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.
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.
I’m surprised ISPs haven’t found a way to start issuing fines and fees for alleged copyright violations.
Bottom line or not there are ways that ISP’s could mitigate the loss that would benefit their bottom like while hurting the consumer.
Example: 1000 users are now nor able to pay or use the internet because of Piracy. ISP says: oh we had 2000 users now we have 1000 easy we will just double the cost of internet on those 1000 users.
ISP’s are like any other company. Pointing it out doesn’t mean it is negative. They are a business ruin their business model and it impacts everyone. I am not saying you are wrong. I just think your comment tries to view this stance in a negative light in the context and something being a business with a bottom line doest not instantly make something negative or make something negative not worth fighting for.
Mitigating the loss isn’t the point.
Pirates account for some of the most significant internet users. Pirates generally buy higher tier plans, and actually use them. These are high value clients to the ISP.
Most households have maybe a handful of people, let’s say, 4 on average, where each can be doing around one thing on the internet at any given time. Some of the highest bandwidth activities that they can legally engage in, aside from bulk downloads (games, files, etc), is video streaming. Most 4K video services are streaming at around 25-40Mbps, across four people, that’s 100-160mbps. Accounting for overhead, most households don’t require more than 200mbps.
These are small fry users for the ISP, since presently 200mbps is very middle-of-the-road for available speeds in most places.
Pirates are usually in the 500+ Mbps plans whenever they’re made available, usually at a significant premium for the speed, and for the unlimited bandwidth that they need for their consumption. They’re the prosumers that see the value in the extra speed and cost… And there’s a LOT of them. Whether it’s casual piracy, like watching licensed content for free on some ad-riddled shady site from overseas, to full on data warehouse pirates who download terabytes of data every month… There’s a large number of users that pirate content of all sorts.
ISPs know this, they see the copyright claim notices, and they know how much of their userbase is going to vaporize if something like this passes.
You think it’s maybe half? That they should just increase pricing to make up for it? Yeah, they did the math, if that was the problem, they wouldn’t care, nor spend the money to fight it.
The fact that they’re fighting against this should be extremely telling that this kind of legislation would significantly impact the business. They would lose a huge portion of their clients. They would need to overhaul the business to stay afloat, if they can survive it at all.
You’re comment is reductive and short sighted. You don’t seem to realize what their actions actually mean, or at least, what they imply. ISPs are not fighting for us out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re not charities. They’re profit mongering business people who only care about the bottom line. So if they’re going to bat against the MPAA/RIAA for something that will benefit their clients who are doing things that are clearly illegal, what does that say about how this will affect their bottom line.
IMO, if this goes through, then we’re going to see more than a few ISPs go chapter 11.
Man most pirates use something like stremio or popcorn time off a home network, the real reason they need to fight this is were still on ipv4 - the amount of logistics they’d have to give a shit about just to address a device (then somehow beyond reasonable doubt attribute that device to a user) is prohibitively expensive
I get what you’re saying, and I think it’s more that the copyright folks want the ISPs to banhammer whole households when violations happen.
First, that’s going to punish a whole lot of people who have nothing to do with the piracy. Imagine having family over for a weekend, and their snot nosed tweenager brings their laptop, gets on your wifi and their torrent program fires up… Come Monday, after they’ve gone home, you try to sign in to your work at 9AM for your work from home job and you have no internet because of a copyright troll.
Second, they already know which subscriber it is. I dunno if you’ve downloaded a
carmovie illegitimately ever, but the ISP spams your inbox with notifications about “cease and decist” bullshit about it. Usually this goes to the ISP provided mailbox which nobody uses, so a lot of people don’t realize it’s happening, nor care, but they’re already legally required to forward that shit on to you. They know who is doing it. They send those messages and I’m sure have systems that tally up how many of their subscribers get them and at what frequency they are recieved.Third, ISPs are not the police. They’re literally the messenger that carries your traffic to and from the rest of the internet. They just want to happily continue doing that for the ludicrous amounts of money they’re paid to do it.
ISPs are already bearing the cost of upgrading all their stuff to support the ever growing sets of standards they have to meet to continue being an ISP, set forth by the FCC and other regulatory bodies that they previously stole millions of dollars from promising to upgrade their networks to fiber, then paid themselves insane amounts instead… They want to afford their next yacht and live life in luxury, not be the security guards for some copyright troll with a grudge.
Not to mention “ISP” is an incredibly broad term. You can consider international transit providers as ISPs. If they’re headquartered in the USA, they have to abide by the rules too. That means the “ISP” for the dedicated server farm for your local online delivery place could be shut down, because someone logged into one of their “cloud” desktops to watch finding Nemo on popcorn time, causing the datacenter ISP to cancel their internet. Poof. No more delivery because Jim doesn’t know how to hit “sign out” before setting up his work laptop to be a babysitter for his kids.
The implications of this are huge.
I haven’t read the text and maybe there’s exceptions for service networks and connections. Maybe it’s only targeting residential connections. IDK. But from what I’ve heard so far, that’s not the case. Given that this is patent trolls and government representatives writing this garbage, I doubt they know enough to exclude those groups.
