"Cox did not profit from its subscribers' acts of infringement," judges rule.
One thing that leaps out at me about this ruling is that courts understand the internet a lot better nowadays. A decade or so ago Sony would have probably gotten away with the argument that Cox profited from the users’ piracy; nowadays judges themselves use the internet and are going to go “lolno, they probably would have been Cox customers anyway. It’s not like anyone pays for internet connection solely to pirate. And in most areas people don’t even have a choice of provider, so how is Cox profiting from this?”
What do you mean, how do you pirate stuff online? Surely you got the hat on? I mean, I can see biting a hard drive might be more appropriate but the hat, come on, the hat!
They have so far. It’s still legal to use a VPN without verifying my identity. It’s still legal, though difficult, to access the Internet anonymously. The local police department doesn’t blanket monitor everyone’s search history.
increasingly difficult tech solutions for privacy are a bandaid not a cure.
I’ve never been able to find a private tracker to join in like 20 years of this shit. Everything is closed off to registration and you basically have to find some guy in a dingy alley to suck off for the chance they might give you an invite.
TorrentLeech has open registration several times per year. Keep an eye on Opentrackers.org for any of these. Note that some are open, while others are open application. The latter means you must meet certain criteria to be accepted. Typically this is proof of your stats on other trackers, but sometimes it’s exclusively for refugees from one that failed.
Keep in mind that you will not ever find open registrations on an established, reputable tracker. They don’t need more users. They only recruit from lesser, more accessible trackers. You will need to start on these to establish yourself. There are plenty of guides on this, with most starting on RED or MAM.
If you aren’t on any of these, it’s not because they’re too hard to get into- it’s because you don’t want to put in the effort. Which is exactly what private trackers want to avoid.
Also, smaller doesn’t always mean bad. TorrentDB was a rising star, with regular open invites, right up until its collapse. Even the giants like PTP started from nothing. Getting in early is a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you help grow it.
If you’re into audiobooks, Myanonymouse is essential but easy to get into. Other than that, I’m the same. 20 years of torrenting and I’ve never needed a private tracker
I’m in BTN and it’s the only indexer I use for my Sonarr instance because it has absolutely everything. I’ve never not been able to find something and almost everything I download will saturate my 1.2 Gbps connection.
For Radarr I don’t have any private trackers and it takes 35 public trackers to get coverage that is almost as good. The options I’m given are way less organized and download speeds are a gamble. It’s not really an issue because I rarely watch movies, but I definitely understand why private trackers are so sought after. I’ll eventually try to get into some smaller ones which tend to be pretty easy to do.
The private trackers I use have stipulations stating if one of your invited folks breaks the rules you get punished as well. Makes it a very selective process choosing whom to share with.
Yup. Debrid is a superleecher service. It doesn’t actually seed anything, so it contributes nothing back to the torrents. If everyone used debrid, there would be nothing to torrent as there would be no seeders.
Private trackers are a false sense of security. If you’re able to get an invite to a private tracker, you really think a multi-billion dollar industry won’t also be able to get one?
At most, private trackers offer more consistent content and more accurate seed/leech counts. But they absolutely won’t protect you from the lawsuits from media companies. If anything, being on a private tracker increases your chances of getting fucked in court, because enforced seed ratios means every single user is liable. Remember that leeching isn’t a crime, but seeding is. Because distribution is what the media companies care about, and that’s only accomplished through seeding. Just like how cops won’t typically be interested in busting a drug buyer, when they can bust the dealer instead.
Your nice shiny 12.0 ratio means you’re getting fucked hard when the dildo of consequences finally arrives. And the dildo of consequences rarely arrives with lube.
Folks need to learn how to rip. It’s a little more tedious but you can’t be tracked and the quality is almost always better. Even the most inexperienced can get started after a few hours of research and tinkering.
