8 ms·

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

181 points by LinuxBender 3y ago

mysteria 3y ago
That argument could, interestingly enough, technically apply to the power company or landlord as well. I mean people are renting a house and buying electricity to pirate right?
- wyldfire 3y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    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 and not do any kind of traffic inspection or analysis. That way they might be able to argue that the plaintiff couldn't prove contributory infringement.
    - kmeisthax 3y ago
      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 hack people, and you aren't logging or inspecting traffic, then you can't investigate that spam or that hacking. At a minimum it means every other online service is going to distrust your users - i.e send them through reCAPTCHA hell; up to an outright ban. Think like what it's like to use clearweb services through a Tor exit node, and now imagine that for a bunch of nontechnical users. They're going to switch to the ISP that doesn't result in them getting group punishment. But actual criminal actors are going to flock to the service, because they need someone in the middle to launder their packets for them, which makes them have a worse reputation, and so on.
      - ryandrake 3y ago
        Interesting. I wonder how VPN providers navigate "known or should have known" then?
        autoexec 3y ago
        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.
        kmeisthax 3y ago
        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.
        RugnirViking 3y ago
        how would it be a lawsuit? its farcical that there even are georestrictions in the first place. Netflix doesnt care about them either. The only reason they exist is to please rights holders with weird demands. It's not either netflix or the customer's responsibility to care about upholding them (other than netflix's own contractual requirements) In other news; netflix themselves allow the usage of VPNs[0] provided you dont use the free (ad-supported) plan. Presumably to prevent the sort of thing I used to do with spotify years ago (be from a region where no advertisers paid them, so the space where adverts would usually be was just blank) [0]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/277 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/277
    - hn_acker 3y ago
      > 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. This is a sufficient argument in many situations. To shore it up for cases where the electric company gets informed (by a court, for example, with or without the court actually ordering the electric company to do something about it) that subscriber Jackie Doe has been sued and penalized for copyright infringement, there has to be a complementary argument about whether placing mandatory enforcement on multiple providers in the service stack (website -> internet service provider -> electricity) is a reasonable legal framework. How many turtles on the way down should be forced to restrict known copyright infringers? Before internet access became nearly as necessary as it is today, former Senator Orrin Hatch proposed a law authorizing destruction of copyright infringers' computers by copyright holders. (In the service stack I mentioned previously, "computer" would be a link between internet service provider and electricity.) Meanwhile, my takeaway of the featured article is that bans of internet service are not a fringe idea, at least among big copyright publishers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#Intellectual_property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#Intellectual_prope... This thread reminded me of an EFF article "Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack" [2] about the content moderation tech stack (social media site -> site hosting provider -> internet service provider). The article focused on voluntary moderation actions by site hosting providers and ISPs but is a useful prototype for examining tech stacks which involve third-party liability laws, including in copyright contexts. [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/beyond-platforms-private-censorship-parler-and-stack https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/beyond-platforms-priva...
    - runlevel1 3y ago
      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 rare individuals who choose to fight do sometimes use that as a defense. However, those technologies have a purpose other than anonymizing activity. A residential ISP who took active measures to obscure their customers activity would have a harder time defending against a complaint of negligence.
      - autoexec 3y ago
        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.
      - swozey 3y ago
        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/fingerprinting-your-files/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2004/08/04/232539/fingerpri...
    - autoexec 3y ago
      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.
    - callalex 3y ago
      > the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know This is completely true, and yet many many countries place a fee on any writable media (drives, cards, disks) and funnel that bribe directly to the RIAA and MPAA by law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
- prophesi 3y ago
  On a related note, if you're a renter and utilities are included in your rent, be sure to check the lease if there's a clause that prohibits high electricity consuming activities like running a home media server, a cryptominer, or growing certain plants.
  - boplicity 3y ago
