Firms wanted seven years' worth of IP address logs on users who discussed piracy.
While we can be pretty confident that Reddit has its own motivations (i.e. self-interest) for fighting these lawsuits, this is still a good news story for pirates.
It’s data that could have value, so I doubt they don’t store it. I think the movie studios didn’t offer enough. Or Reddit thought it was too damaging for this particular sale.
I always assumed this would happen, so had a second account. Which had a special email address both of which I only used via Tor and private brower mode.
It was insane to think they would comply with this to begin with. Downloading pirated media isn’t illegal, neither is discussing piracy. What is illegal is redistribution, and good luck proving that on a large scale community like this.
EDIT: These are 2 USA based companies, US Laws apply to this context.
More specifically there is no US Federal Law about obtaining pirated works, only the Redistribution
17 U.S. Code § 506 - Criminal offenses
(a)Criminal Infringement.—
(1)In general.—Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed—
(A)for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
(B)by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180–day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
(C)by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.
(2)Evidence.—
For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement of a copyright.
(3)Definition.—In this subsection, the term “work being prepared for commercial distribution” means—
(A)a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution—
(i)the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution; and
(ii)the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed; or
(B)a motion picture, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution, the motion picture—
(i)has been made available for viewing in a motion picture exhibition facility; and
(ii)has not been made available in copies for sale to the general public in the United States in a format intended to permit viewing outside a motion picture exhibition facility.
So, basically, downloading cracked adobe products is always right. It’s always morally acceptable. But your provider is risking their ass.
The big industry names want to make you believe that you’ll be punished for downloading a car. It’s all fearmongering.
America is such a small country though, no one would assume anything said online is directed at it’s miniscule population without an explicit reference.
Listen, they either reply to the comment they wanted to reply to, or they did it wrong. They replied to the comment that prefaced with a statement about US Law in particular. It should be clear to them that the statement applies to US Law.
In a motion to compel that was filed last month, movie companies Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures argued that “Reddit users do not have a recognized privacy interest in their IP addresses.”
But in Wednesday’s ruling, US Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson said, “The Court finds no reason to believe provision of an IP address is not unmasking subject to First Amendment scrutiny.”
Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures previously sued the Internet service provider Frontier Communications, alleging that it is liable for its users’ copyright infringement.
The fact that movie companies only sought IP addresses instead of names this time around wasn’t enough to sway the court.
As in the previous cases, the movie companies “cannot show that the information they seek here is unavailable from other sources,” Hixson wrote.
Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures cited Reddit posts in which users say that Frontier didn’t terminate their Internet service despite sending many copyright infringement notices about torrent downloads.
The original article contains 598 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It kinda does if a judge has decided that an IP address does not identify who the offender was and thus is not enough evidence to bring a case against someone.
I feel like I don’t need to explain to folks around here that companies will lawyer up and basically use the legal system to harass and intimidate regardless if they have standing or not if they think you are small enough to be bullied into stopping a behavior. Which I assure you your average instance admin is.
Might I direct you to the huge flaming catastrophe of bullshit known as “the police don’t give a fuck lol”. All they need to do is make it difficult, costly and time consuming to win and fuck you once you get hit with charges. And would you look at that, the US legal system specializes in all 3 of those! How convenient.
The sad reality is no matter how winnable your case is, companies can still bury you for years and consume every free moment of your life and then some. For many people, these court battles become their entire life for several years. It can cost them everything.
They’ll need one but that doesn’t mean they will be able to afford one. The point of these lawsuits is to intimidate, even if they don’t win, if people see lives ruined because of the cost to defend, they’ll be scared into not pirating. This is a fear campaign.
And yet they still want them, so there must be more to the story. I also don’t understand why since I have dynamic IP address in EU, unless they can match the ownership to a person at any given time in the past its not useful info.
Not really, though. If they’re ordered to turn over IPs, they’ll turn over IPs. Whether those are legit or VPN IPs is another story, but the burden placed on the instance admin doesn’t really change much.