Sorry couldn’t resist. Ripping is a term from CD/DVD days. You’d “rip” the contents off, i.e. make a digital backup. Now it’s applied to making backups of streams as well. Obviously the contents of these discs and streams are your property or otherwise legally obtained materials and are not being duplicated, sold, or in any way distributed to others if the content does not belong to you.
Yo! What exactly is different about private trackers? Like how does that help? Im lucky enough to have one but due to the seed ratio rules, I find myself downloading from my usual sites more frequently because I worry about seeding indefinitely.
I personally like Mullvad, their practices, and their straightforward price of 5€/month. They’re not going to try to lure you in with discounts by subscribing for multiple months or years. Now if Mullvad has gone downhill, someone chime in.
I use private internet access (pia). It’s reasonably priced, really good for the number of devices, and I don’t believe they keep logs. At least it used to be that way, but I haven’t checked that since I signed up a decade ago. I have had zero issues with anything or anyone while using it for any reason. Uptime is basically 100%. Also has mobile support if that matters.
Same, I used to use PIA for about a decade, but I could’ve sworn I heard they were one of the ones that had gone way downhill. Otherwise I never had an issue with them. I’ll have to do some digging, see if it was founded or just a reddit rumor.
PIA’s service is still decent and offers all the features that other VPNs do, but they got bought out by a company that has added spyware to programs in the past. So many users jumped ship when that buyout was finalized, because it’s hard to trust their application or their service when the owning company has a known history of intentionally infecting their users.
Okay yes that’s what I remember reading. I have Express VPN now, and while researching found it’s still surprisingly highly and doesn’t log. it’s on the more expensive side though, so I may still give proton or one of the other recs a try.
I just wish they would advertise the truth. VPN’s are basically useless nowadays for everything except torrenting. Most websites once they detect a VPN address will just shut down. Go ahead and give Imgur a try with it turned on to see what I mean.
I use a VPN constantly and sadly a lot of sites add known VPN ip’s to a ban list, I just reconnect my VPN and usually I get a good address but yea it sucks
Media Corporations should not have a say in disconnecting users from the internet based on copyright infringement.
The right to social participation is part of a basic human right - self-determination. Today, the majority of interactions with society involve communication via internet in one way or another, so that access to the internet is vital for enabling social participation.
Yeah, it’s somehow comparable to a scenario where they had the power to decide you can’t use uber/taxi, or postal services, because you used it to transport the HDD you’re using for your private collection of copyright-protected media.
You’re right, but looking at this analogy backwards tells us the problem isn’t the ability for Uber/ISPs to ban users–this happens and isn’t a problem with Uber-- it’s that Uber, unlike ISPs, doesn’t hold a monopoly on feasible means of transportation. We can’t reasonably expect a business to act outside its own best interests, so it’s insane to allow a business to exist in such a form. Short term, sure, regulate; but really, nationalize it.
A federal appeals court today overturned a $1 billion piracy verdict that a jury handed down against cable Internet service provider Cox Communications in 2019.
If the correct legal standard had been used in the district court, “no reasonable jury could find that Cox received a direct financial benefit from its subscribers’ infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights,” judges wrote.
The case began when Sony and other music copyright holders sued Cox, claiming that it didn’t adequately fight piracy on its network and failed to terminate repeat infringers.
Cox’s appeal was supported by advocacy groups concerned that the big-money judgment could force ISPs to disconnect more Internet users based merely on accusations of copyright infringement.
If not overturned, this decision will lead to an untold number of people losing vital Internet access as ISPs start to cut off more and more customers to avoid massive damages."
In today’s 4th Circuit ruling, appeals court judges wrote that “Sony failed, as a matter of law, to prove that Cox profits directly from its subscribers’ copyright infringement.”
The original article contains 543 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
:) You do know that bot is banned in lemdro.id right?
And to be fair, it is unsolicited bot spam (I miss BotDefense) although it ultimately is up to the admins and mods in this…instance and there is always the possibility of useful bots. Blanket blocking them via your profile seems a bit, meh, e: especially if you want to invoke one which is always the better way?