    I lived in a building that had the cost of electricity included in the rent for long-term tenants, but newer tenants had to pay for their own electricity use. One person I knew in the building was using their "free" electricity to mine cryptocurrency. This was, in my opinion, not far from stealing. Was it legal? Probably? Was it ethical? Not by a long shot.
    - boplicity 3y ago
      I'd be curious if anyone thinks if mining crypto in this case is ethical. If so, why? (It wasn't just a small amount -- there were many computers, running 24/7.)
      - whatshisface 3y ago
        I wonder how running several computers would compare to other high-current draws that we would consider normal use, like using an electric oven a lot (3kw, plausibly 10 computers).
        mysteria 3y ago
        The oven won't be on 24/7 and even if you're baking the elements cycle on and off (that's why you hear the clicking relays). You'll have to integrate it over a month and compare that to the constant consumption of a mining rig.
      - samatman 3y ago
        Tenancy is a contractual relationship. It doesn't include ethical sidequests like making sure your landlord doesn't pay large electrical bills which he has agreed to pay as part of the contract. Electricity is metered, making it the landlord's responsibility to put an "up to X KW a month" clause in the contract. That electricity isn't free, the scare quotes don't change that. It's cost-included. Your opprobrium appears to hinge on the idea that this tenant would only mine crypto if the power is provided on a single-bill, all-you-can-eat basis, which I don't see as a safe assumption here. The tenant got a good deal. That happens sometimes. If landlord ever notices, he'll put another clause in the contracts going forward. Live and learn.
ryandrake 3y ago
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.
- callalex 3y ago
  Keep in mind the ISPs are also the content publishers. A bit of an ouroboros if you will.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- throwup238 3y ago
  > 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!
  - duskwuff 3y ago
    Better yet, the photographer took a whole series of photos with this theme: https://www.dreamstime.com/search.php?srh_field=pirate&s_sp=Ocusfocus https://www.dreamstime.com/search.php?srh_field=pirate&s_sp=...
- nimbius 3y ago
  Must be a junior capo who forgot the boss wrote the DMCA specifically giving ISP operators a free pass (dont wanna step on the streaming racket)
- edm0nd 3y ago
  Honestly, I'm siding with the EFF on this one. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/if-not-overturned-bad-copyright-decision-will-lead-many-americans-lose-internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/if-not-overturned-bad-... They are a great org fighting for our digital rights.
j-bos 3y ago
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?
- shiroiushi 3y ago
  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.
  - tarxvf 3y ago
    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.
    - shiroiushi 3y ago
      So if jurors admit that they changed their verdict because they disagreed with the law, does that cause a mistrial?
      - j-bos 3y ago
        ianal but I believe so, it's the jury's duty under the law to decide based on the law and the facts presented at trial, anything else is a violation of that duty. Jury nullification works because there's no way to prove the why for a juror's decision. Arguably jury nullification is a feature of the right to trial by a jury of peers.
  - seanhunter 3y ago
    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-acquits-extinction-rebellion-protesters-despite-no-defence-in-law https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/jury-acq...
gustavus 3y ago
If purchasing isn't owning piracy isn't stealing.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Exactly. It's like if I take a rental car for a joyride. That shouldn't be illegal.
  - cma 3y ago
    Isn't it a replica of the rental car in the analogy?
    - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
      robertlagrant wouldn't download a car!
      - robertlagrant 3y ago
        Exactly! If I could, then car improvements would cease to exist.
  - Arialonomus 3y ago
    Your analogy undermines the point you seem to be making, given that renting is, by definition, not purchasing.
  - eddd-ddde 3y ago
    More so you look at a rental car from afar, and using your own mediums make your own exact copy, which you then use for a ride.
    - dylan604 3y ago
      Except, you incur quite an expense making your own exact copy whereas copying some bits costs you such a low number that it approaches $0
karaterobot 3y ago
> 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.
- tarxvf 3y ago
  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!
- seanhunter 3y ago
  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.
nadermx 3y ago
The ruling for those interested. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.161920/gov.uscourts.ca4.161920.92.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.161...
RiOuseR 3y ago
[dead]
WalterBright 3y ago
It's always the entity with money that is liable, not the entity that committed the dirty deed.
kelnos 3y ago
Disappointing that the ISP is liable for anything. They shouldn't be required to disconnect customers based on unproven allegations made by a random company, without any due process involved. Internet service should just be a human right. If you still really want to punish someone for copyright infringement, fine them. Taking away their internet access is cruel and unusual punishment given how much the internet is needed to function in society these days.

