Four more large Internet service providers told the US Supreme Court this week that ISPs shouldn’t be forced to aggressively police copyright infringement on broadband networks.
While the ISPs worry about financial liability from lawsuits filed by major record labels and other copyright holders, they also argue that mass terminations of Internet users accused of piracy “would harm innocent people by depriving households, schools, hospitals, and businesses of Internet access.” The legal question presented by the case “is exceptionally important to the future of the Internet,” they wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday.
There would be no more internet access for anyone anymore if that were allowed.
Soooo many insecure networks out there ripe for the picking if you know what you’re doing and have the tools available. And the tools are often free, not costing any money. From there, those networks are the places people will go to commit their “piracy”.
And what exactly is piracy? If I purchase an album on iTunes but choose to download it on ThePirateBay, is that really piracy? Because I have done that when the music THAT I FUCKING PAID FOR is no longer available for me to download off of iTunes and Apple won’t give me a refund for said music purchase. People do it for games that include shitty DRM and don’t allow them to easily install on another device like Linux too.
I like the end result that ISPs are pushing back on this, but don’t mistake this for altruism on their part.
Their businesses make money selling internet service. Were they to support cutting off those accused of piracy, they would be losing paying customers. Further, the business processes and support needed for this to function would be massively expensive and complicated. They’d have to hired teams of people and write whole new software applications for maintaining databases of banned users, customer service staff to address and resolve disputes, and so much more.
Lastly, as soon as all of that process would be in place to ban users for piracy accusations, then the next requests would come in for ban criteria in a classic slippery slope:
- pornography
- discussions of drugs
- discussions of politics the party in power doesn’t like
- speaking out against the state
- communication about assembling
- discussion on how to emigrate
All the machinery would be in place once the very first ban is approved.
Plus, you aren’t disconnecting a person, but a whole family or business.
And since many areas in the US only have one provider, you force that family to cancel all streaming services they might have. It’s a lose-lose-lose situation.
I think a big problem we don’t want to address is now that we’re so interconnected, internet access is a necessity that should be classified as a utility. You can’t just cut off someone’s electricity without notification or process because they did something bad with it and it should apply here too
Not if they get their universal digital ID system in place. It is the wet dream of tyrants of all kinds.
What. Is this something that’s been on the horizon?
I think it is also the user they disconnect for piracy tend to pay more. They tend to be more premium customers also why should they enforce what happens on their lines. It is an illegal search and seizure. Let the government get a warrant prove something is illegal then the ISP can disconnect them.
Why don’t they start with OpenAI and other LLM vendors, because they are the biggest copyright infringement abusers of all time?
Because they’re also rich. Laws are for the poors.
ISPs are rich too?
Which is why the Supreme Court is hearing the case. Two wealthy industries fighting out who gets to extract the most wealth.
If someone is using municipal water in their meth lab, the whole city block shouldn’t have their water shut off
Removed by mod
If someone is using meth in prison, the whole prison should be shut down.
If internet companies want to make an argument like that, then internet should be treated as a utility.
If internet companies want to make an argument like that, theninternet should be treated as a utility.
The headline should read:
Despite best efforts and all odds, ISPs find themselves on the right side of history.
Only because it would hurt their bottom line.
Funny how we can only win when it’s corporations fighting each other.
imagine getting banned from the one monopoly ISP available to you in your entire city. what do you do after that? sell your house?
puts on fake moustache “Hello I am new to the area and would like to procure one internet please.”
It’s insane that people (okay, mostly corporations) try to argue internet access is not a utility. What happens then? Does your home value decrease? Or does the next purchaser have to petition the ISP to convince them they are a different, non-infringing customer and hope they reverse the ban??
Sony can’t have your electricity cut off if you pirate. Because electricity is a utility.
ISPs want it both ways. They want the legal protections of a utility without the obligations.
The solution is to give them the legal protection they want by declaring them a utility.
I wonder if would you get your electricity cut off if you plugged in a 750kW industrial oil drill in your backyard
The 200A main breaker on most homes would trip a little above 50kW. Could you even start up 1000hp without 3 phase?
I wanted to exaggerate for comedic purposes, I had 500MW written initially 😄
The people who sell electricity are surprisingly happy to sell you electricity. If you happen to do something horribly wrong and don’t burn your house down, an electrician will be happy to do the repairs. If you have 200 Amp service and draw the full 200 all year long, the most significant reaction would probably be getting a personalized Christmas card.
Those moments when you can’t decide if someone’s username means they’re a science nerd or a Venture Bros. fan.
Me_irl:
Who in their right Minds would want to be a nerd but not a venture brothers fan?
I’m not certain but there’s a high probability that that Venn diagram is just a circle
Go Team Venture!
It’s like the other side of the diagram has disappeared from the mateeeeeriiiiiaal plaaaaannneeeeee!
Terminating service over allegations of piracy. Kicking someone off the internet because an automated copyright system accused them of piracy. That’s crazy.
How can you hold a company responsible for someone else’s actions? When someone hits someone with a car we don’t go after the manufacturer. I think ISPs should only be held accountable for their own actions.
I think they’re trying to apply the same logic that’s applied to internet platforms like YouTube, Twitter, etc., where the platform is only non-liable for copyright violations on their platform if they have a good-faith system in place for preventing copyright infringement and responding to DMCA requests. I don’t think this logic should apply to ISPs, frankly the entire internet is far too large of a place to be monitored by any one company for copyright infringement, and I’d rather ISPs be nationalized and treated as public utilities than try to fit them into the same legal framework as social media companies.
