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

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/court-blocks-1-billion-copyright-ruling-that-punished-isp-for-its-users-piracy/

by LinuxBender • 2 years ago

181 88 2 years ago

arstechnica.com

ryandrake3• 2 years 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.

throwup238• 2 years 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• 2 years 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=...

nimbius• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Honestly, I'm siding with the EFF on this one.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/06/if-not-overturned-bad-...

They are a great org fighting for our digital rights.

emacdona• 2 years ago

Eh… I will always find it easy to root against Sony. They embedded rootkits in media they produced for PAYING customers [1]

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_roo...

thwarted• 2 years ago

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.

My understanding is that ISP don't want to be seen as dumb pipes, despite that it would probably absolve them of a lot of responsibility and liability, because dumb pipes are effectively a commodity and thus a race to the bottom price-wise. Of course, in many US markets, they have this locked up and are a monopoly anyway. This is may be (slightly) less of a focus now, but back in the 90s, ISPs saw piled on extra services as differentiators and lock in, which is why you might have had an email address in your ISP's domain, or (in the case of cable internet) Video On Demand services tied in with internet access, or even things like content filtering (to appeal to parents). ISPs have tried a lot of different things to avoid being considered dumb pipes.

charles_f2• 2 years ago

Ironically I would probably pay more for a dumber, but more reliable pipe.

My operator changed my modem, and its configuration is "easier than ever!" (says the manual). That is, you have to use your account page on their website to change the wifi settings, and the more advanced part of it you must install an app on your phone. But you can't specify a custom DNS (which I'm sure the default router firmware would let you do).

So yeah, just give me a modem, and I'll do everything myself.

whaleofatw2022• 2 years ago

I mean I hate -other- parts of Cox but AFA cablecos go, they weren't comcast bad at least?

autoexec6• 2 years ago

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.

ISPs don't generally go looking for copyright infringement. In order to keep safe harbor protections ISPs are required by law to register with the US copyright office (which requires them to pay a small annual fee) and provide them with a contact address where they agree to accept DMCA notices. The media industry hires third parties who hunt for IPs sharing files and they report them to the ISPs at their registered address which means they now can't pretend they didn't know about it. Of course those third parties aren't very careful about who they accuse of infringement and innocent people and even innocent network printers (https://archive.nytimes.com/bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/0...) have been accused as a result, but accusations and unproven allegations are all that matter according to the courts (so far)

pyuser5832• 2 years ago

I used to work for an ISP. We were indoctrinated not to even think about what was going over our lines.

The big concern was we’d be sued, and the emails of the opposing law firm would be going over our pipes.

But that was just an example given to us as to why we should back away.

Realistically, the firm was spending its time and energy laying more cables to offer services in a wider area.

pmontra• 2 years ago

The big concern was we’d be sued, and the emails of the opposing law firm would be going over our pipes.

You mean, the mails between the opposing law firm and their customer suing you? That would be bad.

But also the mails between any other parties not in any litigation with you. Or web requests by any random person to any random server.

callalex3• 2 years ago

Keep in mind the ISPs are also the content publishers. A bit of an ouroboros if you will.

j-bos2• 2 years 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?

shiroiushi2• 2 years 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.

tarxvf2• 2 years 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.

seanhunter2• 2 years 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-acq...

mysteria2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

ryandrake3• 2 years 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.

prophesi• 2 years 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.

boplicity3• 2 years 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.

Dylan168072• 2 years ago

Home media server? Won't that be on par with a lightbulb?

gustavus• 2 years ago

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

robertlagrant2• 2 years ago

Exactly. It's like if I take a rental car for a joyride. That shouldn't be illegal.

cma• 2 years ago

Isn't it a replica of the rental car in the analogy?

Arialonomus• 2 years ago

Your analogy undermines the point you seem to be making, given that renting is, by definition, not purchasing.

eddd-ddde• 2 years 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.

corint• 2 years ago

In the UK there's a law covering this specific case. Theft is deigned "taking with the intent to permanently deprive", so joyriders were defending their actions by returning the vehicle after just this.

Therefore, there's now an offence for this: Taking Without Consent: https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/theft-act-offences

autoexec6• 2 years ago

Piracy isn't stealing anyway. It's just copyright infringement. DRM and other consumer hostile practices are just more reasons to add to the growing pile of reasons why copyright infringement might not be unethical no matter what the legality is.

thefatboy• 2 years ago

Is piracy uploading or downloading?

karaterobot• 2 years 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.

tarxvf2• 2 years 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!

seanhunter2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

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

WalterBright• 2 years ago

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

kelnos2• 2 years 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.

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

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