Cox tries to get contributory infringement ruling in Sony lawsuit overturned.

It feels dirty to agree with an ISP on something. But even the worst corporations are on the right side of something from time to time I suppose.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1032·
      2 years ago

      A lot of it is the sheer bureaucracy of chasing down actual pirates and weeding them from people who just happen to be on the same IP address.

      If one guy visiting an apartment block downloads a torrent from a public connection, what is ATT supposed to do? Shut down Internet to the entire building?

      This is an undue burden for ISPs, even if the content isn’t living in a gray zone of legality.

        • primrosepathspeedrun@lemmy.worldEnglish
          22·
          2 years ago

          this is why everyone should pirate literally anything they can, even if they don’t particularly want it.

          er, with a few very gross exceptions that shouldn’t exist.

      • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldEnglish
        412·
        2 years ago

        … IP addresses are assigned to modems… They don’t assign IP addresses to… Cables going to buildings I guess lol but ok.

        And if you’re in some fucked up place that has the entire apartment complex’s internet going to one modem, then God save your soul.

  • antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    93·
    2 years ago

    Absolutely the correct stance, nothing dirty about it. At this point, for better and for worse, the Internet is a basic necessity. Imagine having your water turned off because you threw water balloons at your neighbour.

    • fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      36·
      2 years ago

      Not water baloons, but some companies will cut off your water if you’re sharing it with a neighbor. (especially if that neighbor had their water cut off for not paying a bill)

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comBannedEnglish
            9·
            2 years ago

            We all know implicitly that it’s not illegal to share your water because it’s unethical. It is illegal because making it illegal protects the water company’s profits, humanity be damned.

            it’s perfectly ethical, unless i’m stealing the water, they’re using the same water i’m using and that means i’m paying for it. It’s literally not a problem.

            It might cut flat charges but, get fucked.

            • feannag@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
              14·
              2 years ago

              I think you misinterpreted, because you two are saying the same thing. It is ethical to share. Therefore, it has not been made illegal for being unethical (because it is ethical), it has been made illegal to protect profits.

          • snooggums@midwest.socialEnglish
            3·
            2 years ago

            For sure. Even when it isn’t a law the same outcome happens when corporations get the police to enforce their policies.

          • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
            41·
            2 years ago

            How though? If you’re using extra water to share with your neighbor, and YOU still pay your water bill, they still get extra money for extra usage, right? It just comes from your wallet rather than your neighbors.

    • psycho_driver@lemmy.worldEnglish
      29·
      2 years ago

      Or Nestle asked your water utility to disconnect your service because you’re drinking free water instead of purchasing theirs. Not a direct correlation but closer.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      2 years ago

      I was thinking, imagine the media companies demand the power company turn off your power because you downloaded a pirated movie. Or gas stations stop selling gas to you because you speed.

    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      Imagine having your water turned off because you threw water balloons at your neighbour.

      gasp!

      I do that ALL THE TIME!!!

  • michaelmrose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    931·
    2 years ago

    I want to say as an employee of an ISP I literally dealt with users who essentially couldn’t get high speed internet anymore at their address because we were the only option and their grandkids downloaded movies. This put the entire household at a grave disadvantage educationally compared to other households. It shouldn’t be a thing.

    • Tryptaminev@lemm.eeEnglish
      391·
      2 years ago

      That this is even legal in the first place is insane. Digital communication is at least as vital, if not more vital that postage. Image someone is just banned form getting post delivered or he gets throttled to only once every other week…

  • 4lan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    59·
    2 years ago

    I had Verizon threatened to shut down my internet. I had been receiving notices for close to a decade via email, I assumed they were all toothless. And that was true in the past

    I just called the Verizon copyright office and told them that it wasn’t me and I would change my Wi-Fi password 😂

    It was suspiciously easy as if they really don’t care and are just trying to be compliant

    I got a VPN and no longer have to deal with it

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      Heh, the one time (or that series of times) I got “caught pirating” was at university, and the IT dept was super chill about it. They “didn’t know what I was doing”, but we’re concerned about my data usage (managed a couple TBs in a month in the mid 00s) and they slapped my hands for it. Was really fun going ‘I must have gotten a virus’ 5-6 times in a couple months as I dialed in the throttle speeds to a level they were chill with.

      Amazing how the tech students always struggled with viruses 🤔

    • RaccoonBall@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      2 years ago

      I feel like most people don’t even check their ISP email anymore. Why use that instead of the Gmail you’ve had for 18 years.

      • 4lan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        2 years ago

        No they sent it to my main email, I don’t even know if I have a Verizon email address

    • Majestic@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      2 years ago

      Just FYI. Comments nearly exactly like yours on Reddit were used in copyright troll lawsuits against ISPs as evidence they didn’t do enough to enforce copyright and were negligent and legally liable.

      Further when that didn’t work the copyright agency sued Reddit to try to unmask the identities of those people to bring legal proceedings against them to coerce them into testifying against their ISP at threat of being in trouble for their activities. Reddit was big enough to fight off the lawsuit luckily but be careful.

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    612·
    2 years ago

    How about this: courts can’t order ISPs to disconnect customers.

    To me, that’s like ordering my driveway barricaded because I have too many traffic tickets. If I’m breaking the law, charge me with a crime or sue me. But don’t block my internet access, that’s just uncalled for.

  • AlexWIWA@lemmy.mlEnglish
    50·
    2 years ago

    Small ISPs have zero interest in enforcing piracy. They don’t want to lose the customers on their highest tiers. Comcast though, they suck

      • isles@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Especially since it specifically highlights porn in a different color, it labeled my VPN IP as “Likes Porn”.

        • modus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          2 years ago

          Weird… I looked up the IP for my church group’s forum and it said the same thing.

