6 ms·

EFF to court: The Supreme Court must rein in secondary copyright liability

113 points by walterbell 1y ago

Wowfunhappy 1y ago
> Households—especially in low-income and communities of color, which disproportionately share broadband connections with other people—would face collective punishment for the alleged actions of a single user. Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!
- idle_zealot 1y ago
  Ah yes, in order to Get Things Done activists should read the room and... stop mentioning race? Because racists are in charge? I'm sure they'll manage great things and all of this social backsliding will just resolve on its own.
  - em-bee 1y ago
    if you want racists to do something that benefits people, you can't tell them that people of color benefit too, worse that they are the primary beneficiaries. we have a tendency to cut of our nose to spite our face, and racists even more so.
  - Wowfunhappy 1y ago
    I would like the racists to not be in charge. I would also like for households that share internet connections, which we have just been told are disproportionately communities of color, to not loose access to the internet.
neilv 1y ago
It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society. So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that. A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.
- crooked-v 1y ago
  Most media piracy is a direct result of it being somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to consume that media legally. See, for example, the tremendous drop in music piracy resulting from various music streaming purchases and Apple's popularization of direct track purchases before that. Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes. (* Check out the official guide on what services have the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-episodes-movies https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...)
  - yepitwas 1y ago
    IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way. But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
- mulmen 1y ago
  Piracy is a service problem. Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves. The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
  - IlikeKitties 1y ago
    I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy. edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.
heffer 1y ago
Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result. I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.
- BobaFloutist 1y ago
  I really wish there was a paradigm where we could track people down for death/bomb threats(/swatting)/CSAM, but where the police were genuinely prohibited from accessing the same information for anything less. I guess the missing link between CSAM and piracy is probably fraud/scams? It's pretty hard to argue that law enforcement should be allowed to track someone down for an implausible death threat but not for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a senior citizen, but then it's harder to establish a clear line between fraud/scams and piracy. I guess with fraud/scams you can just track the cash and not the other vectors? I dunno, I have similar feelings about license plate cameras and CCTV. I don't think there's any big mysterious reasons why I can, in five minutes, imagine a system that's actively protected from abuse, but somehow it's never what's proposed, I think it's because privacy advocates tend to be opposed to the people giving cops new toys so all the proposals for giving cops new toys have minimal input from privacy advocates. It's a bummer.
- dannyw 1y ago
  I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore. Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually. It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
AnthonyMouse 1y ago
The premise of intermediary liability is such a scourge. You have a dispute between two parties but the plaintiffs don't want to be bothered to actually prove their case, so instead they want to a) deputize some conglomerate as the judge and then b) be able to sue the conglomerate if it sides with the accused; but not allow the accused the same privilege. And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process? I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.
ants_everywhere 1y ago
Back in the days when the music industry stole from artists the justification was that it cost money to pay for recording studio time, print records, set up distribution channels, promote shows, organize shows, and so on. Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases. Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much. And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over. I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.
- walterbell 1y ago
  There's an impending "no tax on tips" rule that may benefit artists going direct to fans.
  - HWR_14 1y ago
    Artists are not classified as a typically tipped job, so they do not benefit from this.
    - walterbell 1y ago
      Artists with a podcast for fans might benefit, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Tipped-Occupations-Detailed-8-27-2025.pdf https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Tipped-Occupation... Digital Content Creators: Produce and publish on digital platforms original entertainment or personality-driven content, such as live streams, short-form videos, or podcasts. For example: Streamer, online video creator, social media influencer, podcaster.
- privatelypublic 1y ago
singularity2001 1y ago
EFF, the force that wants good but creates evil

113 points by walterbell 1y ago

> Households—especially in low-income and communities of color, which disproportionately share broadband connections with other people—would face collective punishment for the alleged actions of a single user. Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!

idle_zealot 1y ago
Ah yes, in order to Get Things Done activists should read the room and... stop mentioning race? Because racists are in charge? I'm sure they'll manage great things and all of this social backsliding will just resolve on its own.
- em-bee 1y ago
  if you want racists to do something that benefits people, you can't tell them that people of color benefit too, worse that they are the primary beneficiaries. we have a tendency to cut of our nose to spite our face, and racists even more so.
- Wowfunhappy 1y ago
  I would like the racists to not be in charge. I would also like for households that share internet connections, which we have just been told are disproportionately communities of color, to not loose access to the internet.

neilv 1y ago

It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society. So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that. A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.

crooked-v 1y ago
Most media piracy is a direct result of it being somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to consume that media legally. See, for example, the tremendous drop in music piracy resulting from various music streaming purchases and Apple's popularization of direct track purchases before that. Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes. (* Check out the official guide on what services have the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-episodes-movies https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...)
- yepitwas 1y ago
  IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way. But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
mulmen 1y ago
Piracy is a service problem. Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves. The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
- IlikeKitties 1y ago
  I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy. edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.

heffer 1y ago

Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result. I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.

BobaFloutist 1y ago
I really wish there was a paradigm where we could track people down for death/bomb threats(/swatting)/CSAM, but where the police were genuinely prohibited from accessing the same information for anything less. I guess the missing link between CSAM and piracy is probably fraud/scams? It's pretty hard to argue that law enforcement should be allowed to track someone down for an implausible death threat but not for stealing tens of thousands of dollars from a senior citizen, but then it's harder to establish a clear line between fraud/scams and piracy. I guess with fraud/scams you can just track the cash and not the other vectors? I dunno, I have similar feelings about license plate cameras and CCTV. I don't think there's any big mysterious reasons why I can, in five minutes, imagine a system that's actively protected from abuse, but somehow it's never what's proposed, I think it's because privacy advocates tend to be opposed to the people giving cops new toys so all the proposals for giving cops new toys have minimal input from privacy advocates. It's a bummer.
dannyw 1y ago
I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore. Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually. It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.

AnthonyMouse 1y ago

The premise of intermediary liability is such a scourge. You have a dispute between two parties but the plaintiffs don't want to be bothered to actually prove their case, so instead they want to a) deputize some conglomerate as the judge and then b) be able to sue the conglomerate if it sides with the accused; but not allow the accused the same privilege. And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process? I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.

ants_everywhere 1y ago

Back in the days when the music industry stole from artists the justification was that it cost money to pay for recording studio time, print records, set up distribution channels, promote shows, organize shows, and so on. Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases. Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much. And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over. I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.

walterbell 1y ago
There's an impending "no tax on tips" rule that may benefit artists going direct to fans.
- HWR_14 1y ago
  Artists are not classified as a typically tipped job, so they do not benefit from this.
  - walterbell 1y ago
    Artists with a podcast for fans might benefit, https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Tipped-Occupations-Detailed-8-27-2025.pdf https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Tipped-Occupation... Digital Content Creators: Produce and publish on digital platforms original entertainment or personality-driven content, such as live streams, short-form videos, or podcasts. For example: Streamer, online video creator, social media influencer, podcaster.
privatelypublic 1y ago

singularity2001 1y ago

EFF, the force that wants good but creates evil