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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.
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.