ISP to Supreme Court: We shouldn’t have to disconnect users accused of piracy

flop_leash_973@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 1141 points – ISP to Supreme Court: We shouldn’t have to disconnect users accused of piracy
arstechnica.com

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.

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They’re 100% only doing this for money, but still, nice to see them in the right for once.

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.

Yeah IP owners really want to have all the benefits of ownership with none of the drawbacks. After lobbying for and receiving a blank check to be able to rent seek indefinitely, they are constantly acting to outsource any cost of detection and enforcement of "their" property. Disgusting how goddamn entitled they are.

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.

... 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.

I don’t know why you’re being downvoted for this. Even with CGNAT and related technologies, each modem still has a unique MAC address at the cable/DOCSIS level (even without loading Ethernet on top).

Where you could be wrong is buildings with large networks, say an apartment building with wired Ethernet to all the units but all being routed through the same WAN(s), but even still I’d hope that the network is managed in a way that it’s not hard to tell which unit is which IP internally. Unrelated but I’d also pray that each unit is on its own VLAN for security.

There are some apartment buildings with shared Internet connections that are just open and public; It's crappy but cheap if someone can't afford individual connection

Personally I’d die for Ethernet straight into my unit, I had that once in a new building and it was fantastic (though you still had to pay an ISP individually), if only to avoid cable modems and the like. My current cable ISP wouldn’t provision IPv6 to their very own (old, clunky) modem so I had to go out and buy one that doesn’t care whether or not it’s provisioned.

Ohh for sure, they know that if they get rid of the pirates, they'd lose half their customer base and will struggle to pay the CEOs bonus.

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Internet shutoffs should require a court order. Not some emails that are "this person did a bad 🥺🥺🥺 no proof but can you please take our word for it 🥺🥺🥺🥺"

Internet shutoffs shouldn't be a thing, outside of non-payment or legitimate abuse. If I do something illegal, they should have to sue me, not shut off my internet.

Yeah, they don't disconnect a criminals phone service because they committed a crime and made a phone call. It makes no damned sense.

Only happens as a matter by court order and is a limit on the person not on the corporations. Though if found out after by the court it can be ordered terminated. And you will face further punishment. But this is levied against the person. As in "You are not allowed to do a thing and if we find out you did the thing you will face further punishments." Corporations should not have the responsibility or ability to determine any ones eligibility. They are a businesses not a government.They are responsible for their own tos and should never be anything more.

government.They are responsible for their own tos

Piracy almost certainly violates their TOS

Actually, that's been done several times over the decades. As well as banning computer access. The guy caught hacking into the fbi gets his mouse and keyboard taken away.

If you do something illegal, you should be arrested.

Copyright infringement lawsuits are a far cry from bomb threats or the like.

Not everything that is illegal is punishable by arrest

Yeah, I've been ticketed for speeding, and that certainly doesn't come with the threat of arrest unless I'm driving super recklessly or something (but that's a different offense altogether).

So you're saying copyright infringement is on par with speeding or parking past the meter's end? Eh, fair enough.

Honestly it is less severe than speeding. Copyright was an invention of the pre-digital era. Now that we all use computers, so many things we do every day are technically copyright infringement that it is absurd to even have these kinds of conversations.

I was just pointing out a logical fallacy. It's literally impossible to do the thing you said.

This is just facts, they aren't an opinion

Maybe not a court order. But I could get behind a process similar to other utilities where you have months or warning and paperwork.

I don’t pirate these days, but when I did (and was stupid about it) the emails/letters had pretty exact evidence.

They included the name of the work, my WAN IP address at the time, and the amount of data transferred (uploaded) out from it.

This was in the US and I’m unaware of how such notices work in other countries that work similarly.

That's all they can get though they have no proof it was actually you and not someone else using your Internet, how they find out is they join the public trackers and just log everyone in it generally even without a VPN on private trackers they have no idea what you are doing

I think their goal is to tie the evidence to the ISP account, not necessarily name exactly who was pirating that work.

Why should ISP lose revenue enforcing laws for another corpos benefit?

If media industry was serious, they should pay for it 🫢

Their game is just to try to make the ISPs liable; they don't actually want it enforced. In fact, failure to enforce is the feature. They paint the ISP as complicit in the piracy then sue the ISP for hundreds of millions in damages hoping for a no-fault settlement. That's a much better revenue stream than suing someone for 10k who can't pay it.

There is a lesson in here about decentralization here folks 🫢

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.

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)

Which is absolutely ridiculous since you are paying for the water that you are sharing.

I know you know this but it bears saying explicitly: it's because pretty much all laws are out there to enforce property first. Humanity is secondary. 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Because your sharing your water with them disincentivizes their paying their bill.

Extrapolating on this, if you could legally share your water with the neighborhood couldn't an enterprising person with a zeriscaped yard sell their water to a thirsty lawned neighbor? That's money the water company considers theirs

Garbage collection services dislike when people throw their garbage in neighbor's cans even when the neighbor is paying for the larger can (e.g. the disposal volume being used). This has led to some garbage distribution piracy alongside recycling collection crews.

