Transparency and Compliance
Background
All participants in the Internet video distribution chain - content providers, service providers, corporations and educations institutions as well as consumers - share a concern with the flow of copyrighted content over networks. Widespread piracy associated with various P2P application is also the main concern of content owners, seeking to curtail the piracy. This section is intended to further the readers understanding of legal issues service providers are faced with and the approach that PeerApp has taken in order to ameliorate their concerns or mitigate any risks associated with the caching of copyright material.
The major content owners, including Hollywood studios, MPAA, RIAA and others, have been waging an anti-piracy campaign for a long time that included legal action against operators of peer-to-peer networks as well as individual filesharers. The impact of piracy on content owners’ business is not uniform. The Hollywood studios have long focused on piracy of the content which incurs the most significant monetary damage to them – movies being screened in the cinemas (the so-called ‘theatricals’) and popular TV shows. The ISPs have traditionally played an important role in this anti-piracy campaign. The content owners employ services of technology companies to crawl P2P networks and collect IP address information of alleged infringers. The content owners then turn over this information to the corresponding service providers, seeking their assistance in disclosing identities of the users and/or disconnecting the repeated abusers.
Digital Millinium Copyright Act (DMCA) - 1998
ISPs have firm liability protection based on ‘safe harbors’, that set up clear procedural provisions for routing and caching traffic, as described in US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) from 1998, European Union E-Commerce directive from 2000, and adopted as a legal standard globally. The DMCA offers copyright-related liability protection to network service providers in three major areas:
- Routing of packets,
- Hosting of 3rd party applications
- Caching of content
Specifically, section 512b of DMCA spells out the following procedural requirements that ISP caching systems must follow to be entitled for the “safe harbor” protection:
- The ISP is not the one who originally made the material available
- Caching is automatic, intermediate and temporary storage of content in local servers
- ISP did not modify the content
- ISP complies with industry standards regarding the updating of the content
- ISP does not interfere with content’s access manners (such as passwords, etc.)
- Provider must remove infringing files upon gaining actual knowledge of infringement
At the same time, it is important for ISPs to cooperate with the content owners in the anti-piracy campaign and maintain 100% visibility of IP information related to their subscribers. In addition, when content is discovered in an ISP cache, they are subject to take down notices to remove infringing content that has been discovered by a content owner. It is a content owners’ responsibility to point out the pirated content, but the ISPs responsibility to remove such content from their systems.
UltraBand Mode of Operation
UltraBand supports transparent network caching of HTTP and P2P protocols. The methodology of caching for both HTTP and P2P is as follows:
1. A subscriber requests a content object from a remote server or site. A redirector (router, switch or DPI device) forwards the request to the UltraBand cache. Interpretation of the file request is based on the information contained within Layer 4 or layer 7 of the requesting data packets.
2. The entire session is forwarded to the remote site or P2P clients without interference from the UltraBand. If there is any authentication or tracking of usage from the remote site, that functionality is preserved in its entirety.
3. Once the remote site or peers have decided to transfer to object, the UltraBand inspects that object during the transfer. If the requested file exists in the UltraBand’s storage arrays, the file transfer request form the originating sites/server is stopped.
4. The UltraBand delivers the file or object to the subscriber transparently - as if from the origin server or site. Delivery of the content occurs at wire speed, giving the user the best possible quality of experience.
UltraBand Compliance
The UltraBand is 100% compliant with all of the key procedural requirements of the DMCA 512b section.
UltraBand is a network-based cache that intermediates all transactions between ISP subscribers and Internet content sources, and is not a destination or content source in its own right.
UltraBand propagates all transactions to the Internet content source, guaranteeing that the content served from cache is always up-to-date and available outside of the service provider network, as required by the applicable legislation.
The caching is based on automatic network redirection and application of caching logic which do not involve targeted selection of specific subscribers or Internet content services for caching.
PeerApp’s UltraBand operates as a Layer 2 network cache, on one hand using subscribers’ IP addresses to access the Internet content sources and on the other using Internet content source IP addresses to deliver content to the ISP subscribers.
As a result, it preserves all IP addresses of subscribers and origin servers, maintaining content access as it would take place without the cache. The system never interferes with the business logic of any Internet application or service, including pay-per-click, peer ratings, unique visitor statistics and conditional access provisions.
UltraBand also offers an ability to take down content items from the cache through its dedicated management interface, using an appropriate content item identifier.
UltraBand Anonymity
UltraBand cache is not a peer or destination within P2P networks. As such it doesn’t become a target of scrutiny for content owners seeking to curtail piracy in ISP networks.
Furthermore, as it fully propagates subscriber information to the P2P networks, the visibility afforded to network service providers and content owners as a result is identical as it would have been without the cache in place.