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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

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

VPN companies already do sketchy shit to get around Netflix's georestrictions[0]. I've heard rumors like they route traffic through residential IP blocks somehow. If they're able to do this, then IP reputation doesn't matter as much. They're already burning IP addresses to connect to Netflix with anyway...

[0] BTW, how is this not a massive industry-wide DMCA 1201 lawsuit? Advertising a service as being capable of getting around georestrictions sounds like it should be as illegal as advertising a DVD decryptor.

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

#63

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 must install an app on your phone

I _love_ those. When I'm trying to configure my modem, nothing gets my nether regions tingly faster than

(1) Visiting the documented configuration site on the back of the modem

(2) It 404s in a new and excitingly different way from every other modem you've owned

(3) After visiting a nearby business with working internet, the helpful interblags populace suggests you need an app, for ... reasons

(3a) At least in the old days, that was just a blatant money grab (harvest your location history and contact list, spam notifications, and so on). Now with halfway decent permissions it's less clear why they're such a-holes about it.

(4) You have the foresight to install the app while internet is available.

(5) Your phone is 2 years old, and the manufacturer views bare-minimum due-diligence updates as a liability and hasn't packaged the latest OS updates. Google simultaneously doesn't trust you to update your phone without somebody-other-than-them taking the liability and also highly recommends all their app developers to only target the very latest Android version. None of the modem-makeitbetter-thingamawhutts work on your phone because 2yo devices are practically fossil fuels in the making at this point.

(6) You surf the interblags for an old version of the modem-makeitbetter-thingamawhutts. After searching long enough, you have a >50% chance of having found the real archive and not a virus, since Google refuses to host old APKs.

(7) By sheer luck, that suffices, and your modem manufacturer doesn't have one of those "your thingamawhutt version is too old" screens in their app.

(8) You go back home, where it's safe and all is well, and when you try to configure your modem you find that the app only works if it can phone home to the mothership. That's a fine thing to want to do, except the only reason you're using the blasted app is because you don't have internet at home and would like to rectify the deficiency.

(9) After a bit of contemplation on the life choices that led you to this moment, you recall that your wife's phone can produce a hotspot that might remedy the immediate clusterfuck.

(10) That doesn't work. Her phone has internet and working hardware, but Google has decided to ask her cell provider if she's allowed to share the hardware she purchased with nearby devices for a single crisis moment. Her cell provider says that she can do anything she would like with the device she paid for and owns, so long as they also get paid repeatedly.

And so on. I'm having fun, reply if you want me to continue the saga, but IME an app is a very poor choice for configuring a modem, and that sort of bullshit has bit me in more ways than I can count. Even when you can get the damned thing to work, like OP mentions, the settings aren't anywhere near as nice as what the firmware natively supports.

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

#64
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.

Is piracy uploading or downloading?

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home media server? Won't that be on par with a lightbulb?

Depends if you use a NUC or a 10 year old 2U HP rack server with redundant power supplies, 4 Xeons and 128GB of RAM.

I would still expect the xeon server to go pretty low once you make sure power saving is enabled. High double digit watts on average. Maybe they need to cut down to two CPUs but I can't imagine that hurting the performance.

It's significantly more than a NUC but even a single mining GPU would use more and a real mining rig is an order of magnitude higher.

And in terms of grow lights, it gets you a couple square feet.

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

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is piracy uploading or downloading?

yes.

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

#67

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…

You're by no means incorrect but the strategy you're speaking of here to determine where warez is going is .. about 25+ years behind and even then network engineers used it as kind of a "look, they're not netengs, they're not going to understand how we encap/decap packets and uniquely identify their chain of custody, so just say something simple so they get the idea."

It also fell flat on its head when it hit the "is an IP a person?" argument.

Every file crossing the line is fingerprinted and various ISPs give various copyright-track software vendors or licensors direct access to track those pre-determined fingerprints and report problem to ISP for customer to mitigate or help prepare for subpoena. There's a lot of other ways this stuff is tracked I won't get into and the environments even more direct now with all of the ML tools. Webhosts and social media apps do the same thing so they can have smaller abuse departments digging for CSAM content. Data exfiltration is a huge space.

As soon as a new lady gaga video is uploaded to Vevo, the fingerprint was already determined, and the copyright bots have alread been scanning the internet for that file for days/weeks. Watch a new music video release on youtube, you'll see attempts to copy it get hammered immediately.

DPI and MITM-TLS which a lot of people blindlyaccept by accepting various free ISP features basically takes most of the end users privacy away in the end anyway. They're all reselling your data, ISPs and most VPNs are scum.

These are scenarious that someone with experience at a major CDN would be very familiar with. We do the same thing tracking every unique object on the entire platform.

'2004 - https://www.technologyreview.com/2004/08/04/232539/fingerpri...

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

#68

> 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.

That's not 100k per violation on the download side it's 100k per work. Each work could be downloaded multiple times. The infringement damage is also the cost to make whole the copyright holder not necessarily the value to the person who did the pirating.

Consider you have a painting that's worth $5m and I steal it.[1] If I go to sell it, I'm not going to be able to go to a reputable dealer so I can only sell it for less. Say $1m. Now say I get busted and I have to pay you restitution. I won't only have to pay the value to me ($1m) I have to pay the value that you lost ($5m), because that's the principle of equity - that you should be made whole as far as possible the damage you have suffered. Some value ($4m in this example) has been destroyed but the court doesn't actually care about that - that's my problem because I have to find that from somewhere to pay you back.

[1] I know there are meaningful differences between piracy and theft of a physical item I'm just using the physical example because it makes clear how damages work in the legal sense.

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

#69
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.

Here you go. This happened in the UK. Protesters admitted they had done the damage, the judge said there was "no defense in law" for the protesters actions but the jury acquitted anyway. It was definitely widely publicised - the case was across all the media in the UK when it happened.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/jury-acq...

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