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 – 771 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.

36 more...

Ain't nobody going to talk about that guy in the thumbnail eating a CD while wearing that hat? Stock photos are weird.

I miss r/WTFstockPhotos

Create a Lemmy version! Be the change you want to see.

Stop copying my comments ;D

But actually: I don't want to mod it :/

That's okay, you can create subs and not mod them. Lemmy has a sort-of-mechanism to transfer modship already.

And now with AI they can get even weirder, specially if they trained it on already weird stock photos.

What do you mean, how do you pirate stuff online? Surely you got the hat on? I mean, I can see biting a hard drive might be more appropriate but the hat, come on, the hat!

Internet is a utility and should be treated as such.

Up next Sony sues Pacific Gas & Electric for profiting off of piracy. All those torrents were powered by Pacific Gas & Electric.

Sues corning for making all that glass that transmitted the piracy.

And finally, after suing everyone, sue the almighty himself, who dared to bring all these pirates into existence.

I agree but the average person doesn't even know what that means.

If you were a true american you'd be for privatization of all utilties

/s

Billion? What are they smoking???

Ikr? It's like they're counting every act of digital piracy ever to be their lost profits when that's obviously not the case.

It's not "like", that has been the argument with these piracy cases for ages. If I pirate 100 movies, it obviously means that if I couldn't have I would have gone to the shop to buy each and every one of them. It's even worse for anyone caught distributing the downloads, where a site host can be hit with this logic for every user download ever.

Apparently these days they are claiming that movie and TV piracy costs the US film industry $29-71 billion a year and the US GDP a cool $115 billion in total
Because, you know, we have all that money just floating in our pockets now thanks to piracy.

Video game piracy has led to more purchases from me, because I'll download a game to try on a whim that I wouldn't have purchased, find out that's it really good and buy it

It has been shown that pirates spend more on media than anyone else, so companies are effectively attacking their best customers because they are short sighted idiots

Same, I blame games not having a trial version anymore. Streams free weekends are actually great for this. I've bought a couple free weekend games I've played in the past.

Best way to get me to not pirate your game and buy it is to have a decent demo available. Against the Storm is a bizarre pitch (Rouge-lite City builder), but they had a good demo that allows unlimited play on the standard biome with a level cap. Was incredibly easy to try it and play enough to decide I like it.

Media Corporations should not have a say in disconnecting users from the internet based on copyright infringement. The right to social participation is part of a basic human right - self-determination. Today, the majority of interactions with society involve communication via internet in one way or another, so that access to the internet is vital for enabling social participation.

Yeah, it's somehow comparable to a scenario where they had the power to decide you can't use uber/taxi, or postal services, because you used it to transport the HDD you're using for your private collection of copyright-protected media.

You're right, but looking at this analogy backwards tells us the problem isn't the ability for Uber/ISPs to ban users--this happens and isn't a problem with Uber-- it's that Uber, unlike ISPs, doesn't hold a monopoly on feasible means of transportation. We can't reasonably expect a business to act outside its own best interests, so it's insane to allow a business to exist in such a form. Short term, sure, regulate; but really, nationalize it.

At the very least, nationalise the last mile.

I live in Brazil, there are many problems here and stuff. But at least no one gives a fuck about piracy, lol. Never needed a VPN for torrents, not gonna need anytime soon.

If I'm not mistaken, Brazilian law allows people to download and make digital copies of copyrighted material, so long as it's for personal use. I should probably look into that sometime

It's like that in many countries. The USA is just kind of shit in this regard.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A federal appeals court today overturned a $1 billion piracy verdict that a jury handed down against cable Internet service provider Cox Communications in 2019.

If the correct legal standard had been used in the district court, "no reasonable jury could find that Cox received a direct financial benefit from its subscribers' infringement of Plaintiffs' copyrights," judges wrote.

The case began when Sony and other music copyright holders sued Cox, claiming that it didn't adequately fight piracy on its network and failed to terminate repeat infringers.

Cox's appeal was supported by advocacy groups concerned that the big-money judgment could force ISPs to disconnect more Internet users based merely on accusations of copyright infringement.

If not overturned, this decision will lead to an untold number of people losing vital Internet access as ISPs start to cut off more and more customers to avoid massive damages."

In today's 4th Circuit ruling, appeals court judges wrote that "Sony failed, as a matter of law, to prove that Cox profits directly from its subscribers' copyright infringement."

The original article contains 543 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Dear Lemmy.world. can you kill ALL bots? they're the first sign of a website going to shit.

You know you can just turn off bots in your profile settings... right? That is an option here.

:) You do know that bot is banned in lemdro.id right?

And to be fair, it is unsolicited bot spam (I miss BotDefense) although it ultimately is up to the admins and mods in this....instance and there is always the possibility of useful bots. Blanket blocking them via your profile seems a bit, meh, e: especially if you want to invoke one which is always the better way?

At least these bots are not "the" bots you think they are.

But they lead to "the" bots you think they are.

Really Cox should be paying pornhub.com for such strong "customer acquisition" support imho

1 billion dollars over pirated music? Who pirates music amymore