If I’m right on that, and I hope to all fuck that I’m not, and they didn’t exclude service/business networks, then this legislation will be the single most disruptive thing that happens to the internet.
Services like Dropbox and other “cloud” storage systems will jump up and down, going offline regularly because people want to share x movie with so-n-so, and don’t know how, so they dump it wholesale into Dropbox, getting their internet service cancelled.
Even if I’m wrong, and it’s only targeting residential subscribers, it’s still a massive pain point. Work from home will be difficult at best, and most people won’t have internet service regularly. Given that the internet is presently regarded as more important than the fucking telephone, which the government annexed as an essential service when it was the only “fast” method of communication, and we’ve since dogpiled most of what was considered an essential service into the internet (like telephone calls), this really really can’t, and shouldn’t happen.
To continue my analogy to telephones, this is very similar to having your phone line cut because you played a copyrighted song for a friend over the line. Now you can’t call 911. Get fucked. In an era when telephone is the only game in town (before the internet), that would have been completely unacceptable. You got cut off because you called your friend to play him the new hit “enjoy the silence” by Depeche mode over the phone (in 1990), and now you can’t call 911 to get an ambulance for your visiting elderly relative who just had a heart attack, and they die.
gg copyright trolls, you sure “won”.
No. Fuck that. The internet is a critical communications network, not something you get grounded from because time/Warner/Disney (?) got angry about your use of it. Fuck them. Fuck this shit. Fuck the government for even considering it. Fuck everyone who supports this garbage. Access to the internet should be immutable. You can’t cancel someone’s connection because you take issue with how they live their life.
I understand what the copyright holders are doing and it makes me sick. They want to take away your internet because you didn’t pay full fucking price for some bullshit they’re peddling. You’re a source of entertainment at most, stay in your goddamned lane fuckers. You’ll take the exorbitant amounts of money the majority of people are willing to pay for your shit stain of a streaming service, and you’ll like it just the way it is. They want to make us comply through fear of losing access to shit like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all the crap we browse on the internet to bring us some iota of joy, so that the public will be so fearstricken of losing it, they they’ll fork over whatever they need to, in order to do things “legally” and we’ll be screwed into using their service… or else.
It’s a fucking money grab because they’re to chicken shit to prosecute people individually like the RIAA did during the Napster incident.
Either sit down and shut up, or sue the people responsible the way the RIAA did, which already has a judgement on record that you can’t hold the individual who is named as the subscriber for the illegal use of the service they’re subscribed to.
No really… At least one of those Napster RIAA cases went to a judge, and IIRC it was deemed that there was too much opportunity for it to be not the named subscriber that the named subscriber couldn’t be reasonably held liable for the actions of someone else connected to the internet through their connection. Wifi, pretty much guarantees that outcome.
So come at me bro. Good fucking luck you dillholes. Unless they catch you specifically in possession of the illegally obtained products, you’re fine. Just be sure to memorize the “erase everything and catch fire” command for your particular storage. As soon as you get the legal notice they must give you for the lawsuit, run it. They won’t have shit for evidence and the courts will throw out the case, forcing them to pay your legal fees.
And that’s exactly what they’re trying to avoid doing, by punishing people with this legislation. This is essentially a slap suit against the whole fucking country.
It must not pass.
You were too busy talking you missed the point when it knocked you on your ass.
Your entire comment can be summarized with one word: irrelevant.
Terminating service over allegations of piracy. Kicking someone off the internet because an automated copyright system accused them of piracy. That’s crazy.
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.
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 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
Absolutely
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?
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.
If someone is using municipal water in their meth lab, the whole city block shouldn’t have their water shut off
Removed by mod
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).
A private business should remain private. If the government an take a business away because of public importance, then there is no incentive for a business to grow.
China, North Korea. They siezed businesses, including internet.
I think that’s the only point we disagree on.
I do think ISPs should have much more competition. Exponentially more.
That would be a fair point if we were talking about like, small businesses in markets that are well-suited to competition, but that is not mpdern ISPs.
Iirc, much of the backbone of the US’s fiber optic cable network is publicly owned anyway, it’s just the “last mile” that’s privately owned, which is the local lengths of fiber that run through neighborhoods to individual residences. But most of this infrastructure was also heavily subsidized by the state, so the way I see it, ISPs are essentially leaches that extract rent from a system paid for by the people and (directly or indirectly) built by the state. Why should we let them collect profit from a network they didn’t build when we could own the entire network publicly and set monthly rates to break even, rather than generate a profit (which would keep prices very low, as seen in Every Other Country with mainly state/municipally owned ISPs).
If you allow the government to take over any private business, for any reason, they will fabricate reasons to do so. Stalin, and Mao did this. Publicly owned means owned by the people.
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.
It’s almost as if the people here favor individual rights over corporate profits.
imagine getting banned from the one monopoly ISP available to you in your entire city. what do you do after that? sell your house?
I actually just use my phone for internet and haven’t had a landline ISP for 2 years now.
Visible, $25/month has saved me so much money and they even sent me a free phone.
