Anti-piracy company Rightscorp says that it’s working on a new tool to try to extract cash settlements from suspected Internet pirates. The company says that’s its new technology will lock users’ browsers and prevent Internet access until they pay a fine that’s been levied. To encourage ISPs to play along, Rightscorp says the system could help to limit their copyright liability.
The digital copyright enforcement company recently published their financials and their losses have deepened. This might be seen by them as a way to turn around their failing business model, but it’s fraught with challenges.
- they have a fairly small client base – they don’t protect many copyrighted works
- internet service providers (ISPs) in the USA are not fans of coypright trolls – their business model is considered by some as copyright trolling
- their business model of delivering the ‘fine’ through the ISP could be counter-productive to the ISP’s business model
- blocking the use of the internet until the fine is paid is holding paid resources to ransom
Rightscorp reports that their technology will work as follows:
“In the Scalable Copyright system, subscribers receive each [settlement] notice directly in their browser,” the company reports.
“Single notices can be read and bypassed similar to the way a software license agreement works [but] once the internet account receives a certain number of notices over a certain time period, the screen cannot be bypassed until the settlement payment is received.”
The idea of locking browsers in response to infringement allegations is nothing new. Users of some ISPs in the United States already receive these warnings if too many complaints are made against their account. However, to date no company has asked for money to have these locks removed and the idea of ‘wheel clamping’ a browser is hardly an attractive one, especially based on the allegations of a third-party organization.
Rightscorp seems confident that they can get ISPs to sign on for the ‘service’ – we’re not sure how though.
“Its implementation will require the agreement of the ISPs. We have had discussions with multiple ISPs about implementing Scalable Copyright, and intend to intensify those efforts. ISPs have the technology to display our notices in subscribers’ browsers in this manner,”
We can see that it is technically possible to hold customers internet connections to ransom, we’re not sure that ISPs will get on board with this method of extracting fines – or how large the benefit to the ISP would be, especially when compared to the potential for loss of customers to the ISP for supporting the practice.
Rightscorp seems to be trying to use the 3rd party liability clause within the DMCA to cajole ISPs into becoming willing participants in this scheme. We guess time will tell if that actually becomes a tool that Rightscorp can use effectively for any length of time.
A competitor to Rightscorp, MPAA/RIAA has a program called Copyright Alerts, which limits the number of warnings that will be sent to single subscriber. This avoids labeling them as repeat infringers too quickly. The similar system operated by Rightscorp has been known to send 112 reports to a single user within a 48 hour period – apparently for sharing a single torrent of copyright material.
We’re also unsure how someone who actively uses torrents to get copyright material will react when faced by an internet lockout. If said lockout requires them to use a particular browser, then surely just switching to a browser without the technology would side-step the lockout?