In case you wanted some cyberpunk dystopia in your cyberpunk dystopia.

Where does the cyberpunk come into play with the garbage bins?

Neon lights and vaporwave when you open the lid. It’s the bees knees.

Two ways.

The outer layer is the ad-hoc (often underground or criminal) system that serves to rectify a problem caused by the unjust rules of the legitimate system, in this case, refuse pirates who match overflow to underused capacity.

The inner layer comes from service to the community becoming punk when the mainstream becomes destructive. When recycling bandits start redistributing garbage they go from being commensal with their neighborhood (causing some noise pollution and some additional mess) to mutualist (providing a service to the neighborhood they scavenge).

I appreciate the explanation, but I don't think I follow what that has to do with cyberpunk.

Wikipedia describes cyberpunk as "futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberware, juxtaposed with societal collapse, dystopia or decay".

I understand the relation to dystopia, and even your comparison to the punk movement, but I don't get the cyberpunk comparison, lol

If you move them wrong they start flying around the street at an ever increasing speed.

Wow, that's really odd. My garbage company doesn't care what I do with my or anyone else's can. I can even set mine on my side of the street, and as soon as it empties, refill it and move it across the street (there's like a 15 min gap between them), and they literally don't care. I also overfill it fairly often, and again, they don't care. As long as the truck can pick it up and dump it, they're happy.

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.

Free water? Where do you live? Here I have to pay for that. 🤣

I mean, municipal water most places isn't free, but for drinking water it's effectively free.

Well water is a thing

I've had those things before. But there is maintenance and power to factor in; so not entirely free.

Power yea maintenance not really been running the same pump for my house for almost 2 decades now

I was just being sarcastic. I am WELL aware that wells exist. Also my city water isn’t really all that expensive. Certainly much cheaper than buying bottled water on the daily.

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.

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

gasp!

I do that ALL THE TIME!!!!

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.

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...

Yep, good luck finding a job with no internet.

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

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 🤔

I remember discovering that if I plugged my laptop into where an abandoned printer was at my school I would get a full 100megabit pipe. At the time that was incredible.

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.

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

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.

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.

The ISPs? doing something nice?? for the customers???
Shit, I must have slipped into the wrong timeline or something

It's without a doubt motivated by their own loss of revenue but a consumer friendly take is still commendable

Nope, they just don't wanna be bothered. But if it's a win it's a win.

It means they can fire the one guy that sends the angry letters and get rid of a printer.

It's less work and cost for them if they don't have to do this.

ISPs can't take your money if they cut off your internet

iiNet in Australia used to fight for their users’ privacy until they eventually sold out.

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

enforcing piracy

NOTICE

YOU HAVE NOT MET YOUR MONTHLY PIRACY QUOTA

YOU WILL BE TERMINATED,

THANKS.

This is actually how private trackers operate lol, I got banned from one because I forgot to torrent anything in over 3 months since I was playing a huge game during that time.

This is why I have a seedbox. A small monthly fee to maintain access to sites that are impossible to join nowadays

It's becoming impossible to monitor. I have 5G Broadband Internet and I share a public IP address with everyone in my area. I look at https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com and it shows thousands of torrents that my neighbors have pulled downloaded.

What is this site? It feels like it's a tool for anti-privacy copyright narcs. A domain it links to is "antitor.com."

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

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

Wow it actually knew 5 of the 50 torrents I downloaded recently

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)

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.

I use proton VPN for torrenting. It doesn't show I've downloaded anything. I think that means my VPN is working? 😅

Meanwhile, VPN providers be like "come on download stuff 😉😉😉", wouldn't that be a much easier case for them to prove willful disregard for piracy?

A day is going to come when the VPNs are going to be targeted for regulation.

It's only a matter of time before someone shoots up a school with a 3D printed gun or Epstein's a terabyte of child porn to a Senator's office or some other silly bullshit, and then VPNs will become the whipping boy for our litany of problems.

In autocratic states where VPNs are blocked, they use VPNs that are harder to detect. So by the time they decide to criminalize VPN use in the free (read slightly less un-free) world, we'll still have a cornucopia of options.

It's like FBI trying to ban encryption or get it regulated when we already have encryption technology that is deniable.

n autocratic states where VPNs are blocked, they use VPNs that are harder to detect

Paying for the VPN that's harder to detect with my credit card which is very easy to detect.

It’s like FBI trying to ban encryption

https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/the-fbi-is-secretly-breaking-into-encrypted-devices-were-suing

Devices are already riddled with backdoors imposed by federal authorities. The only real way to avoid them is to obtain a device not designed or assembled within the NATO block.

Incidentally, import of these devices has become increasingly difficult, on the grounds that these devices may have backdoors implemented by foreign governments.

In case you weren't aware, it's actually pretty easy to pay for a VPN in unmarked funds. Most will allow for BTC transactions, but some VPNs will even allow you to use giftcards for a place like Target.

Most will allow for BTC transactions

This is the dumb guy panacea for committing every financial crime. You'd never even know the block chain is a public ledger.