Reddit blocks access to all major VPN services (on desktop for sure) when they click a link from a search engine (maybe even navigating directly to it but I don’t do that). This has been happening for about a month now. There’s a specific page it shows that basically says “come back without a VPN.”
I don’t think it does it if you’re logged in and have cookies enabled.
Caveat: there is a simple way to bypass it, I’ll let you old.heads figure that one out.
No lmao, I tried to upvote his comment and Thunder spat out that error. A few subs have started doing that (or it’s instance-wide but only for certain VPN servers) in the last week or so.
I can access old.reddit.com with VPN. The new shitty layout will block you but there are browser extensions to automatically redirect. I’m never logged in since I deleted my accounts a few months ago.
That would probably be because your instance is different. Lemmy.world has recently blocked VPN traffic apparently because of bad actors uploading CSAM behind VPN. I also had issues with Lemmy with my VPN this week and either need to split tunnel or need to browse Lemmy as view-only.
Those bad actors are really stupid, a VPN isn’t going to protect them. You’re not magically anonymous behind a VPN, and such material is obviously going to attract the attention of very skilled cyber security experts & law enforcements.
Idiots doing crimes never understand basic OpSec.
Not all instances keep logs…
Some intentionally discard them, look into the policys of the instance you’re signing up to.
All your comments and posts are hosted on your parent instance then shared to the federated instances.
Some instances don’t even let you sign up with an email or make it optional.
Lemmy.world keeps logs, but much more controversial instances often don’t.
Also it’s much more complex, because you have to think about the scope of the potential lawsuit as well as the given evidence that a user is actually sharing the material infringing on their copyright; which will not be a large amount of the user base. They can’t simply sue a user for having an account, the user has to actively be sharing infringing material.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.
What is reddit?
Baby don’t hurt me
it’s where everyone in Lemmy came from
I confirm.
What is lemmy? 🫣
An instance with poor interoperability and boot licker admins.
I doubt - or hope they don’t - Reddit stores them for that long?
It’s data that could have value, so I doubt they don’t store it. I think the movie studios didn’t offer enough. Or Reddit thought it was too damaging for this particular sale.
Reddit wasn’t offered enough.
I always assumed this would happen, so had a second account. Which had a special email address both of which I only used via Tor and private brower mode.
I am so conflicted on which side should I be on :/
A rough translation of a brazilian quote for you: “In a fight between these guys, I cheer for the fight”.
Brazilian phonk intensifies
That’s poetry
I’m gonna say this all the time now
If the film industry wins that could be a really awful precedent. Just sayin’
How is it hard to root for the anonymity of people? This is pretty cut-and-dry.
You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) side with any for profit company
I’m glad Reddit won here because it sets a precedent that will protect less well-funded Lemmy instances.
Ever?
Small exception for when two for profit companies are fighting each other. At that point it becomes a question of which is the lesser evil.
So like the US elections.
They’re the same picture.
Welll y’know what they say, the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that
Fuck Reddit.
I’ll give it a go, but I don’t think you can fuck a website yet.
Not with that attitude you can’t
Hey I’m ready to fuck a website, I’m just waiting on technology to catch up!
For real tough, Steve can suck diseased dicks in hell.
Le reddit wins legain, m’fellows!
thanks for the pic it really makes my eyes piss jizz in my mouth
So… They’re happy?
yea steven
Is that a red hat?
Careful now, IBM is also awfully litigious.
You’ll never narwhal my bacon, see!
It was insane to think they would comply with this to begin with. Downloading pirated media isn’t illegal, neither is discussing piracy. What is illegal is redistribution, and good luck proving that on a large scale community like this.
EDIT: These are 2 USA based companies, US Laws apply to this context.
Careful with this. Downloading pirated content can definitely be illegal depending on where you live.
It’s just not usually enforced as heavily as redistributing.
this! there are countries other than the US
The US Media Companies demanding user details from a US Social Media Company is in the USA though. In case that was unclear to some people.
More specifically there is no US Federal Law about obtaining pirated works, only the Redistribution
So, basically, downloading cracked adobe products is always right. It’s always morally acceptable. But your provider is risking their ass.
