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Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

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Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#21
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The ISP is the actual medium whose network was used to copy the alleged infringing content. So that's not analogous to all the utilities in use by the infringer.

I think the key differentiator is that Cox [somehow] knew that the customer was using their network to copy the alleged infringing content. The electric company doesn't know this, and (to use another example) the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know that their customer is storing the content on the drives the make. If I were Cox, I suppose I would be incentivized to operate kind of like a VPN and just not store logs…

I suspect willful blindness to infringement wouldn't help. Willful blindness is such a problem in law that most laws are phrased using the words "known or should have known". Someone who should have known is said to have constructive knowledge.

There's also business and legal reasons why ISPs need to log and inspect traffic. "No logging" means "no abuse desk" - i.e. if someone's using your ISP to send out spam or hack people, and you aren't logging or inspecting traffic, then you can't investigate that spam or that hacking. At a minimum it means every other online service is going to distrust your users - i.e send them through reCAPTCHA hell; up to an outright ban. Think like what it's like to use clearweb services through a Tor exit node, and now imagine that for a bunch of nontechnical users. They're going to switch to the ISP that doesn't result in them getting group punishment. But actual criminal actors are going to flock to the service, because they need someone in the middle to launder their packets for them, which makes them have a worse reputation, and so on.

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#22
> A US District Court jury in the Eastern District of Virginia found the ISP liable for infringement of 10,017 copyrighted works.

(does some mental math)

Each of those copyright violations was apparently worth $100,000. Wow, with all the movies I've pirated, I ought to be a lot richer.

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#23

Wow, a case between an ISP cartel member and a copyright cartel member. Hard to pick one to root for. Somehow neither side managed to make the other side look like the good guy. You'd think ISPs would do their darnedest to make it so they don't have a way of knowing what content is flowing over their pipes, to help avoid accusations of contributory infringement. ALSO: The photo of an Internet Pirate is amazing.

> ALSO: The photo of an Internet Pirate is amazing.

And it seems it's not an AI generated image based on the credit. Someone actually sat down for a photographer and chewed on a CD dressed as a pirate. Wonderful!

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#24
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, if you're a renter and utilities are included in your rent, be sure to check the lease if there's a clause that prohibits high electricity consuming activities like running a home media server, a cryptominer, or growing certain plants.

I lived in a building that had the cost of electricity included in the rent for long-term tenants, but newer tenants had to pay for their own electricity use. One person I knew in the building was using their "free" electricity to mine cryptocurrency. This was, in my opinion, not far from stealing. Was it legal? Probably? Was it ethical? Not by a long shot.

I wonder if they are the reason newer tenants had to pay, but the landlord couldn't change their lease until the last one expires

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#25

Wow, a case between an ISP cartel member and a copyright cartel member. Hard to pick one to root for. Somehow neither side managed to make the other side look like the good guy. You'd think ISPs would do their darnedest to make it so they don't have a way of knowing what content is flowing over their pipes, to help avoid accusations of contributory infringement. ALSO: The photo of an Internet Pirate is amazing.

Must be a junior capo who forgot the boss wrote the DMCA specifically giving ISP operators a free pass (dont wanna step on the streaming racket)

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived in a building that had the cost of electricity included in the rent for long-term tenants, but newer tenants had to pay for their own electricity use. One person I knew in the building was using their "free" electricity to mine cryptocurrency. This was, in my opinion, not far from stealing. Was it legal? Probably? Was it ethical? Not by a long shot.

I wonder if they are the reason newer tenants had to pay, but the landlord couldn't change their lease until the last one expires

Possible, but more likely the landlord (or new owner) realized that if you can switch to tenant-billed even with a rent drop, you have a more valuable property overall - if most of the apartments in the area are tenant-billed.

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key differentiator is that Cox [somehow] knew that the customer was using their network to copy the alleged infringing content. The electric company doesn't know this, and (to use another example) the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know that their customer is storing the content on the drives the make. If I were Cox, I suppose I would be incentivized to operate kind of like a VPN and just not store logs…

I suspect willful blindness to infringement wouldn't help. Willful blindness is such a problem in law that most laws are phrased using the words "known or should have known ". Someone who should have known is said to have constructive knowledge. There's also business and legal reasons why ISPs need to log and inspect traffic. "No logging" means "no abuse desk" - i.e. if someone's using your ISP to send out spam or ha…

Interesting. I wonder how VPN providers navigate "known or should have known" then?

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#28
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. The ISP is the actual medium whose network was used to copy the alleged infringing content. So that's not analogous to all the utilities in use by the infringer.

I think the key differentiator is that Cox [somehow] knew that the customer was using their network to copy the alleged infringing content. The electric company doesn't know this, and (to use another example) the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know that their customer is storing the content on the drives the make. If I were Cox, I suppose I would be incentivized to operate kind of like a VPN and just not store logs…

> The electric company doesn't know this, and (to use another example) the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know that their customer is storing the content on the drives the make.

This is a sufficient argument in many situations. To shore it up for cases where the electric company gets informed (by a court, for example, with or without the court actually ordering the electric company to do something about it) that subscriber Jackie Doe has been sued and penalized for copyright infringement, there has to be a complementary argument about whether placing mandatory enforcement on multiple providers in the service stack (website -> internet service provider -> electricity) is a reasonable legal framework. How many turtles on the way down should be forced to restrict known copyright infringers? Before internet access became nearly as necessary as it is today, former Senator Orrin Hatch proposed a law authorizing destruction of copyright infringers' computers by copyright holders. (In the service stack I mentioned previously, "computer" would be a link between internet service provider and electricity.) Meanwhile, my takeaway of the featured article is that bans of internet service are not a fringe idea, at least among big copyright publishers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#Intellectual_prope...

This thread reminded me of an EFF article "Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack" [2] about the content moderation tech stack (social media site -> site hosting provider -> internet service provider). The article focused on voluntary moderation actions by site hosting providers and ISPs but is a useful prototype for examining tech stacks which involve third-party liability laws, including in copyright contexts.

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/beyond-platforms-priva...

Re: Court blocks $1B copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users' piracy

#29
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. It's like if I take a rental car for a joyride. That shouldn't be illegal.

Isn't it a replica of the rental car in the analogy?

robertlagrant wouldn't download a car!
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