4 ms·

Cox owes $1B to record labels for harboring music pirates, jury decides

28 points by OrgNet 7y ago

Clubber 7y ago
>Essentially, the recording industry just showed that a jury will buy its argument that an ISP should be held liable for failing to kick a music pirate off its network. This will end badly for you and me. I suspect there will be large groups of people who are unable to get internet access because they were suspected of some copyright violation by the ISPs, who are now liable and aren't required to be fair or show evidence, or even let the accused present evidence. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually, entire geographic areas will be cancelled from internet services just because of the risk. ISPs will now have to deal with the fact that a ~$100 a month subscription can now risk billions of dollars. They're not going to take any risks with any subscribers. They're also going to heavily scan all network traffic applying AI network analysis to find any potential offenders and cut them off. I can see how this could potentially kill the internet as we know it, at least in the US.
- sli 7y ago
  This is how VPNs will get de facto banned without ISPs having to go through the trouble to get them actually banned.
  - curryst 7y ago
    Likely not. This statute requires the defendant to have knowledge of the infringement. With a VPN, ISPs (theoretically) don't know that you are infringing. On the other hand, however, this same statute could be applied to VPN providers because they do have knowledge of the infringement. It will be interesting to see if US based VPN providers start clamping down on torrent traffic.
- Keverw 7y ago
  > entire geographic areas will be cancelled from internet services just because of the risk. Hmm. Like if a city or neighborhood is low income, they might pirate more? So don't give them internet access at all? Kinda like how insurance companies think males are worse drivers I guess or some sort of pre-crime thing. I guess instead of cutting people off totally, you could just create an internet risk score and charge rates based on that? Factor in your location, profession, age, if you are married or not, credit score, smoker or not, etc. If that happened pretty sad then. Some jobs you can only apply online, I guess some retail jobs don't even print applications anymore and then if you were applying for tech pretty sure Google doesn't print out job applications either. The internet seems just as important as water, electric or phone. I think businesses and other organizations just assume you have it now. Then not everyone has smartphones either or want smartphones. Someone I know isn't tech-savvy and still has a flip phone. Their insurance agent told them about their new app that could lower your rates that you keep open while driving, I guess it uses the accelerometer (while other companies offer a thing that plugs into the OBD2 port) but I guess he couldn't believe about not having a smartphone in this day and age. I know I couldn't stand using a flip phone, texting and voicemail access was a nightmare, but some people still just want a phone that can actually only just make phone calls. Then for other people their smartphone is their only access to the internet, which a smartphone is nice to have when away from your computer but I couldn't stand if it was my only device... Even a cheap Chromebook probably be more useful if using the internet a lot.
  - unlinked_dll 7y ago
    in many places, telcos have a legal obligation to serve communities. The quality/price of that service might be shit, but you’re not going to see telcos back out of low income neighborhoods. They’ll just increase prices.
  - Clubber 7y ago
    >Like if a city or neighborhood is low income, they might pirate more? Could be as simple as a neighborhood has a lot of teenage boys in it.
LinuxBender 7y ago
To keep the focus off your home network, consider instead running your torrent programs on a cheap VM in a cheap VPS provider, then sftp down the files you wish to keep and destroy the VM. You can probably automate this. VPS providers typically have much faster symmetric network connectivity anyway.
- jstarfish 7y ago
  Amazon will forward piracy notices to the accountholder, so you are still liable. Have no experience with piracy on other hosts, but Ramnode seems to host a lot of malware so I'm sure it would work there. Just use a seedbox service instead.
  - LinuxBender 7y ago
    Absolutely. I am suggesting to do this for all file sharing, so that even for legal bittorrent file sharing, the ISP doesn't even look at you. This also reduces the impact on your bandwidth quota, if you have one. Comcast is 1TB/mo.
unlinked_dll 7y ago
I thought that the whole point of the DMCA was to remove secondary liability from ISPs or does that cover providers, just services? Regardless this is dumb. Cox shouldn’t have to care what data flows through their network anymore than they care about what people transmit through their telephone networks.
- ThrustVectoring 7y ago
  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is also extremely relevant, but it specifically exempts intellectual property law.
mutant 7y ago
I don't think it's the end of the internet just yet, there's going to be some appeals here

