Court blocks $1 billion copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users’ piracy

Yglorba@lemmy.dbzer0.com to Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ@lemmy.dbzer0.com – 769 points – Court blocks $1 billion copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users’ piracy
arstechnica.com

One thing that leaps out at me about this ruling is that courts understand the internet a lot better nowadays. A decade or so ago Sony would have probably gotten away with the argument that Cox profited from the users' piracy; nowadays judges themselves use the internet and are going to go "lolno, they probably would have been Cox customers anyway. It's not like anyone pays for internet connection solely to pirate. And in most areas people don't even have a choice of provider, so how is Cox profiting from this?"

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Don't believe that you're always gonna be protected by some judge somewhere.

Get a proper VPN, dammit!

In the end, you can't out-tech the law. You need rights.

Your so-called "rights" won't hold to the pressure of massive media capital alone. It will erode away.

They have so far. It's still legal to use a VPN without verifying my identity. It's still legal, though difficult, to access the Internet anonymously. The local police department doesn't blanket monitor everyone's search history.

increasingly difficult tech solutions for privacy are a bandaid not a cure.

tech the law. You need rights. I'm not sure we can right-out the system, we probably need both.

I just wish they would advertise the truth. VPN's are basically useless nowadays for everything except torrenting. Most websites once they detect a VPN address will just shut down. Go ahead and give Imgur a try with it turned on to see what I mean.

Change your server to another location. ISP blocks VPN addresses that have been tagged.

I use a VPN constantly and sadly a lot of sites add known VPN ip's to a ban list, I just reconnect my VPN and usually I get a good address but yea it sucks

Yo! What's a proper VPN these days? It seems like all the ones I used to trust went to shit.

I've heard proton and mullvad are pretty good

mullvad no longer portforwards, so probably not a good option to torrent with. proton is good if you use their whole ecosystem.

I do miss port forwarding but could you explain why its necessary for torrenting?

I personally like Mullvad, their practices, and their straightforward price of 5€/month. They’re not going to try to lure you in with discounts by subscribing for multiple months or years. Now if Mullvad has gone downhill, someone chime in.

Mullvad doesn't do port forwarding anymore, AirVPN seems like a good replacement but I forgot where they are based

Just self-host a VPN on a VPS so you can enable disk encryption and disable logging.

Edit: looks like I need a new VPN...

I use private internet access (pia). It's reasonably priced, really good for the number of devices, and I don't believe they keep logs. At least it used to be that way, but I haven't checked that since I signed up a decade ago. I have had zero issues with anything or anyone while using it for any reason. Uptime is basically 100%. Also has mobile support if that matters.

Same, I used to use PIA for about a decade, but I could've sworn I heard they were one of the ones that had gone way downhill. Otherwise I never had an issue with them. I'll have to do some digging, see if it was founded or just a reddit rumor.

PIA’s service is still decent and offers all the features that other VPNs do, but they got bought out by a company that has added spyware to programs in the past. So many users jumped ship when that buyout was finalized, because it’s hard to trust their application or their service when the owning company has a known history of intentionally infecting their users.

Okay yes that's what I remember reading. I have Express VPN now, and while researching found it's still surprisingly highly and doesn't log. it's on the more expensive side though, so I may still give proton or one of the other recs a try.

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