Mullvad even lets you send them an envelope with cash in it, with no identifying info other than your account number.

Devices are already riddled with backdoors imposed by federal authorities. The only real way to avoid them is to obtain a device not designed or assembled within the NATO block.

this smells distinctly russian for some reason, anyway, just use open source software and hardware, the protection net while not perfect, is entirely open, and theoretically, capable of perfect safety.

this smells distinctly russian

Of course, disregard everything Snowden and Assange leaked. Your devices are secure, citizen. Carry on.

my brother in christ you literally referred to it as the NATO block.

What makes you think chinese devices don't have backdoors for example? It's also likely russian devices do, though idk how many if any they produce. We do know that russian malware often has a russian locale kill switch because apparently they're a little silly like that.

What makes you think chinese devices don’t have backdoors for example?

Incidentally, import of these devices has become increasingly difficult, on the grounds that these devices may have backdoors implemented by foreign governments.

Considering how many corporations rely on VPNs for their workers, I don't think this would gain much traction.

A number of countries are experimenting with registration of VPNs and blocking of TOR traffic.

And there are more than a few VPN series that are explicitly or implicitly compromised by the security services in their own countries.

I wouldn't try planning to do the next 9/11 on a ProtonVPN, for instance. The NSA is all over that shit.

Well,

a) even the labels and studios pirate stuff that isn't theirs. They don't really believe what they preach.

b) All that content they produce involves unethical treatment of the actual creators and technical staff who are under-compensated, and often lose all rights to their own creative work. and

c) regional blocks are just marketing bullshit, and is the primary thing VPNs advertise they'll circumvent for you.

Yeah, but ISPs are rich and VPN providers are not. The most recent numbers I can find for Cox (2020) show $12.6 billion in revenue.

I've had VPNs email me that they'll terminate my account if they find me pirating again after getting notified of DMCA. That was a few years ago by the same VPN I'm still with and have been pirating ever since. I haven't gotten any more emails so either I didn't get caught again or they're just not notifying me any more.

I didn't want to lose the VPN though since it gives me a long term IP and allows incoming port for torrenting

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…..

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.

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

Abolish copyright

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The road that we're slowly headed down actually leads to a reality not too far from what you describe.

Computers are increasingly becoming a nested-doll situation wherein the end user is only given access to a lower privileged portion of hardware that exists within a larger supervisory system, of sorts. It will all be (and currently is) marketed as "for your security" "features" while owner control of computer systems is slowly being eroded.

Cox Communications being the ISP for the customers.

You will not ever, ever see Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum .etc doing this. They would happily snip your internet access and leave you high and dry.

I work for Spectrum. I cannot officially speak for the company, of course, but...We don't want to be doing this shit, either. We give people 12 strikes. First 4 I just a notice, next 4 is modem quarantine until notice is acknowledged, next 4 we also sent snail mail, with the last one being a 1 year suspension. Anyway, I worked in repair for 5 years. Not a single person at any level gave a crap. Sups, managers, VP's. "We give them 11 chances to figure out they should use a VPN" was the common attitude. All these warnings and man-hours taking calls and dealing with unblocking modems is a waste of time and money.

I'm going to have to slightly disagree with you here. Yes I know, I'm disagreeing with someone who actually works with the company. Based on pirate experience that I've noted over the years on Reddit's piracy subreddit, what I've read on TorrentFreak for the first 9 or so years I've been reading it off and on and vice versa. Spectrum falls under the category of an ISP to be wary of.

I was going to say that Time Warner also owned them, however, it's actually the opposite. And now I'm knowing that Time Warner Cable isn't really much of a thing anymore. But before it's demise, pirates had been wary of it's existence because of Time Warner's relentlessness of targeting piracy.

I'm going to guess that maybe the reason you're saying all of these warnings is probably because there having been that shift in control. But I do recall that Charter/TW was not to be trifled with.

Cox, the same company that would send me emails and cut my internet when I tried to torrent 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.

you paid for that with an identity attached im guessing, i'm not really sure what else you expected to be honest.

whispers quietly in your ear: “Usenet”

Lol, I've been on that train for a decade. I just wanted to try using my own personal VPN server to torrent which kinda defeats the purpose of a VPN I guess.

Pretty much all cloud providers monitor their servers for piracy and malware distribution/downloads.

True, but it wasn't the cloud provider that caught it. They just forwarded the letter to me from the company that monitors torrent swarms and records IPs.

Here in NL the ISP's are refusing to give client info to the government due to privacy policy, giving a big "go fuck yourself" to any agency trying to convict internet pirates. A judge needs to sign for an ISP to release information on soneone, which only happens with large criminal cases like drug sales and child porn distribution. The fight to change the law so ISP's are forced to release all client info has been going on for years and years now, constantly ending in favor of privacy. ISP's are asshole companies lurking for your money, but at least they protect client privacy over here.

Difficult to feel sorry for an organisation whose only responsibility is to generate profit for their shareholders. If their policy happens to align with normal human ethics it is a coincidence and they will not spare a moment to consider the plight of their customers when the shoe is on the other foot. Fuck them. Long live the pirates.