The big industry names want to make you believe that you’ll be punished for downloading a car. It’s all fearmongering.
Yes but you commented on a global website, so your previous generalist statement definetly doesn’t apply to everyone reading it :)
Then share your local law. Don’t be pissy that Americans are clarifying for other Americans.
America is such a small country though, no one would assume anything said online is directed at it’s miniscule population without an explicit reference.
Whoops, your bias is showing.
Thats why I stated at the top that more specifically there is no “US Federal law…”
And that’s why they specifically referred to “your previous generalist statement” where you didn’t do that.
Listen, they either reply to the comment they wanted to reply to, or they did it wrong. They replied to the comment that prefaced with a statement about US Law in particular. It should be clear to them that the statement applies to US Law.
It’s a US site and a US court.
US law is the only thing relevant to the case being discussed.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
In a motion to compel that was filed last month, movie companies Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures argued that “Reddit users do not have a recognized privacy interest in their IP addresses.”
But in Wednesday’s ruling, US Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson said, “The Court finds no reason to believe provision of an IP address is not unmasking subject to First Amendment scrutiny.”
Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures previously sued the Internet service provider Frontier Communications, alleging that it is liable for its users’ copyright infringement.
The fact that movie companies only sought IP addresses instead of names this time around wasn’t enough to sway the court.
As in the previous cases, the movie companies “cannot show that the information they seek here is unavailable from other sources,” Hixson wrote.
Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures cited Reddit posts in which users say that Frontier didn’t terminate their Internet service despite sending many copyright infringement notices about torrent downloads.
The original article contains 598 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Food for thought: Lemmy instance admins probably can’t afford $800 an hour corporate attorneys to fight off subpoenas.
Food for though: In the US judges have ruled on multiple occasions that an IP address doesn’t actually prove what individual engaged in the act.
Doesn’t matter, these are unpaid volunteers standing up instances. Most, if not all, have no desire to fight that battle on their own dime.
That’s why it does matter.
Even if they get the IP addrsss from an instance, they can’t use it for anything.
It doesn’t just stop there.
It kinda does if a judge has decided that an IP address does not identify who the offender was and thus is not enough evidence to bring a case against someone.
I feel like I don’t need to explain to folks around here that companies will lawyer up and basically use the legal system to harass and intimidate regardless if they have standing or not if they think you are small enough to be bullied into stopping a behavior. Which I assure you your average instance admin is.
Might I direct you to the huge flaming catastrophe of bullshit known as “the police don’t give a fuck lol”. All they need to do is make it difficult, costly and time consuming to win and fuck you once you get hit with charges. And would you look at that, the US legal system specializes in all 3 of those! How convenient.
Police can arrest you, but they don’t run the courts.
Ie you get brought in on bogus charges and if the only evidence is a number that isn’t admissable as evidence you would likely see a mistrial.
The average person getting sued also can’t afford an attorney
They sure as hell will find money for an attorney if they are being sued for 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars.
The sad reality is no matter how winnable your case is, companies can still bury you for years and consume every free moment of your life and then some. For many people, these court battles become their entire life for several years. It can cost them everything.
They’ll need one but that doesn’t mean they will be able to afford one. The point of these lawsuits is to intimidate, even if they don’t win, if people see lives ruined because of the cost to defend, they’ll be scared into not pirating. This is a fear campaign.
And yet they still want them, so there must be more to the story. I also don’t understand why since I have dynamic IP address in EU, unless they can match the ownership to a person at any given time in the past its not useful info.
they can. your telco provider knows exactly which ip was assigned to whom at any given time
Sure, but that’s assuming the logs contain your ip in the first place.
Assume they do until proven otherwise
You can just look at the source code… no need to assume anything. You can’t prove a negative lol
And this is why you VPN.
That doesn’t help instance admins at all, though.
It helps admins help you stay anonymous by relieving them from having to cover for you.
I am not going to thank the unpaid volunteers who make the fediverse possible by getting them C&D letters/legal threats.