181 points by LinuxBender 3y ago

That argument could, interestingly enough, technically apply to the power company or landlord as well. I mean people are renting a house and buying electricity to pirate right?

wyldfire 3y ago
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.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  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 and not do any kind of traffic inspection or analysis. That way they might be able to argue that the plaintiff couldn't prove contributory infringement.
  - kmeisthax 3y ago
    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 hack people, and you aren't logging or inspecting traffic, then you can't investigate that spam or that hacking. At a minimum it means every other online service is going to distrust your users - i.e send them through reCAPTCHA hell; up to an outright ban. Think like what it's like to use clearweb services through a Tor exit node, and now imagine that for a bunch of nontechnical users. They're going to switch to the ISP that doesn't result in them getting group punishment. But actual criminal actors are going to flock to the service, because they need someone in the middle to launder their packets for them, which makes them have a worse reputation, and so on.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Interesting. I wonder how VPN providers navigate "known or should have known" then?
      - autoexec 3y ago
        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.
        kmeisthax 3y ago
        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.
        RugnirViking 3y ago
        how would it be a lawsuit? its farcical that there even are georestrictions in the first place. Netflix doesnt care about them either. The only reason they exist is to please rights holders with weird demands. It's not either netflix or the customer's responsibility to care about upholding them (other than netflix's own contractual requirements) In other news; netflix themselves allow the usage of VPNs[0] provided you dont use the free (ad-supported) plan. Presumably to prevent the sort of thing I used to do with spotify years ago (be from a region where no advertisers paid them, so the space where adverts would usually be was just blank) [0]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/277 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/277
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    > 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. This is a sufficient argument in many situations. To shore it up for cases where the electric company gets informed (by a court, for example, with or without the court actually ordering the electric company to do something about it) that subscriber Jackie Doe has been sued and penalized for copyright infringement, there has to be a complementary argument about whether placing mandatory enforcement on multiple providers in the service stack (website -> internet service provider -> electricity) is a reasonable legal framework. How many turtles on the way down should be forced to restrict known copyright infringers? Before internet access became nearly as necessary as it is today, former Senator Orrin Hatch proposed a law authorizing destruction of copyright infringers' computers by copyright holders. (In the service stack I mentioned previously, "computer" would be a link between internet service provider and electricity.) Meanwhile, my takeaway of the featured article is that bans of internet service are not a fringe idea, at least among big copyright publishers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#Intellectual_property https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#Intellectual_prope... This thread reminded me of an EFF article "Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack" [2] about the content moderation tech stack (social media site -> site hosting provider -> internet service provider). The article focused on voluntary moderation actions by site hosting providers and ISPs but is a useful prototype for examining tech stacks which involve third-party liability laws, including in copyright contexts. [2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/beyond-platforms-private-censorship-parler-and-stack https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/01/beyond-platforms-priva...
  - runlevel1 3y ago
    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 rare individuals who choose to fight do sometimes use that as a defense. However, those technologies have a purpose other than anonymizing activity. A residential ISP who took active measures to obscure their customers activity would have a harder time defending against a complaint of negligence.
    - autoexec 3y ago
      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.
    - swozey 3y ago
      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/fingerprinting-your-files/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2004/08/04/232539/fingerpri...
  - autoexec 3y ago
    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.
  - callalex 3y ago
    > the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know This is completely true, and yet many many countries place a fee on any writable media (drives, cards, disks) and funnel that bribe directly to the RIAA and MPAA by law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
prophesi 3y ago
On a related note, if you're a renter and utilities are included in your rent, be sure to check the lease if there's a clause that prohibits high electricity consuming activities like running a home media server, a cryptominer, or growing certain plants.
- boplicity 3y ago
  I lived in a building that had the cost of electricity included in the rent for long-term tenants, but newer tenants had to pay for their own electricity use. One person I knew in the building was using their "free" electricity to mine cryptocurrency. This was, in my opinion, not far from stealing. Was it legal? Probably? Was it ethical? Not by a long shot.
  - boplicity 3y ago
    I'd be curious if anyone thinks if mining crypto in this case is ethical. If so, why? (It wasn't just a small amount -- there were many computers, running 24/7.)
    - whatshisface 3y ago
      I wonder how running several computers would compare to other high-current draws that we would consider normal use, like using an electric oven a lot (3kw, plausibly 10 computers).
      - mysteria 3y ago
        The oven won't be on 24/7 and even if you're baking the elements cycle on and off (that's why you hear the clicking relays). You'll have to integrate it over a month and compare that to the constant consumption of a mining rig.
    - samatman 3y ago
      Tenancy is a contractual relationship. It doesn't include ethical sidequests like making sure your landlord doesn't pay large electrical bills which he has agreed to pay as part of the contract. Electricity is metered, making it the landlord's responsibility to put an "up to X KW a month" clause in the contract. That electricity isn't free, the scare quotes don't change that. It's cost-included. Your opprobrium appears to hinge on the idea that this tenant would only mine crypto if the power is provided on a single-bill, all-you-can-eat basis, which I don't see as a safe assumption here. The tenant got a good deal. That happens sometimes. If landlord ever notices, he'll put another clause in the contracts going forward. Live and learn.

