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AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

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Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#71

Post by yantz »

rootusrootus wrote: post #70
yantz wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still connect to a low speed ISP much in the same way that people banned from Twitter or YouTube can still use much smaller platforms with a lower reach.

My tax dollars helped pay for the infrastructure that the ISP is selling me service over. It's a little different from Twitter or Youtube, who are just a site on the Internet.

Your tax dollars helped pay for the development of the Internet and many of the technologies that those sites and services use today.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#72

Post by EpicEng »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #20
wmf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bargain compared to being on the wrong end of a federal copyright lawsuit.

It's cheaper than most court fees (whether those fees should exist is a different story).

But courts actually... do stuff.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#73

Post by mywittyname »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #11
tantalor wrote: post #8

The podcast Reply-All had a good episode about why this is problematic earlier this year. https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/118 Excerpt: ALEX: So finally, I find this website that is called the Center for Copyright information. PJ: And what’s that? ALEX: It’s a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs, they’re working together. And the deal is, if you feel that you have wrongly received…

> It’s a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs, they’re working together The entertainment industry wants takedowns eagerly enforced. The ISPs don't want to do work. Ignoring complaints is the predictable outcome. (As is AT&T becoming stricter about copyright enforcement after buying a content company.)

Anymore, the ISPs and the entertainment industry are the same entities.

AT&T owns WarnerMedia, formerly Time Warner, which owns cable networks, movie & music studios. Most of the entertainment Americans consume are owned or produced by AT&T or a subsidiary.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#74

Post by drawkbox »

bitxbitxbitcoin wrote: post #2

Some of you might be wondering why "a little over a dozen" people being booted from their ISP is newsworthy. This is figuratively the beginning of a very, very slippery slope.

It is a very bad precedent to cut people off a needed service to live today, and it needs to be stopped immediately.

The problem is ISPs and content providers, or both, are prioritizing their needs over other industries.

Say someone does pirate something, and the cost of that is a few hundred or even thousands of dollars that they wouldn't have bought anyways in most cases or couldn't afford. Well they also use the internet to purchase products, pay bills, and the internet is part of daily life now. Cutting someone off from the network utility because of even large amounts of digital goods being pirated is the wrong approach as it has collateral damage to other products/industries, survival of the person and possibly their family and more.

Should the person pay a fine? Yes. Should they lose their internet? No, unless ISPs and content providers, or if they are one in the same, are more important than every other industry. ISPs/content providers aren't more important than every other industry and ISPs are more of a utility that needs to be always available, other methods are needed, cutting someone off from a needed service to live is cruel and unusual punishment.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#75

Post by JTbane »

tantalor wrote: post #8

The podcast Reply-All had a good episode about why this is problematic earlier this year. https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/118 Excerpt: ALEX: So finally, I find this website that is called the Center for Copyright information. PJ: And what’s that? ALEX: It’s a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs, they’re working together. And the deal is, if you feel that you have wrongly received…

Literal definition of extortion there.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#76

Post by rootusrootus »

yantz wrote: post #71
rootusrootus wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My tax dollars helped pay for the infrastructure that the ISP is selling me service over. It's a little different from Twitter or Youtube, who are just a site on the Internet.

Your tax dollars helped pay for the development of the Internet and many of the technologies that those sites and services use today.

Sure, the development of the technology, but not the actual services themselves. The difference with the local ISP is that my tax dollars actually helped pay for the physical plant. And through my gov't I give them actual physical right-of-way to lay cables and maintain them. This is a very important distinction that does not apply to a soft service on the 'net somewhere.

Now, if my tax dollars helped pay for Twitter's datacenter, then now we have something to talk about. And perhaps in the state where Twitter is, they got tax breaks which amount to effectively a subsidy from the citizenry. In that case I think it's time to take the case to court.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#77

Post by Spivak »

craftyguy wrote: post #15
Spivak wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISP sees high amounts of traffic over a public VPN and kicks you off their network for suspicious activity. You go to appeal it in one of their 'courts' and since there aren't really any rules the burden of proof is on you. You really were pirating so such positive proof doesn't really exist and you're off the internet for good.

There are perfectly legitimate reasons for 'consuming' a large amount of bandwidth. For example, I help seed a number of Linux distro ISOs over bittorrent, and once got a letter from my absolute shit of an ISP (Frontier, if you are reading this, it's you).

Plenty of legitimate usage, I'm talking about the fact that masking your traffic with a VPN isn't really protection when these 'courts' can demand you prove you weren't pirating content in order to restore your service.

So getting away with piracy by way of plausible deniability is much harder.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#78

Post by Scriptor »

mywittyname wrote: post #73
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs, they’re working together The entertainment industry wants takedowns eagerly enforced. The ISPs don't want to do work. Ignoring complaints is the predictable outcome. (As is AT&T becoming stricter about copyright enforcement after buying a content company.)

Anymore, the ISPs and the entertainment industry are the same entities. AT&T owns WarnerMedia, formerly Time Warner, which owns cable networks, movie & music studios. Most of the entertainment Americans consume are owned or produced by AT&T or a subsidiary.

I don't know about most of the entertainment. Now that Disney owns Fox Studios they're the other major creator of film and music.

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#79

Post by mdpopescu »

eiaoa wrote: post #14
obblekk wrote: post #5

I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright), but are still made uneasy by this development. I think the source of that discomfort is - what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? Competition in the form of space internet can’t come soon enough, not to enable pirates, but to ensure normal people have reason…

> what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process? This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government…

Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government.

Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s

Re: AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown

#80

Post by yantz »

rootusrootus wrote: post #76
yantz wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your tax dollars helped pay for the development of the Internet and many of the technologies that those sites and services use today.

Sure, the development of the technology, but not the actual services themselves. The difference with the local ISP is that my tax dollars actually helped pay for the physical plant. And through my gov't I give them actual physical right-of-way to lay cables and maintain them. This is a very important distinction that does not apply to a soft service on the 'net somewhere. Now, if my tax dollars helped pay for Twitter…

The physical plant was made a long time ago and was a one-time investment, like arpanet back in the day, or for example investigation made by universities using public grants that helped develop video codecs that are now in use by sites like youtube. So yes, it's the same.
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