Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 211 points – Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses
arstechnica.com

Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses::Firms wanted seven years' worth of IP address logs on users who discussed piracy.

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Discussing " "piracy" " (unauthorized copying) does not equate to being guilty of it: title aught to say "alleged".

The film industry in this case wasn't after the data to go after the individuals who made the posts but to use them as witnesses against their ISPs who did nothing in response to piracy complaints. The DMCA has a requirement for a repeat infringer policy and evidence that the ISPs knew about the piracy and that their users chose them or stayed with them because the ISP wouldn't kick them off goes a long way to winning the case against the ISP. They were going after the deep pockets.

Nearly every ISP assigns IP addresses dynamically. So unless they're using IPs from very close timespans, the raw IP addresses are effectively useless to identify repeat offenders.

Yes? But as the person you are responding to has mentioned, they're not after the individuals, they're after the "ISPs who did nothing in response to piracy complaints."

Having the IP address of those users will reveal which ISP they are using.

Just run a traceroute or tracert command against any website and you can see for yourself how your connection initially goes through your ISP before branching out to the rest of the internet.

The ISP would have the records to identify the repeat infringers. Or should at least. That was the problem the film industry is going after: the ISPs not doing even the bare minimum required by law to terminate infringers, even when they had been notified many times by rightsholders.

From a previous article about this case:

https://lemmy.world/post/10751737

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/film-studios-demand-ip-addresses-of-people-who-discussed-piracy-on-reddit/

Last year, a Reddit user wrote that they received 44 emails from Frontier threatening to cut off their service due to torrent downloads, but “if they didn’t do it after 44 emails ... they won’t."

Either the ISP has the records to identify the users and the film industry can get their information to use them as witnesses that way or the ISP doesn't have their information and shows how not-seriously they are taking the issue. Either way, it's bad for the ISP.

Also, do IP addresses really change that often anymore, even if you aren't paying for a static one?

Also, do IP addresses really change that often anymore, even if you aren’t paying for a static one?

For most ISPS, every time you restart your modem it will be assigned a new IP. Some ISPs may reassign the same IP within a small time period, but most will just assign a new IP for every new connection.

Must be a regional thing. I have the same IP for years, no matter which ISP I use. Struggling to think of a single time it changed in the last 20+ years.

My parents' isp setup a static dhcp entry per customer. If you change the mac address of your router you don't get an address. The address you get with the proper mac address is constant and can't be changed.

Would a lemmy insurance stand up to such a request?

Or is this a case where from a privacy perspective, Lemmy is worse

I had this conversation with one of my instance’s mods about a month ago.

Essentially:

If provided with a court order, we could theoretically provide:

  • Email address
  • Record of all comments / posts made by the user
  • Incoming/outgoing DMs for the user
  • Voting activity made by that user
  • Communities subscribed to

(I think that's everything off the top of my head)

IP addresses are not logged in the db or linked to a user, but if the RCMP shows up with a warrant and says "We want all IP addresses that submitted a comment at 09:11:43am PST Jan 16 2024" then I'd be able to get that from the access logs. Access logs are only stored for 14 days and then purged, DB backups are taken daily and stored for 30 days.

Lemmy instances would probably have far fewer resources to fight with. But also more likely to fly under the radar so I don’t know overall.

Hopefully this information is not being retained so until industry players take notice it should be safe.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In a motion to compel that was filed last month, movie companies Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures argued that "Reddit users do not have a recognized privacy interest in their IP addresses."

But in Wednesday's ruling, US Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson said, "The Court finds no reason to believe provision of an IP address is not unmasking subject to First Amendment scrutiny."

Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures previously sued the Internet service provider Frontier Communications, alleging that it is liable for its users' copyright infringement.

The fact that movie companies only sought IP addresses instead of names this time around wasn't enough to sway the court.

As in the previous cases, the movie companies "cannot show that the information they seek here is unavailable from other sources," Hixson wrote.

Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures cited Reddit posts in which users say that Frontier didn't terminate their Internet service despite sending many copyright infringement notices about torrent downloads.

The original article contains 598 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Fuck Reddit, 'cuz I'm over here now. (in the best Diceman voice I can muster)