Supreme Court to decide whether ISPs must disconnect users accused of piracy
a year ago by Tony Bark to c/technology
Yes, but that would mean that logic has any bearing on what the Supreme Court decides to do

The US has a law to limit the liability of gun manufacturers.
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA) is a U.S law, passed in 2005, that protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products. Both arms manufacturers and dealers can still be held liable for damages resulting from defective products, breach of contract, criminal misconduct, and other actions for which they are directly responsible. However, they may be held liable for negligent entrustment if it is found that they had reason to believe a firearm was intended for use in a crime.
More like, if you steal something you are banned from using roads and sidewalks and doors.
Yeah, sure but to "steal something" is to imply that you're depriving the original owner use of the thing you stole. This is more like making an exact copy depriving nobody of use of the original thing.
it's more like depriving someone use of roads, sidewalks, and doors because they got caught walking out of Kinkos
Gonna be a lot of issues that come from this. Legally speaking. It's already on the books that an IP address doesn't represent a single person... so I'm not terribly clear on how they plan to enforce this even if it were to pass.
You assume precedent, consistency, or ethics matter to the current people in power in the US.
I'm not a judge, but isn't internet essentially a utility these days? Cutting someone off because of piracy seems like cutting off electricity or water because they did something illegal with it.
Net neutrality is why your online jokes were censored under Biden
-- John McRacist, Republican congressman, former CFO of Evil Inc., former lawyer of Vile Ltd., member of Christofascism Society and Roman Salutes to Jesus
I'm pretty sure this supreme court would rule that people don't have a right to electricity, or even water. They'll probably be totally ok with people losing internet access as punishment for crossing media owners.
or even water
We never stopped the “lol treaties with Native American tribes don’t count” bullshit.
Besides your point but this is the aspect about Gorsuch that I can't seem to make internally consistent. He almost always rules in terms of native rights – even when, I think, it stretches his supposed originalist guiding principle – yet is more than happy to rule as a conservative on all other times and support "industry" and big business (even when it stretches his supposed originalist guiding principle).
I know that nothing necessitates a person to act logically and most act from emotion, more than anything, but most people, I find, have a relative reason they think they're being logically consistent but I can't seem to suss even that out, with regards to him.
to be fair the treaty never specified anything about water, and the Navajo nations should have had better lawyers or better guerilla warfare tactics if they wanted more negotiating power.
Pragmatically, yes. Legally, no. Progressives have been fighting for years to get internet classified as a utility in the US, and regressives and (ironically) internet companies have been fighting against that effort at every turn in the name of profit.
And now look how well that's turned out. Gee, if only some people had warned them that deregulation was a monkey's paw...
They could even be totally innocent, the mere accusation is enough, wtf?
That sink is a vampire, don't let it in
Due process seems to just be a recommendation.
Recommendation???
No.
It's a luxury you can try but only if you can afford it.
bottle water companies would love this, as would the oil giants
I'm some places in the States they will cut off your electricity or water for sharing with a neighbor that has had theirs shut off. I have seen both happen personally, and not in some back water state. They both happened in upstate NY.
Cut off for sharing, or cut off for running illegal/unsafe/unlicensed wiring and plumbing connections?
For straight up running a hose or an extension cord so they're not completely doa.
more importantly because of accused. Just accused.
I’m not a United Statesian so I have no clue anymore how it works there, but other places have been making the case that the Internet is an essential service and that access to it is a basic right. So to leapfrog off your question, is that like a poor person stealing a loaf of bread being cut off from food because they didn’t food responsibly enough?
Unfortunately the country I was born in, the USA, is also one that voted against the international resolution to define food as a human right. 😕
didn't many European countries remove People's hand for theft a few centuries ago?
If it's upheld, that's the precursor to full-blown info blackouts, just cut off internet to anyone 'accused' of wrongspeak against the powers that be, which is basically everyone.
This also sounds like SOPA reborn.
Given the US is ran by the New Fuhrer? I could see this being used against criticism of leadership or anything else resembling free will and not just piracy. I also find it sad that the day the US will probably die as a free country and turn into a dictatorship, is the same day it gained its independence in the first place.
Is ran?
Their uncivilized censorship regime vs. our civilized online child protection and anti-terror laws.
It was supposed to be a reference to a meme making fun of "us vs. them" mentalities. I know enough about the think of the children argument.
I'm not doing piracy, I am merely training my AI!
Call me when all these LLM get their internet cut off then.
Being accused of will lose you access to basic infrastructure? Why not cut electricity too?
Don't give them ideas. Next they'll cut the blood stream to your brain.
Supreme Court: "One of us! One of us!"
Accused???
