[HN Gopher] If Not Overturned, Bad Copyright Decision Will Lead ...
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If Not Overturned, Bad Copyright Decision Will Lead Many to Lose
Internet Access
Author : ystad
Score : 221 points
Date : 2021-06-05 12:41 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| hereme888 wrote:
| I hope it causes VPNs to become more popular.
| nullc wrote:
| Some of this stuff happens because providers own unclean hands
| causes them to mount an inadequate defense.
|
| For example, providers should be in the position where they would
| defend themselves by saying that monitoring their users online
| activities would be a criminal violation of wiretap law.
| Unfortunately, providers have taken the ability to monitor users
| through terms of service provisions so that they can collect data
| on their users to sell to advertisers, thus diminishing their
| ability to argue that they're just a dumb pipe.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Not only to sell to advertisers, but to share with media
| companies (and some ISPs are subsidiaries of media companies)
| for even more targeted content creation.
| whereistimbo wrote:
| Yeah sick. What a good time to stop listening music like mediocre
| pop songs from these big three major labels.
|
| Coincidentally that is what I've done lately, given some music
| from independent artist sounded better, even more, the
| freemusicarchive.org and elsewhere in the Internet (like
| bandcamp) hosted a lot of great free songs licensed in Creative
| Commons which made me realize that mediocre pop songs are a scam,
| it sounds so sucks, but on top of that, you have to pay for it.
| And the money you pay to them might be used for evil practice
| like this.
| myself248 wrote:
| This seems a fine place to ask: Is there a way to get a
| Spotify-like user experience, but for creative commons music?
| I'd happily pay a few bucks a month if someone else's back-end
| would divvy it up to the various artists' tipjars.
| dsqrt wrote:
| Perhaps Jamendo https://www.jamendo.com/ ?
| beebeepka wrote:
| VLC used to promote this service. Haven't listened to their
| channes since they were removed from the list.
|
| I've discovered tons of great new and new music thanks to
| the stations in VLC. Was stuck listening to old tunes for
| almost 20 years. I. Old but there's tons of greatusic being
| produced. Not pop music, though, that's for sure
| xbar wrote:
| I would be fine if I had a "Record Label Filter" on all my
| music sources.
| NortySpock wrote:
| Possibly Funkwhale, but it does not have a tip-jar
|
| https://funkwhale.audio/en_US/
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| Twitch has a lot of talented DJs and performers.
| uvesten wrote:
| Even though it took quite I while, I feel like many(!) law
| professionals are starting to "get" intellectual property law and
| understand the internet, so this ruling will most likely be
| overturned in the next instance.
|
| Nowadays this kind of ruling is a surprising but it's a small
| court and not really significant. Back in the 90's and 00's you
| could almost bet on all courts making draconian rulings like
| this, but the general internet literacy of law professionals has
| surely (and finally) changed for the better :)
| kmeisthax wrote:
| More specifically, people started using copyright infringement
| lawsuits as a business model.
|
| It took years for the courts to discover that, say, Prenda Law
| weren't just some lawyers trying to stem the tide of rampant
| BitTorrent piracy, but were actually sharing their own content
| and then suing people who downloaded it to make money off of
| settlement demands. However, now that this has happened, it's
| significantly harder to get out-of-order discovery on a John
| Doe just by alleging an IP address sent parts of a file. Courts
| want something more than that.
|
| AFAIK the big thing nowadays is abusing Florida's "pure bill of
| discovery" to subpoena people for copyright litigation. This is
| legally dubious because copyright is inherently a "federal
| question", meaning that state courts aren't supposed to touch
| anything even remotely related to it. However I haven't yet
| seen someone try and attack otherwise valid copyright cases
| based on the fact that early discovery was improperly granted.
|
| My personal opinion is that Congress needs to step up to the
| plate next and realize that individual filesharing does not
| cause nearly as much harm to copyright owners as the law
| currently presumes. Statutory damages should not be available
| when suing people who merely shared infringing files for non-
| commercial purposes. Allege a direct commercial benefit or hope
| you can prove actual damages.