I live in Brazil, there are many problems here and stuff. But at least no one gives a fuck about piracy, lol. Never needed a VPN for torrents, not gonna need anytime soon.
If I’m not mistaken, Brazilian law allows people to download and make digital copies of copyrighted material, so long as it’s for personal use. I should probably look into that sometime
It’s not “like”, that has been the argument with these piracy cases for ages. If I pirate 100 movies, it obviously means that if I couldn’t have I would have gone to the shop to buy each and every one of them. It’s even worse for anyone caught distributing the downloads, where a site host can be hit with this logic for every user download ever.
Apparently these days they are claiming that movie and TV piracy costs the US film industry $29-71 billion a year and the US GDP a cool $115 billion in total
Because, you know, we have all that money just floating in our pockets now thanks to piracy.
Video game piracy has led to more purchases from me, because I’ll download a game to try on a whim that I wouldn’t have purchased, find out that’s it really good and buy it
It has been shown that pirates spend more on media than anyone else, so companies are effectively attacking their best customers because they are short sighted idiots
Same, I blame games not having a trial version anymore. Streams free weekends are actually great for this. I’ve bought a couple free weekend games I’ve played in the past.
Best way to get me to not pirate your game and buy it is to have a decent demo available. Against the Storm is a bizarre pitch (Rouge-lite City builder), but they had a good demo that allows unlimited play on the standard biome with a level cap. Was incredibly easy to try it and play enough to decide I like it.
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.
Ain’t nobody going to talk about that guy in the thumbnail eating a CD while wearing that hat? Stock photos are weird.
I miss r/WTFstockPhotos
Create a Lemmy version! Be the change you want to see.
Stop copying my comments ;D
But actually: I don’t want to mod it :/
That’s okay, you can create subs and not mod them. Lemmy has a sort-of-mechanism to transfer modship already.
That’s how true hackers read the data without a cd-rom drive.
i thought he was munching it into shape so it would fit the floppy drive.
And now with AI they can get even weirder, specially if they trained it on already weird stock photos.
What do you mean, how do you pirate stuff online? Surely you got the hat on? I mean, I can see biting a hard drive might be more appropriate but the hat, come on, the hat!
Internet is a utility and should be treated as such.
Up next Sony sues Pacific Gas & Electric for profiting off of piracy. All those torrents were powered by Pacific Gas & Electric.
Sues corning for making all that glass that transmitted the piracy.
And finally, after suing everyone, sue the almighty himself, who dared to bring all these pirates into existence.
If you were a true american you’d be for privatization of all utilties
/s
I agree but the average person doesn’t even know what that means.
Really Cox should be paying pornhub.com for such strong “customer acquisition” support imho
Don’t believe that you’re always gonna be protected by some judge somewhere.
Get a proper VPN, dammit!
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In the end, you can’t out-tech the law. You need rights.
The right to pirate?
The right to privacy could help, like media company’s can’t use legal action to get IP addresses
Your so-called “rights” won’t hold to the pressure of massive media capital alone. It will erode away.
They have so far. It’s still legal to use a VPN without verifying my identity. It’s still legal, though difficult, to access the Internet anonymously. The local police department doesn’t blanket monitor everyone’s search history.
increasingly difficult tech solutions for privacy are a bandaid not a cure.
deleted by creator
¿???
Skill issue
I’ve never been able to find a private tracker to join in like 20 years of this shit. Everything is closed off to registration and you basically have to find some guy in a dingy alley to suck off for the chance they might give you an invite.
Getting into MAM is easy tho and you can branch from there, there are people sharing invites to others.
TorrentLeech has open registration several times per year. Keep an eye on Opentrackers.org for any of these. Note that some are open, while others are open application. The latter means you must meet certain criteria to be accepted. Typically this is proof of your stats on other trackers, but sometimes it’s exclusively for refugees from one that failed.
