Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 93 posts

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

#51

Post by autoexec »

ryandrake wrote: post #2

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.

> 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.

ISPs don't generally go looking for copyright infringement. In order to keep safe harbor protections ISPs are required by law to register with the US copyright office (which requires them to pay a small annual fee) and provide them with a contact address where they agree to accept DMCA notices. The media industry hires third parties who hunt for IPs sharing files and they report them to the ISPs at their registered address which means they now can't pretend they didn't know about it. Of course those third parties aren't very careful about who they accuse of infringement and innocent people and even innocent network printers (https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/0...) have been accused as a result, but accusations and unproven allegations are all that matter according to the courts (so far)

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

#52

Post by autoexec »

ryandrake wrote: post #13
wyldfire wrote: 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…

They didn't just know about it, they actually said they didn't want to perm disconnect accounts they were told have been repeatedly infringing because they didn't want to lose the money those accounts would bring in. They screwed themselves by talking about it over email (including saying outright "Fuck the DMCA").

No ISP is happy about the fact that they're forced to spend significant amounts of time and money working as "copyright police" for the media industry for free, and they aren't happy that (so far) courts have insisted that they need to permanently disconnect people from the internet over nothing but unproved accusations from questionable sources, but it was a bad idea to talk openly about that in email because all of that was later used against them in court.

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

#53

Post by autoexec »

gustavus wrote: post #6

If purchasing isn't owning piracy isn't stealing.

Piracy isn't stealing anyway. It's just copyright infringement. DRM and other consumer hostile practices are just more reasons to add to the growing pile of reasons why copyright infringement might not be unethical no matter what the legality is.

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

#54

Post by duskwuff »

throwup238 wrote: post #23
ryandrake wrote: post #2

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!

Better yet, the photographer took a whole series of photos with this theme:

https://www.dreamstime.com/search.php?srh_field=pirate&s_sp=...

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

#55

Post by autoexec »

runlevel1 wrote: post #32
ryandrake wrote: post #13

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…

How they "know": The copyright holders join a torrent swarm and log all IPs that give them pieces of their copyrighted content. They then send infringement complaints to the IPs' ISPs alleging that someone with that IP was infringing on their copyright at the given date and time. There are a number of reasons an ISP might not know who had a given IP at a given date and time. DHCP and CGNAT are two big ones. And the r…

DHCP can be set up to make things harder, but most people's IPs don't change very often. ISPs don't want to make it impossible to tell who had an IP address at a given date/time because they need that information to fight other forms of internet abuse (spammers, phishers, hackers, malware, child porn, etc) as well as other legal requests they see from police and certain three letter agencies who file the proper paperwork with the ISPs legal department. This is generally a good thing and makes the internet a safer/better place.

Any ISPs who made it impossible for themselves to tell which customer had an IP address is going to act as a safe haven for bad actors and they'll get blacklisted from many other networks pretty quickly. Only the largest ISPs can ignore abuse issues on their network without fear of being blacklisted and their IP space null routed.

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

#56

Post by tarxvf »

shiroiushi wrote: post #16
j-bos wrote: post #3

Given so many people with strong feelings about copyright law, has there been any widely publicized occurence of jury nullification on a case like this?

Has there been any widely publicized occurrence of jury nullification on any case? I feel like it's something that certain people on the internet bring up a lot, but in reality pretty much never happens.

Generally speaking you can't just admit to jury nullification without potentially undoing the nullifcation. All you can really do is say "not guilty". If you want to find jury nullification you have to find cases where the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of conviction but the jury didn't convict anyway.

And that can be hard to say, since outside of the court you often don't know exactly what the jury saw and the variation in juries can be pretty astounding.

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

#57

Post by tarxvf »

karaterobot wrote: post #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.

This could make it a lot easier to justify buying more disks for the NAS. I can't afford to keep saving this much money!

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

#58

Post by autoexec »

ryandrake wrote: post #27
kmeisthax wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

VPN providers, especially non-logging ones, keep their abuse handling practices secret. They all claim to have "ways" to catch abuse on their network - I suspect it just comes down to a combination of flagging accounts/logging events following certain types of behavior along with data collected from abuse complaints.

Seems possible enough to keep logs of possible abuse for an account without keeping IP logs around. I'd also guess they have a lower standard for evidence needed to suspend/close an account for abuse than an ISP would. It's just not worth the trouble to keep a suspicious account open when it risks getting their IPs blacklisted.

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

#59

Post by pyuser583 »

ryandrake wrote: post #2

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.

I used to work for an ISP. We were indoctrinated not to even think about what was going over our lines.

The big concern was we’d be sued, and the emails of the opposing law firm would be going over our pipes.

But that was just an example given to us as to why we should back away.

Realistically, the firm was spending its time and energy laying more cables to offer services in a wider area.

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

#60

Post by speff »

charles_f wrote: post #47
thwarted wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. My understanding is that ISP don't want to be seen as dumb pipes, despite that it would probably absolve them of a lot of responsibility and liability, because dumb pipes are effectively a commodity and thus a race to the bottom pric…

Ironically I would probably pay more for a dumber, but more reliable pipe. My operator changed my modem, and its configuration is "easier than ever!" (says the manual). That is, you have to use your account page on their website to change the wifi settings, and the more advanced part of it you must install an app on your phone. But you can't specify a custom DNS (which I'm sure the default router firmware would let y…

You can get that. It’s a business account. It costs more because that’s the actual price of a dedicated line with an uptime SLA.
Post reply on HN