| xbar wrote:
| Uh. Lawyers understanding that this is a bad ruling isn't going
| to stop Sony from suing Comcast, with disastrous consequences.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| I think there needs to be a distinction in law between
| infrastructure providers (like COX) and application providers
| (like Facebook or Google).
|
| Infrastructure providers have a monopoly or an oligarchy over a
| geographic area and do not know what specific activities users
| engage in online, aside from which websites are visited.
|
| Application providers can build their monopolies based on network
| effects and potential competition is not constrained by an
| external limitation, like geography. They know what users do on
| their platforms.
|
| DMCA treats them the same. Cutting off someone's Internet access
| seems like a very early 00's solution to piracy, when you could
| still conceivably walk into a business and fill out a paper job
| application. Legal concepts need to evolve with the Internet and
| we need finer grained distinctions.
| greggyb wrote:
| * Oligopoly, unless you're claiming that an infrastructure
| provider is one of the following:
|
| Either:
|
| 1. A sole provider of a good or service
|
| OR
|
| 2. One of several ruling elites that form the primary basis of
| government.
|
| Monopoly:Oligopoly :: Monarch:Oligarch.
| easrng wrote:
| In much of the US there is only one ISP that provides
| reasonable speeds. In my area, that's Spectrum. The only
| other options here are slow DSL and satellite.
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| The parent post by greggyb wasn't arguing against the fact
| that many areas only have one Internet provider, but was
| specifically focused on the Grandparents, use of the word
| "oligarchy" instead of the more appropriate "oligopoly" to
| refer to situations where people have their choice of two
| or three ISPs.
| easrng wrote:
| Whoops! Misread that, too late to edit though.
| shkkmo wrote:
| And in many parts of the US, such as where my parents live,
| there is a single ISP that provides crappy DSL and nothing
| else.
| Natsu wrote:
| I'm not sure we need to draw distinctions between the two in
| this case.
|
| I mean, I don't want Google searching through gmail for any
| time anyone has shared anything that might be subject to
| copyright, either.
| hermitdev wrote:
| I think I'd tend to agree with you.
|
| I think more broadly, we don't need new law or even a
| reinterpretation of existing law in this case. We simply need
| to uphold due process. Punitive actions should not, and must
| not, be taken against individuals or corporations, even, on
| mere unproven allegations.
| hamsterwill wrote:
| Now let us scale a more 'confident' scenario, politcal desired
| digitisation and social scoring, needed to [get:reward] and to
| take a seat in RL (real life ^^ -sorry for this irony) you
| know, [for: "fill'in some forms"] to [get:reward], feeling way
| too drunk...to solve...
|
| ...let me tr... _um_... "Some ruse...so subtle, that can't
| wear its own status clientele, presumptuously questioned, but
| 'by-carryed' backed..." (-;
| eckesicle wrote:
| These are all words but I have no idea what any of it means.
|
| Are you feeling okay?
| megous wrote:
| "Ability to terminate account => ability to supervise customers."
| What? :D
| cratermoon wrote:
| Ugh, the DMCA is a bad law. What's worse, though, is that the
| laws in the US are stuck in a time when Internet access was a
| nice-to-have, a kind of semi-luxury.
|
| Fast forward to 2021, and imagine if a person could have their
| electricity shut off because they were using it to power a
| computer that shared copyright content. That's about where this
| decision sits.
| failwhaleshark wrote:
| It's the best law big money labels can buy.
| beprogrammed wrote:
| So the attack is, gain access to a business or personal network,
| torrent files that will definitely get you noticed, repeat until
| the ISP pops said target....
| thrower123 wrote:
| Fun with the public wifi that your Comcast-provided router or
| Amazon mesh network is making available to the world...
