The Editor's Cut

Tags

Asia Pacific broadband business intelligence IP ISP network analytics network management Network Neutrality Network Policy Control North America North American Quality of Experience Real Time Entertainment traffic management transparency TV United States US
© Copyright Sandvine Incorporated ULC 2003-2013. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms of Use