Keep in mind that you will not ever find open registrations on an established, reputable tracker. They don’t need more users. They only recruit from lesser, more accessible trackers. You will need to start on these to establish yourself. There are plenty of guides on this, with most starting on RED or MAM.
If you aren’t on any of these, it’s not because they’re too hard to get into- it’s because you don’t want to put in the effort. Which is exactly what private trackers want to avoid.
Also, smaller doesn’t always mean bad. TorrentDB was a rising star, with regular open invites, right up until its collapse. Even the giants like PTP started from nothing. Getting in early is a perfectly viable strategy, especially if you help grow it.
The worst part is when he said I had no technique
Fuck em, don’t need em. Never have, probably never will
If you’re into audiobooks, Myanonymouse is essential but easy to get into. Other than that, I’m the same. 20 years of torrenting and I’ve never needed a private tracker
It’s mostly just an elitist thing
I’ve been using audiobookbay, does myanonymouse have more content?
About the same, but guaranteed seeders. Half the stuff on ABB will never download, MaM takes seconds
That’s great, I noticed ABB doesn’t track my ratio anywhere even though they require an account.
I’d say it’s more convenience than elitism.
I’m in BTN and it’s the only indexer I use for my Sonarr instance because it has absolutely everything. I’ve never not been able to find something and almost everything I download will saturate my 1.2 Gbps connection.
For Radarr I don’t have any private trackers and it takes 35 public trackers to get coverage that is almost as good. The options I’m given are way less organized and download speeds are a gamble. It’s not really an issue because I rarely watch movies, but I definitely understand why private trackers are so sought after. I’ll eventually try to get into some smaller ones which tend to be pretty easy to do.
Between The Internet Archive, Anna’s Archive, and AudiobookBay, I’ve never struggled to find books on public trackers.
deleted by creator
The private trackers I use have stipulations stating if one of your invited folks breaks the rules you get punished as well. Makes it a very selective process choosing whom to share with.
deleted by creator
[deleted]
Just use a debrid service. 10x better.
Am I right in thinking though, if everyone used a debrib service, nobody would be seeding the torrents and it would all fall to bits?
Yup. Debrid is a superleecher service. It doesn’t actually seed anything, so it contributes nothing back to the torrents. If everyone used debrid, there would be nothing to torrent as there would be no seeders.
Please don’t follow this advice. These services don’t seed, if they get popular it will kill bittorrent.
Private trackers are a false sense of security. If you’re able to get an invite to a private tracker, you really think a multi-billion dollar industry won’t also be able to get one?
At most, private trackers offer more consistent content and more accurate seed/leech counts. But they absolutely won’t protect you from the lawsuits from media companies. If anything, being on a private tracker increases your chances of getting fucked in court, because enforced seed ratios means every single user is liable. Remember that leeching isn’t a crime, but seeding is. Because distribution is what the media companies care about, and that’s only accomplished through seeding. Just like how cops won’t typically be interested in busting a drug buyer, when they can bust the dealer instead.
Your nice shiny 12.0 ratio means you’re getting fucked hard when the dildo of consequences finally arrives. And the dildo of consequences rarely arrives with lube.
¿???
Hmu with that invite then please
Right? People make it seem really easy lol
Folks need to learn how to rip. It’s a little more tedious but you can’t be tracked and the quality is almost always better. Even the most inexperienced can get started after a few hours of research and tinkering.
Rip?
You know! Like a bong!
Sorry couldn’t resist. Ripping is a term from CD/DVD days. You’d “rip” the contents off, i.e. make a digital backup. Now it’s applied to making backups of streams as well. Obviously the contents of these discs and streams are your property or otherwise legally obtained materials and are not being duplicated, sold, or in any way distributed to others if the content does not belong to you.
Yo! What exactly is different about private trackers? Like how does that help? Im lucky enough to have one but due to the seed ratio rules, I find myself downloading from my usual sites more frequently because I worry about seeding indefinitely.
deleted by creator
Oh nice thanks for that. So should I not worry as much about seeding the private trackers?
deleted by creator
They are on private trackers too. Just use a VPN.