| sp332 wrote:
| Comcast access points don't have a password on the wifi, but
| isn't there still a captive portal where you have to log in
| to your Comcast account before getting access? This might
| have changed during the pandemic actually, but they at least
| can differentiate the guest network.
| livueta wrote:
| Those captive portals generally kind of suck; you can (or
| could, the last time I personally tried was pre-pandemic)
| get around them with mac spoofing or tunneling traffic over
| UDP 53/853. They'd have to keep long-lived NAT logs on the
| gateway to tell that the infringement was from the guest
| SSID.
|
| But I guess at that point you may as well just full-on
| wardrive it.
| sp332 wrote:
| Data used on the guest SSID does not count toward the
| data cap. So wherever it's tracked, they have a way to
| keep logs, manage abuse, and send DMCA notifications.
| testesttest wrote:
| Last time I checked (a year ago), after login,
| authentication was using MAC address and no encryption is
| used (not WPA or WPA2). You can easily sniff a MAC address
| and impersonate a device that is using xinfinty wifi.
| kstenerud wrote:
| This problem stems from ISP unwillingness to be categorized as
| infrastructure, like a phone company. If they were, they could
| use the same arguments that you can't force a phone company to
| terminate phone service just because people are using it for
| illegal activity.
|
| But if they were to be classified as infrastructure, they'd lose
| the lucrative edge they have now, so it's far better in their
| eyes to lose this fight, aggressively cut off internet access to
| some of their subscribers, and reap the rewards of a non-
| regulated service.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> This problem stems from ISP unwillingness to be categorized
| as infrastructure, like a phone company.
|
| A.K.A. Common Carrier status.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Which they lost when they lobbied to remove net neutrality
| requirements.
| monocasa wrote:
| At least cable was never a common carrier. DSL is more
| complicated.
| [deleted]
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > But if they were to be classified as infrastructure, they'd
| lose the lucrative edge they have now,
|
| I was following your argument up until this point. Can you
| elaborate on what this edge is, and how it would be lost? Are
| you referring to net-neutrality? If so, how much money is that
| bringing in?
| cratermoon wrote:
| Back in the 90s I told anyone that would listen that ISPs
| needed to have common carrier status, that it would protect not
| only the customers but also the ISPs. It seems, however, the
| ISPs have grown too entangled with content creation companies -
| or _are_ content creation companies - and they are OK spending
| a substantial portion of their revenues protecting the revenues
| of a Sony. They do so because they know their revenue stream
| depends on protecting the rent-seeking behaviors of the movie,
| publishing, and recording industries.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| I noticed after having both for years that FiOS doesn't care
| at all. You can pirate all you want. In contrast Comcast and
| Spectrum send out notices right away. I don't get the end
| game though. Cut off my gigibit line I pay through the nose
| for? Fine my roommate will just sign up. Or worse I just
| don't pay you anymore at all.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > ISP unwillingness to be categorized as infrastructure, like a
| phone company
|
| Why do they have to be willing in order for this to happen?
| Regulators should just do it whether they want it or not.
| excalibur wrote:
| > In this case, the same court found that Cox was on the hook for
| the copyright infringement of its customers and upheld the jury
| verdict of $1 billion in damages--by far the largest amount ever
| awarded in a copyright case.
|
| What a terrible decision. Was this jury composed entirely of
| corporate "persons"?
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| IIRC, the main issue was because Cox had a policy (as required
| under the DMCA) to block users who are repeat copyright
| offenders on their network. The problem was that they never
| actually followed through on this x-strike policy.
| sp332 wrote:
| slaymaker1907 has it right. Years ago Comcast et al. tried to
| write a six-strikes policy into law, but instead they got this
| weird compromise where ISPs had to each write their own policy
| which at _some point_ included terminating the customer 's
| account. So either not having such a policy or not implementing
| it as written will get an ISP in trouble, but there are almost
| no rules about what has to be in the policy. It's a bad law but
| at the same time you kinda have to work to screw it up as bad
| as Cox did.
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