      • FierySpectre@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 years ago

        Didn’t find anything from me… Then again I’m using a private tracker, which should insulate me from that. (Random people knowing, the ISP probs does know… But I don’t think they care)

        • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I didn’t find anything from me either. Since I’m using Alldebrid to download torrents. It’s a torrent cache that downloads the torrents to their own server and then you can download directly from those servers at high speed. And most of the time the files are already cached so you can download immediately.

  • peanutyam@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    2 years ago

    I’m glad I live in Australia where this doesn’t happen thanks to previous attempts by IP copyright holders (mainly US based ones) to have similar policies forced upon ISP’s here and being told by judges here that the penalties and expectations and demands made by these said IP copyright holding companies was over the top and excessive and thrown out of court……

    • overload@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      I think the precedent set here was that downloading a copy of a movie carried the penalty of the monetary cost of obtaining the movie lehally, so its just not worth pursuing. I might be wrong about that.

    • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.worldEnglish
      5·
      2 years ago

      But not before we abolish corporations and capitalism. The very moment you abolish copyright while keeping capitalism, Disney and co will just outright copy and barely modify other people’s work, then start misinformation campaigns that they were the real creators. Considering all the Disney and other brand simps, I don’t think it will lead to them self-destructing due to bad publicity.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        If that were true, Disney and similar companies should be lobbying for the abolition or at least weakening of copyright, which we can tell isn’t the case.

        • AeonFelis@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          2 years ago

          I won’t argue that corporations wouldn’t steal other people’s work given the chance, but being able to do this is hardly worth the cost of not having copyrights on their own material. A Disney/Pixar/DreamWorks/etc. movie is not a stand-alone product - it’s mainly a feature-length commercial for a franchise. No copyrights means that the corporation doesn’t get revenue from the the merchandise created and sold by third parties.

  • BossDj@lemm.eeEnglish
    181·
    2 years ago

    Can’t wait to find out which industry benefits the SCOTUS justices more.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.caEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    This is less than interesting.

    ISPs don’t want to cut off their income here. I’m certain they have a very good idea of how many of their customers, especially those paying for higher tier plans, are either getting constant DMCA requests, or have a persistent connection to a VPN service. They have a good idea of how much money they’re making from people pirating content, so this position for them is hardly surprising.

    At the same time, I’d rather they fight with the copyright trolls than me. Regardless of the reason for why they’re doing it, it’s a good thing to fight for.

    IMO, they shouldn’t be responsible for this because they’re not tasked with enforcing laws. They must abide by them, and they have a legal, or at least, moral obligation to report any felonies/crimes that they’re aware of (with varying degrees of obligation depending on the severity of the crime. Eg, I’m less bothered if they don’t report, say, piracy, than I would be if they don’t report CP/murder/violent crimes, etc).

    If the LEO’s want a service cut off for a good reason, then let them get a court order for it. They should not be obligated by law to enforce such laws. Any enforcement should be handled by an independent organization, and be filtered through the court system as a check/balance for the whole cabal. They shouldn’t be forced to both find and enforce infractions. Reporting suspected infractions, maybe. Forwarding legal requests to customers, sure (like DMCA notices). Oblige disconnect requests from law enforcement by request (when confirmed necessary by courts in the presence of reasonable evidence), absolutely.

    But having the ISPs do all that themselves with little oversight, is both a danger to their clients, to their liability, and to the public at large, mainly in the context of free speech. The ISP is just the middle man, the messenger. They don’t host the content, nor should they police it, or the access you can get to it. I’m all for collaboration in the interest of enforcing the law, but putting the entire obligation on the ISP seems foolish to me.

    Cyber crimes is one area of law enforcement that I don’t think should be defunded. It may be that ACAB, but those doing the investigative work, away from public interaction (and possible abuse), are not the root of the problem there.

    I dunno, just my opinion man.

    • would_be_appreciated@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      2 years ago

      those doing the investigative work, away from public interaction (and possible abuse), are not the root of the problem there

      They’re the root of privacy problems, which is a non-trivial issue for many of us.

    • SkaBunkel@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      2 years ago

      I’m not sure how real companies handle this, but I can share what we did in a student organization at my university that provided internet to its members.

      Not only could we monitor who was downloading a lot of data, but we also received emails from legal organizations informing us that a specific IP in our network(All members had a public IP) had downloaded copyrighted content. They would ask us to disconnect that user. These emails typically came with an XML file attached, filled with legal information and details about the content being downloaded, often including the exact torrent filename.

      We built a system that would automatically parse the XML and forward the email to the user responsible. The subject line may or may not have been “Use a VPN, you idiot!” at some point.

      We also maintained a “high score” list to track what was trending. The last time I checked, Rick and Morty was in the top 3, but that was a while ago.

  • dogslayeggs@lemmy.worldEnglish
    111·
    2 years ago

    This is capitalism 101: whatever makes the most money is what they support. It doesn’t matter who is hurt (or not hurt), or what is right/wrong. As long as they can make more money than they are losing by lawsuits, they will keep doing this. If they can avoid doing anything at all and not get sued while getting paid by customers, that’s even better.

  • C126@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    10·
    2 years ago

    Shut down their access to computer stores and the power companies while you’re at it. Only fair. No piracy without computers or power.

  • bulwark@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    2 years ago

    So I’ve rented a server for years. It’s in the US and it’s a couple bucks a month. It’s fun to play with and I use it however I want. I’ve had an email server, a next cloud instance, and an open VPN instance to name a few things on it. Well I decided to connect a torrent client from my home to the openvpn instance on my server to see if I could do it. It worked really well until the company I rent from forwarded the DMCA hit back to me for downloading Rick and Morty. I should’ve known better but I thought a nameless faceless server farm wouldn’t be worth the hassle of a DMCA but I was wrong.