Well alrighty then, I hereby accuse the operators of donaldjtrump.com of piracy! Anybody else notice any piratical activity? Foxnews.com seems pretty fishy.
And OpenAI of course.
But it's not piracy if you use it for an LLM, right‽
Yes we are all training our LLMs. Perfectly legal.
I nominate we test with out with the Zuck and his networks.
This still won’t make me pay for Netflix
But it will make me pay for VPNs!
So if Meta is convicted of pirating books for AI training, they lose all internet connectivity? 🧐
dint they just rule AI can legally scrape/books, but not for people who are pirating directly.
The US is such a silly place. Everything is so wrong.
IIRC the judge said they could use the data for training, but specifically added that piracy is still piracy and he didn’t rule on that.
So Disney can just sue Meta for one trillion 😀
so then individuals could just train a model locally on the shittiest hardware they have
Here i am again doing my duty https://mullvad.net/en/why-privacy-matters
Protip for anyone unfamiliar: Mullvad really is the gold standard for a private VPN. If you just want to pirate shit and not get angry letters from your ISP, Nord or PIA will accomplish that. But if you REALLY want privacy, Mullvad is it.
⬆️
That mask almost fell but he’ll make sure it doesn’t slip again
We all wear masks
*it has come to my attention that my joke was not funny, that is all
Idk why but the simplicity of it has me convinced and so far it works well.
But if you need to pay for a „Media Flatrate“ anyway, and you have those 5€ a month, why not spend it for a good cause?
(Also PIA and nord cost 12€ a month unless you sign their predatory 2 year contracts [which are even then just like 1€ per month cheaper], so mullvad is just way better in that regard too)
Also features like UDPoTCP let you bypass local network restrictions, and the ability to pay with cash and Crypto is great if you dont want want to/ cant use paypal or a bank account for any reason
I think in Finland it is a basic utility like power and water. It is certainly priced like that.
Exactly, sure disconnect customers from the Internet if they use it for entertainment... but once they use it to earn the income that pays their bills, it becomes questionable... and once it is in practice required to be a citizen, at the local, national or supra national level then it becomes a totally different question, to which the answer is basically no, you can't disconnect someone otherwise you remove their citizenship.
This is how you get a new darknet.
Yep there is no way they can block I2P, they have to block all of it.
In Germany and no doubt some other countries, private law firms can (on behalf of the copyright holders) request people's identity based on residential IP addresses and then send extortionist legal threats. Apparently an IP appearing on a public tracker can be enough to trigger it, without any confirmed data transfer.
VPNs are common and usually sufficient.
They could. The protocol also supports IP spoofing, so doxing could also be a thing.
For individuals, it is a time consuming and costly legal process, whether justified or not. For the law firm, it costs a few cents per letter, but they get a few hundred (or more) euros when some sucker pays.
they try that in the US, using mass litigation, but it doesnt work, its usually designed to scare indivudal IP users to "turn them self in"
And now I'm on a VPN because if they're just gonna cut people off for accusing of piracy they're gonna have to cut off everyone with a VPN.
TBH I should have been behind a VPN before
I love Mullvad and used them for years, but without port forwarding, they're not the service you want for torrenting. Some alternatives like AirVPN or ProtonVPN are better suited for that stuff.
Before the haters jump in and tell me "it works fine fer me!" it's only working because the user on the other end, like myself, have port forwarding set up. Since you don't have it, you'll never connect to anyone else like yourself nor will they be able to connect to you.
Of course there are alternatives like streaming and Usenet but there are tradeoffs no matter what you pick.
I don't think your explanation of why it seems to work is correct.
I seems to work (works in a limited way, even), because any remote machines that your bittorrent client connected to during downloading are temporarilly recorded on the Mullvad router on the other side of your VPN doing NAT translation as associated with your machine, so when those remote machines connect to that router to reach your machine, it knows from that recorded association that those connections should be forwarded to your machine.
This is quite independent of people on the other side using port-forwarding or not.
Port-forwarding on the other hand is a static association between a port in that router and your machine, so that anything hitting that specific port of the router gets forwarded the port in your machine you specified (hence the name "port" "forwarding"). With port-forwarding there is no need for there having been an earlier connection from your machine to that remote machine to allow "call back".
This is why at the end of downloading a torrent behind a Mullvad VPN will keep on uploading but if one restarts a torrent which was stopped hours or days ago (i.e. purelly seeds), it never uploads anything to anybody - in the first case that NAT translation router associated all machines your client connected to during download to your machine, so when they connect back to download stuff from you it correctly forwards those connections to your machine, but in the second case it's just getting connections from unknown remote machines hitting one of its ports and in the absence of a "port-forwarding" static rule or a record of your machine having connected to those remote machines, it doesn't know which of the machines behind it is the one that should receive those connection so nothing gets forwarded.
