THROWBACK THURSDAY: Six Strikes is what again?

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Back in 2013, the major players in the internet business announced that they were going to solve all the world’s piracy problems. The result was a “six strikes” system that basically had ISPs snooping on users to figure out what kinds of content was going back and forth.

This was a flawed plan from the beginning, because really, in today’s world, you can’t control piracy. What you can do is minimize it by being fair in your pricing and making it tough for casual people to do it. Apple taught us this lesson ten years before the “six strikes” plan was ever unveiled. Before Apple has the iTunes store, music piracy was rampant. Not only that, it was potentially dangerous. Peer-to-peer file sharing solutions moved viruses from place to place, and the results were real. When Apple unveiled an online music store where nearly every song you could think of was available for 99¢, piracy stopped. Simple as that.

The solution today is clearer

Today, we don’t pirate content because most of us don’t keep content on our own devices. We stream. We subscribe to services like Netflix and Spotify rather than downloading movies and songs. Creating our own digital copies seems like too much work. That doesn’t mean the fear of piracy has lessened. Nearly all the content we get today is encrypted in some way. It’s not impossible to beat the encryption, but it’s so much of a pain that most folks don’t do it.

Six strikes didn’t work.

I wrote about it back then and I didn’t think it would work. It seemed like an incredibly dumb idea. The sad thing is that it’s likely that a lot of people put in a lot of effort developing it. Rather than come up with a new model which takes into account occasional piracy and makes it too much work for the average person, they did this.

It’s also worth pointing out that from the internet provider point of view, piracy wasn’t really a content or copyright issue. It was about bandwidth, something there was a lot less of ten years ago. Today there is a lot more bandwidth to go around. Obviously there isn’t an unlimited amount, as you’ll realize if you try to stream a movie on a Saturday night. In most neighborhoods, things slow down a lot when everyone starts to stream. But, the fears that someone will suck up a square mile’s worth of bandwidth by pirating content are largely behind us.

It did give me an excuse to post a new cat picture, something the internet obviously desperately needed:

Well it’s almost a decade later and not only did this system not work, no one even remembers it. Several outlets report that the whole “six strikes” process was disabled in 2017. I didn’t know that, I bet you didn’t either because no one was paying attention to it.

Sadly, the cat isn’t with us either, although I do remember her fondly.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.