Well I appreciate that. But simply discussing piracy should be okay.
Not really, though. If they’re ordered to turn over IPs, they’ll turn over IPs. Whether those are legit or VPN IPs is another story, but the burden placed on the instance admin doesn’t really change much.
MFW I went to upvote but couldn’t because “error: VPN blocked” 😑
Huh, I exclusively browse Lemmy through a VPN and I’ve never seen that one.
He’s probably talking about reddit They no longer allow vpn’s or any user obfuscators to browse the site
instagram definitely does this, reddit seems fine for me so far
Reddit blocks access to all major VPN services (on desktop for sure) when they click a link from a search engine (maybe even navigating directly to it but I don’t do that). This has been happening for about a month now. There’s a specific page it shows that basically says “come back without a VPN.”
I don’t think it does it if you’re logged in and have cookies enabled.
Caveat: there is a simple way to bypass it, I’ll let you old.heads figure that one out.
The block is intermittent on Reddit, but it does occur.
No lmao, I tried to upvote his comment and Thunder spat out that error. A few subs have started doing that (or it’s instance-wide but only for certain VPN servers) in the last week or so.
No they don’t. I use the site with a VPN often and it generally works
Are you logged in? I can’t access Reddit with a VPN if I’m not logged in
replace ‘www’ with ‘old’ in the address and it’s fixed.
I’ve been using a VPN with an account recently. Works fine.
I can access old.reddit.com with VPN. The new shitty layout will block you but there are browser extensions to automatically redirect. I’m never logged in since I deleted my accounts a few months ago.
Yes they do. The block is intermittent on Reddit, but it does occur frequently enough to be obvious they are trying to keep their user dta drsgnet uninterrupted under the guise of “stopping bots”.
That would probably be because your instance is different. Lemmy.world has recently blocked VPN traffic apparently because of bad actors uploading CSAM behind VPN. I also had issues with Lemmy with my VPN this week and either need to split tunnel or need to browse Lemmy as view-only.
Those bad actors are really stupid, a VPN isn’t going to protect them. You’re not magically anonymous behind a VPN, and such material is obviously going to attract the attention of very skilled cyber security experts & law enforcements.
Idiots doing crimes never understand basic OpSec.
Oh. They sued an instance? 😱
Anyway… here’s another 5 hosted in Russia, or a country where piracy is legal, or just don’t give a fuck.
ok but what if in losing the suit, they must give up the logs and IPs?
Before they go under?
like the instance and the people that discussed piracy will be hurt
and it will put fear in others
Not all instances keep logs…
Some intentionally discard them, look into the policys of the instance you’re signing up to.
All your comments and posts are hosted on your parent instance then shared to the federated instances.
Some instances don’t even let you sign up with an email or make it optional.
Lemmy.world keeps logs, but much more controversial instances often don’t.
Also it’s much more complex, because you have to think about the scope of the potential lawsuit as well as the given evidence that a user is actually sharing the material infringing on their copyright; which will not be a large amount of the user base. They can’t simply sue a user for having an account, the user has to actively be sharing infringing material.
And, to be fair, a gofundme for stuff like this often gets full very fast
If the community is big enough to get sued it’s also big enough to spread a link for funding, easy
Would be a real shame if my instance’s logrotate was set to, say, only keep a few days of webserver logs. Real shame.
Good luck establishing precedent with that!
Oops, I accidentally fired the sd card containing my instance running on my raspberry pie.
If that is really how you do it, you won’t need to fry it, it will happen soon enough by itself.
Seriously. Lemmy is a house made of patchwork quilt, with a bit of pine sap here and there to steady the few boards.
“Held together with bubble gum and duct tape” is the phrase I usually use
I was going to download their movies to spite them, but looking it up they’ve only produced complete trash.
Sorry, you’re going to have to be just a little more specific here, I’m wading in a sea of garbage over here
removed by mod
If you think reddit is on your side, think again.
Reddit can eat my ass with a spoon
Exactly, but it’s still a helpful win regardless.
Film industry obviously didnt pay enough