So it's perfectly possible to share back when behind a Mullvad VPN but you have to leave the torrent client keep on seeding immediatly after downloading and it will only ever upload to machines which were in the swarm when the client was downloading (they need not have been clients it downloaded from, merelly clients it connected to, for example to check their availability of blocks to download, which give how bittorrent works normally means pretty much the whole swarm)
It is however not at all possible to just start seeding a torrent previously downloaded unless the download wasn't that long ago (how long is "too long" depends on how long the NAT Translation Router of Mullvad keeps those recorded associations I mentioned above, since those things are temporary and get automatically cleaned if not used),
Ok so now I'm confused entirely. Does that mean leeching I don't need to do a port forward, but seeding I do?
Which means if I want to leech to get the file then seed when I'm not heavily using my network I'm sort of out of luck?
i just use mullvad on my router and port forward directly there
That still won’t work. Either the forwarded port is getting blocked by Mullvad (which is bad) or you’re bypassing Mullvad to use the forwarded port (which is really bad). You’ve essentially roped yourself into a double-NAT situation, where your router has a forwarded port but the router behind yours (the VPN server, which you have no control over) doesn’t.
Best alternative is a seedbox. Preferably in the Netherlands.
Corporate America over here committing piracy en masse.
They have ways to block / identify VPNs.
I think the point is that they can't easilly track back to a specific client of a specific ISP instances of unlicensed downloading of copyrighted materials if they're done behind a VPN.
Mind you, they can still easilly track it back to the VPN, so make sure you're using a provider that puts privacy above all an is not based in countries like the US or UK.
That said, if they just throw an unsupported accusation at you and the ISP cuts you out, using a VPN or not makes no difference.
I recommend AirVPN. Never had a problem w/ them & doesn’t require a special VPN client.
Ditto.
Pirate everything, death to the capitalists.
Get to the point that you don't want their products. Consuming their stuff at all is like sporting brand name cloths and covering the logo.
Once you do this you will find you don't need most of it and it's just a waste of time anyway. The stuff that is authentic and that you genuinely need you can support.
It's honestly like quitting drugs.
The mere accusation causing someone to lose the Internet, which is vital to modern life, would be insane.
Additionally, it would do little to nothing to stop piracy.
they actually do think that if you stop piracy people will flock back to streaming services when in reality all that will happen is i'll just watch more twitch.
I hope that this doesn't come to the US. Even now, a lot of the available Wifi hotspots are from cable companies (which require their account logins, so they definitely will know who you are).
Would giving a throwaway VOIP number that's untraceable to someone fool that kind of service, I wonder? Unless caught right away, they would probably have to get their identity on an individual basis.
I just watch free shit like Tubi, Pluto, Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Peertube, DailyMotion, etc.
You wouldn't be able to access twitch. You'd have to buy cable TV or an antenna for the free channels. Either way media wins via commercials.
All public wifi will be disconnected pretty quickly.
This is actually why I usually install a VPS in whichever country I’m physically in—my end devices always appear to be connecting to something innocent in-country (like a corporate VPN). That VPS then does the double-hop out of the country so that the VPS also seems pretty innocent too.
I don’t think it’s actually more secure though since the VPS is in my name and it’s technically decrypting everything. But I’m a bit less paranoid about that. (I’m not doing tons of illegal shit anyway.)
Look at it this way. Who would you rather risk pissing off, your ISP or a VPS Hosting company?
put the qbittorrent-wireguard container on the vps.
The unproven claims is the key part here. Also the point of "terminating an account would punish every user in a household" is important as well.
You can fine someone for piracy if you want. As long as they have the standard legal protections. But cutting access is excessive.
In the beginning we used to exchange cassettes. You would have a boombox with two cassettes. You would play one while you recorded on the other. Then you gave the cassette back to your friend. Next was the VCR with the big ass cassettes.
Then you would do the same with floppies, then zip disks. Then one day CD recording was a thing, then DVDs. Then thumb drives and now portable HDDs. Basically the cheapest form or recording is always the most popular way for people to share stuff.
The only ones who don't want us to share are those who want to make millions by never innovating.
I couldn't afford one of those fancy 2-cassette boomboxes, so I had my friend bring his tape deck and we put them real close together in the quietest room of the house and recorded that way. Having several siblings meant that there were no quiet places, so we used the empty garage when my parents were at work. The audio was autrocious, tons of echo and static, but I played that tape thin until it snapped.
let's all fall on our sword to make sure Disney never loses a potential subscriber for Marvel Wars. Truly, we are defending the interests of the people here
Then pirates will just get smarter. No way for them to see who is watching all of these movies with their VPN and Debrid service.
