Live data from Hacker News

Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

nytimes.com

51–60 of 369 posts

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#51

It’s interesting to see how as soon as intellectual property theft starts to be critical for powerful interests the legal system magically gets more lenient about copyright enforcement. The balance between public good and protecting IP ownership of the creatives (which is, paradoxically, also part of the public good) has to be struck and enforced consistently.

It's interesting to see how people look for powerful interests to explain simple and correct supreme court decisions.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#53
post #24

A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.

[flagged]

Whoever drafts the law has to arbitrarily choose a number, or there will be no end of litigation to settle it, and a judge will arbitrarily choose a number. OP's opinion is "not more than 10" so 9, 8 and 1 would all be fine with them, while 11 would be too long. Source: reading. Meanwhile you haven't even made clear where you stand on the issue or what point you're making or in what way "differently" OP is supposed to feel.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#54
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI training

AI training might be copyright infringement. But there’s no cases or laws to establish that. I don’t think this case or anything else has been affected by AI training on copyrighted material, if it is deemed infringing.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-torrented-o...

They all seem to be using pirated books. Probably slightly better than just web stuff as it is presumably edited.

The authors case was thrown out on narrow reasoning. But companies now live by different rules so I suspect they won’t be held to account. Even Disney/nintendo are unlikely to stop this…

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/judge-tosses-authors-ai-tr...

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#55

A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.

At this stage I just want a coherent system. There is no way "individuals can have their accounts terminated for one song" and "AI companies can download a complete copy of everything, including pirated works, and roll it into models which can reproduce it exactly and sell it back to you" should be able to co-exist.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#56
> They said that Cox had ignored bad actors, helping 60,000 users distribute more than 10,000 copyrighted songs for free

This is such a tiny number for a company which provides internet to over 6 million homes. I was expecting it to be in millions or at least hundreds of thousands.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#57
post #3

9-0 against the record labels. This effectively ends a long running strategy of trying to milk ISPs for people torrenting without a VPN. At the same time it likely puts things like the *Arr stack at more risk given their more tailored nature.

A personal anecdote:

I had several roommates, and we each were responsible for a utility. I was responsible for internet, and Cox was our provider.

I received multiple e-mails from Cox about copyright infringement. I can't recall them, but I remember it being serious enough for me to tell people to stop.

Thinking back, I feel like Cox's position is right and fair; let users know they're being observed by copyright holders, and inform the user that they could be compelled to provide their identity to complainants.

But ultimately, the responsibility to "stop" the supposed infringement is on the holder, not Cox.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#58
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL but it seems to have major implications beyond music piracy, like into the realm of ISPs and free speech in general, it seems the court (rightly) sees ISPs as a common carrier (like water pipes) and we may see more opinions of the kind that reach into the space of monopolies or duopolies in social media next.

Big tech should loose its safe harbor protection. It’s both an aggregator AND a curator. The algorithms showing you what to see is no different than a newspaper editor. Just like newspapers big tech should be liable for their “feeds” showing harmful and defamatory information

I don’t see how it would ever make sense to hold social media liable for user posted defamation.

Look at the recent Afroman defamation lawsuit and consider how YouTube is supposed to know whether that music video was defamatory or not. It took a court 3 years to reach a conclusion but you want YouTube to make that same call instantly, on millions of posts a day. What you’d get is a world where Afroman’s (non defamatory) speech basically cannot be shared on social media at all.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#59
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I agree that any single fixed term makes sense. Rather, I think it'd be better if the exponential cost to society (in terms of works that don't happen, and works that don't happen based on those works that didn't happen and so on compounding) was just part of the yearly renewal price. Do maybe everyone gets 7 years flat to start with, then it costs $100*1.3^(year). So after another 25 years it'd be aroun…

How about something like IP as a tax? IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.

I want to be super clear that I'm not proposing some finalized plan or numbers here, it'd need some real work spent hashing it all out. Mainly though I hope people will consider more the huge space of untapped approaches to balancing various benefits and costs towards a better societal outcome. And that maybe that helps a little in getting us out of some of the present seemingly intractable boxes we so often seem stuck in?

Your tax idea could certainly be another useful tool. My main immediate thought/caution would be:

>IE: if you make profit off of it, then it cranks up. There's plenty of music artists who's song blow up a decade or more later.

As we have endless examples of, "profit" and even "revenue" can be subject to a lot of manipulation/fudging given the right incentives. I also think that part of the cost I describe is objective: whether it takes off right away or takes off after a decade, as long as it's under full copyright it's imposing a cost on society the whole time. Also other stuff like risk of it getting lost/destroyed. So I do think there needs to be some counter to that in the system, sitting on something, even if it makes no money, shouldn't be free.

But the graduated approach might help with this too, and again they could be mixed and matched. It could be 1001.3^n to keep full copyright, but only 501.2^n to maintain "licenseright", 25*1.15^n for "FRANDright", and free for the remaining period of "creditright". Or whatever, play around with numbers and consider different outcomes. But feels like there's room for improvement over the present state of affairs.

Re: Supreme Court Sides with Cox in Copyright Fight over Pirated Music

#60
post #24

A tiny victory. Copyright should not be more than a decade. This intellectual property system is one of the worst things to happen in modern society is what I would have said a few years ago, now I got bigger problems but I'm still mad.

[flagged]

Copyright is an artificial monopoly set in place to guarantee that artists get a piece of the cake from distributors. The duration of this monopoly is completely arbitrary, and ideally it should be "long enough to make art creation a viable trade".
Post reply on HN