That being said, even if the courts decide they should be forced into that same legal framework, ISPs could easily satisfy their legal obligations by simply blocking access to copyrighted content via their DNS service (which can easily be worked around by using an alternative DNS). There’s no legal reason why ISPs would be expected to block individual users from their network, and even if there were, ISPs shouldn’t be allowed to exist anyway, the state (and therefore the people) paid the lion’s-share of the cost to lay all that fiber-optic and copper cable across the country, so the state should own that infrastructure and operate it in the interest of the people (Internet access would be considered a human right and publicly owned ISPs would only have prices high enough to break even, not generate a profit).
The supremes: oh! Yes! We are on your side ISPs! The MPAA and RIAA will now be allowed to sue individual users directly bypassing courts.
Have fun! You got them boys! You got that 98 year old grandma! Get her house! And that minority girl trying to download the new Beyonce songs? Deathrow! 1 per song! All the single ladies our ass! You wouldn’t download a car! We’re the Supremes! Watch us! But first Trump is president starting now, and poor kids shall get no food in school! They wouldn’t be poor if they got food! Oh and women…we did the abortion thing already darn!..no vote for women! Marriage age 6 now, overruling all states laws.
Let’s get you back to your room Mr. Thomas.
Not everyday i agree with ISPs but here we are. Guilty of and accused of are two very different things. Innocent until proven guilty.
Looks like an old-politician idea to me; a generation late. Nowadays, cutting internet is as bad as cutting electricity.
it’s a nice argument from the users point of view, but it won’t be allowed
copyright holders will need to be thrown a bone, and given some level of enforcement, else, copyright law is meaningless
celebrate all you want, this won’t pass muster
~ signed, a jolly roger
copyright holders will need to be thrown a bone,
Is there a law to support this position?
If so, where is limit? Deep packet inspection of VPN traffic? At whose expense?
It still makes me feel some type of way that Sony (a Japanese company) gets so much sway over US business and policies. It’s something I thought about a lot when Microsoft was trying to close its deal with Activision. I don’t care much either way about multi-billion dollar conglomerates (or trillions in Microsoft’s case) butting heads but it did strike me as odd that a foreign company had that much of a hold on the deal. I get that piracy of media is frowned upon but like the ISP’s are arguing here, the affects of cutting off access to their clientele would have a lot of negative impact. I once again sit here wondering why a foreign company should have that kind of power over American citizens… you know?
May I introduce you to Nintendo?
I never understand how this community relates to copyright. It’s all the freedom of the high seas until AI gets mentioned. Then the most dogmatic copyright maximalists come out It’s all anti-capitalist until AI is mentioned and then the most conservative, devout Ayn Rand followers show up.
Yeah, that’s what happens when you decide on issues separately instead of following a consistent set of principles. I, personally, try to follow a consistent set of principles, with as few caveats as I can muster. Here’s my take:
- copyright should be much shorter, perhaps back to the original 14 years w/ a single optional renewal of 14 years - principle: information should be freely available; caveat: smaller creators shouldn’t get immediately screwed by a large org with more publishing capacity
- ISPs should only provide internet, and if a law is broken, LE should go after individuals - principle: personal responsibility, ISPs aren’t responsible for how you use their service, they’re only responsible for providing a consistent service
- piracy is wrong, but it shouldn’t be prioritized - principle: piracy is a form of theft, since you’re accessing something you don’t have a legal right to; caveat: there’s no evidence that piracy actually reduces sales, and some evidence that it improves it, so let it be
- AI is copyright violation because it has been shown to be capable of reproducing entire texts, so AI companies should compensate creators - principle: copyright, as above; exception: personal use should be fine (similar argument as piracy), but commercial use is profiting off another’s work directly
I think everyone should decide what their principles are, and frame every time they deviate as an exception to those principles instead of just taking every issue at face value. If we don’t have that foundation, everything becomes way too subjective.
I take my principles from libertarianism (NAP), not from objectivism (Ayn Rand), and I make exceptions based on utilitarianism.
Some of it is about the "Why"s.
Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.
Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.
The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)
Why is it the opposite with AI?
Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.
And that’s just for one side of the debate.
Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?
Here’s my guess. Piracy provides a competition against the horrible practices of streaming and entertainment companies that doesn’t otherwise exist, forcing them to provide a better service.
Artists are just a single person making art and their service isn’t gobbled up by the capitalist machine and turned into something user unfriendly. They don’t usually make too much money, unlike huge entertainment corporations, either.
When it comes to piracy, individual content creators often don’t care as long as they get money to live. There have been people who work on video games or movies who say they don’t care if others pirate their work as long as others get to see it. But for AI, it copies and changes the work, stripping the art of its original watermark, and it sets itself up to be a replacement of the artist itself. It doesn’t just spread their work without having you pay for it, it replaces the concept of needing an artist altogether, but only by using their labor in the first place without paying them for it.
If piracy let movie studios replace the idea of needing individual content creators, writers, artists actors, etc then people would feel differently I think. As it is now, people don’t care about big studios, they care about the individual. Piracy currently only really harms the former and not the latter. AI is the opposite.
Copyright is the same for everyone; corporations or people, rich or poor. Financially speaking, this issue has close to 0 to do with individual content creators, much less struggling ones. They are simply not the big content owners.
PR companies know that people care about the individual. So when they shill for a law, they will send in some individual. It’s never about money for corporations or the rich, but always about the “hard-working American”; and then say hello to some Joe, the plumber. I can see why artists on social media would discourage their followers from going to the competition. But the whole copyright angle won’t save anyone’s job.