(Donald trump voice) "We should hold all food companys liable for users violent crimes, this man stabbed another man to death with a spoon! 30 minutes before he ate kraft mac and cheese. It gave him the energy to violently stab this innocent man"
Lets hope they got common sense
What's crazy is that Trump claims to be against the current ruling in Sony's favor, and is siding with Cox.
Instruction unclear? So trump like cocks?
Good for him!
Same in the US.
I got one once from something I know for sure I didn't download. I always assumed it was a friend of mine staying with us that was torrenting "Boss's Daughter Big Booty XXX" or whatever it was, but I never really wanted to ask.
Lol.
Do ISPs like making money?
Then they shouldn't disconnect users who pirate.
I get notifications from my ISP all the time. They don't do anything though because they like the money I give them.
After switching to torbrowser for all my questionable searches and downloads, I no longer get notices from my ISP for like 10 years now
I've been torrenting movies and software since 2000, no vpn, like I literally have torrented damn near everything I've watched for decades and have only gotten a notice once and it wasn't even me. It was from a temporary roommate who had watched a movie on a pirate streaming site.
So that tells you how good and accurate their detection techniques are.
Their methods are fine, they literally just pirate the stuff themselves, see which IPs connect to them, then connect those to an ISP and notify them. The main reasons you wouldn't get notices are getting lucky, not seeding much, not torrenting things that are being monitored, or having an ISP that doesn't care much.
The single notice from the streaming site makes sense, pirate streaming sites are usually honeypots or heavily monitored.
My routine is always use piratebay, never use a pirate streaming site, no new or big studio releases, no porn, not seeding for long and choosing less active torrents. I can't say much for how effective it is since I've never gotten hit so I can't really experiment (I've had five or six ISPs in two different countries).
they literally just pirate the stuff themselves, see which IPs connect to them, then connect those to an ISP and notify them.
And I don't even understand how this would hold up if it ever went to trial. How can an IP owner "pirate" their own IP? Even when they outsource it to services who do this they're still giving permission for the IP to be distributed.
It's like hiring someone to "steal" your own TV, putting it in a back alley and then accusing whoever takes it of being a thief.
It's generally seen as okay on a similar level to undercover work. They do it for Investigation reasons, the torrent was already uploaded before they joined, their monitoring serves a legitimate law enforcement purpose, and they're authorized by the copyright holder (themselves) to do it. They didn't put the movie or whatever out there themselves.
They will use it as another excuse to damage education.
Just do what we do in Canada. Send them threatening letters. It scares 90% of parents into telling their kids to knock that shit off, but they're toothless and can't actually do anything, and the remaining 10% still pirate away. Everyone's happy.
ISPs already do that here in the states. The court case is to decide whether they should shut off access.
I believe ISPs do not want to cut people off. All that does is push you to a competitor. They want to be able to hold you liable for damages
I got one then another, then got a VPN...
I can tell you that Mediacom cable will cut your service off for it, and you have to call in and get scolded before they turn it back on.
And, if it happens 3 times, your service is disconnected permanently.
Alas, true for mine
Thats what the firewall rules do too, don't allow internet connection if there's no vpn connection.
Firewall is a system-wide solution that always works, while qbt config relies heavily on the application implementing interface binding properly. Which it doesn't fully btw.
Yes. I share like 100+ Linux distros via torrents.
Hell, windows itself does it.
low key hope this happens.
it's gonna be fuckin funny to watch all IT in the US grind to a halt because everyone who WFH can't work because their internet was cut off.
then a week into mandatory office returns someone will get the whole datacenter cut off because they're running torrents from their laptop.
dumb fucks are going after the worst people to fuck with.
don't fuck with IT. they know what filthy shit you watch from home.
And they don't care what filthy shit you watch from home so long as they don't have to see it
thank god i go to ireland to do all my torrenting.
i prefer to do mine in the czech republic, personally
Good.
Like 20 years ago the RAVE Act said venues can be charged if anyone is in possession of illegal drugs inside of them during an event. Similar in some ways
Life depends more on accessing things online. This would just be punishing people beyond the scope of the case against people.
Guess it's time to go underground, sigh.
You should already be underground
Then the AI companies that have openly used pirated stuff could also get disconnected lol. Of course business will be fine and individuals will get shafted who expects anything different nowadays.
So all tech companies?
According to the article this is the USA. How on brand.
and it works just as well there as it would in the us....
by which i mean it doesn't work
Yeah it’s fucked up
Is piracy AI scraping?
@lemmy.world
go to feed...
@lemmy.world
go to feed...
Based on that logic, ammunition and arms manufacturers should be held liable for damages as well.
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