28 points by OrgNet 7y ago

>Essentially, the recording industry just showed that a jury will buy its argument that an ISP should be held liable for failing to kick a music pirate off its network. This will end badly for you and me. I suspect there will be large groups of people who are unable to get internet access because they were suspected of some copyright violation by the ISPs, who are now liable and aren't required to be fair or show evidence, or even let the accused present evidence. I wouldn't be surprised if eventually, entire geographic areas will be cancelled from internet services just because of the risk. ISPs will now have to deal with the fact that a ~$100 a month subscription can now risk billions of dollars. They're not going to take any risks with any subscribers. They're also going to heavily scan all network traffic applying AI network analysis to find any potential offenders and cut them off. I can see how this could potentially kill the internet as we know it, at least in the US.

sli 7y ago
This is how VPNs will get de facto banned without ISPs having to go through the trouble to get them actually banned.
- curryst 7y ago
  Likely not. This statute requires the defendant to have knowledge of the infringement. With a VPN, ISPs (theoretically) don't know that you are infringing. On the other hand, however, this same statute could be applied to VPN providers because they do have knowledge of the infringement. It will be interesting to see if US based VPN providers start clamping down on torrent traffic.
Keverw 7y ago
> entire geographic areas will be cancelled from internet services just because of the risk. Hmm. Like if a city or neighborhood is low income, they might pirate more? So don't give them internet access at all? Kinda like how insurance companies think males are worse drivers I guess or some sort of pre-crime thing. I guess instead of cutting people off totally, you could just create an internet risk score and charge rates based on that? Factor in your location, profession, age, if you are married or not, credit score, smoker or not, etc. If that happened pretty sad then. Some jobs you can only apply online, I guess some retail jobs don't even print applications anymore and then if you were applying for tech pretty sure Google doesn't print out job applications either. The internet seems just as important as water, electric or phone. I think businesses and other organizations just assume you have it now. Then not everyone has smartphones either or want smartphones. Someone I know isn't tech-savvy and still has a flip phone. Their insurance agent told them about their new app that could lower your rates that you keep open while driving, I guess it uses the accelerometer (while other companies offer a thing that plugs into the OBD2 port) but I guess he couldn't believe about not having a smartphone in this day and age. I know I couldn't stand using a flip phone, texting and voicemail access was a nightmare, but some people still just want a phone that can actually only just make phone calls. Then for other people their smartphone is their only access to the internet, which a smartphone is nice to have when away from your computer but I couldn't stand if it was my only device... Even a cheap Chromebook probably be more useful if using the internet a lot.
- unlinked_dll 7y ago
  in many places, telcos have a legal obligation to serve communities. The quality/price of that service might be shit, but you’re not going to see telcos back out of low income neighborhoods. They’ll just increase prices.
- Clubber 7y ago
  >Like if a city or neighborhood is low income, they might pirate more? Could be as simple as a neighborhood has a lot of teenage boys in it.

LinuxBender 7y ago

To keep the focus off your home network, consider instead running your torrent programs on a cheap VM in a cheap VPS provider, then sftp down the files you wish to keep and destroy the VM. You can probably automate this. VPS providers typically have much faster symmetric network connectivity anyway.

jstarfish 7y ago
Amazon will forward piracy notices to the accountholder, so you are still liable. Have no experience with piracy on other hosts, but Ramnode seems to host a lot of malware so I'm sure it would work there. Just use a seedbox service instead.
- LinuxBender 7y ago
  Absolutely. I am suggesting to do this for all file sharing, so that even for legal bittorrent file sharing, the ISP doesn't even look at you. This also reduces the impact on your bandwidth quota, if you have one. Comcast is 1TB/mo.

unlinked_dll 7y ago

I thought that the whole point of the DMCA was to remove secondary liability from ISPs or does that cover providers, just services? Regardless this is dumb. Cox shouldn’t have to care what data flows through their network anymore than they care about what people transmit through their telephone networks.

ThrustVectoring 7y ago
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is also extremely relevant, but it specifically exempts intellectual property law.

mutant 7y ago

I don't think it's the end of the internet just yet, there's going to be some appeals here