ryandrake 3y ago

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.

callalex 3y ago
Keep in mind the ISPs are also the content publishers. A bit of an ouroboros if you will.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
throwup238 3y ago
> 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!
- duskwuff 3y ago
  Better yet, the photographer took a whole series of photos with this theme: https://www.dreamstime.com/search.php?srh_field=pirate&s_sp=Ocusfocus https://www.dreamstime.com/search.php?srh_field=pirate&s_sp=...
nimbius 3y ago
Must be a junior capo who forgot the boss wrote the DMCA specifically giving ISP operators a free pass (dont wanna step on the streaming racket)
edm0nd 3y ago
Honestly, I'm siding with the EFF on this one. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/if-not-overturned-bad-copyright-decision-will-lead-many-americans-lose-internet https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/if-not-overturned-bad-... They are a great org fighting for our digital rights.

j-bos 3y ago

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?

shiroiushi 3y ago
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.
- tarxvf 3y ago
  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.
  - shiroiushi 3y ago
    So if jurors admit that they changed their verdict because they disagreed with the law, does that cause a mistrial?
    - j-bos 3y ago
      ianal but I believe so, it's the jury's duty under the law to decide based on the law and the facts presented at trial, anything else is a violation of that duty. Jury nullification works because there's no way to prove the why for a juror's decision. Arguably jury nullification is a feature of the right to trial by a jury of peers.
- seanhunter 3y ago
  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-acquits-extinction-rebellion-protesters-despite-no-defence-in-law https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/23/jury-acq...

gustavus 3y ago

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

robertlagrant 3y ago
Exactly. It's like if I take a rental car for a joyride. That shouldn't be illegal.
- cma 3y ago
  Isn't it a replica of the rental car in the analogy?
  - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
    robertlagrant wouldn't download a car!
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      Exactly! If I could, then car improvements would cease to exist.
- Arialonomus 3y ago
  Your analogy undermines the point you seem to be making, given that renting is, by definition, not purchasing.
- eddd-ddde 3y ago
  More so you look at a rental car from afar, and using your own mediums make your own exact copy, which you then use for a ride.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Except, you incur quite an expense making your own exact copy whereas copying some bits costs you such a low number that it approaches $0

karaterobot 3y ago

> 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.

tarxvf 3y ago
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!
seanhunter 3y ago
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.

nadermx 3y ago

The ruling for those interested. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.161920/gov.uscourts.ca4.161920.92.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ca4.161...

RiOuseR 3y ago

[dead]

WalterBright 3y ago

It's always the entity with money that is liable, not the entity that committed the dirty deed.

kelnos 3y ago

Disappointing that the ISP is liable for anything. They shouldn't be required to disconnect customers based on unproven allegations made by a random company, without any due process involved. Internet service should just be a human right. If you still really want to punish someone for copyright infringement, fine them. Taking away their internet access is cruel and unusual punishment given how much the internet is needed to function in society these days.