Private trackers just lessen the surface area. When the companies decide to lobby enough to change the laws you’ll need to hide with private as well.
Yo! What’s a proper VPN these days? It seems like all the ones I used to trust went to shit.
Just self-host a VPN on a VPS so you can enable disk encryption and disable logging.
I personally like Mullvad, their practices, and their straightforward price of 5€/month. They’re not going to try to lure you in with discounts by subscribing for multiple months or years. Now if Mullvad has gone downhill, someone chime in.
Mullvad doesn’t do port forwarding anymore, AirVPN seems like a good replacement but I forgot where they are based
I’ve heard proton and mullvad are pretty good
mullvad no longer portforwards, so probably not a good option to torrent with. proton is good if you use their whole ecosystem.
Proton does port forwarding
I do miss port forwarding but could you explain why its necessary for torrenting?
Edit: looks like I need a new VPN…
I use private internet access (pia). It’s reasonably priced, really good for the number of devices, and I don’t believe they keep logs. At least it used to be that way, but I haven’t checked that since I signed up a decade ago. I have had zero issues with anything or anyone while using it for any reason. Uptime is basically 100%. Also has mobile support if that matters.
They got bought by an Israeli adware company a few years back
Flashbacks of waterfox browser and system11 😕
Well fuck me…
ProtonVPN…
Same, I used to use PIA for about a decade, but I could’ve sworn I heard they were one of the ones that had gone way downhill. Otherwise I never had an issue with them. I’ll have to do some digging, see if it was founded or just a reddit rumor.
PIA’s service is still decent and offers all the features that other VPNs do, but they got bought out by a company that has added spyware to programs in the past. So many users jumped ship when that buyout was finalized, because it’s hard to trust their application or their service when the owning company has a known history of intentionally infecting their users.
Okay yes that’s what I remember reading. I have Express VPN now, and while researching found it’s still surprisingly highly and doesn’t log. it’s on the more expensive side though, so I may still give proton or one of the other recs a try.
I know the feeling, I used PIA for a while but moved to Mullvad.
Mullvad
This message is sent through mullvad
ProtonVPN
I just wish they would advertise the truth. VPN’s are basically useless nowadays for everything except torrenting. Most websites once they detect a VPN address will just shut down. Go ahead and give Imgur a try with it turned on to see what I mean.
Change your server to another location. ISP blocks VPN addresses that have been tagged.
I use a VPN constantly and sadly a lot of sites add known VPN ip’s to a ban list, I just reconnect my VPN and usually I get a good address but yea it sucks
Media Corporations should not have a say in disconnecting users from the internet based on copyright infringement. The right to social participation is part of a basic human right - self-determination. Today, the majority of interactions with society involve communication via internet in one way or another, so that access to the internet is vital for enabling social participation.
Yeah, it’s somehow comparable to a scenario where they had the power to decide you can’t use uber/taxi, or postal services, because you used it to transport the HDD you’re using for your private collection of copyright-protected media.
You’re right, but looking at this analogy backwards tells us the problem isn’t the ability for Uber/ISPs to ban users–this happens and isn’t a problem with Uber-- it’s that Uber, unlike ISPs, doesn’t hold a monopoly on feasible means of transportation. We can’t reasonably expect a business to act outside its own best interests, so it’s insane to allow a business to exist in such a form. Short term, sure, regulate; but really, nationalize it.
At the very least, nationalise the last mile.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A federal appeals court today overturned a $1 billion piracy verdict that a jury handed down against cable Internet service provider Cox Communications in 2019.
If the correct legal standard had been used in the district court, “no reasonable jury could find that Cox received a direct financial benefit from its subscribers’ infringement of Plaintiffs’ copyrights,” judges wrote.
The case began when Sony and other music copyright holders sued Cox, claiming that it didn’t adequately fight piracy on its network and failed to terminate repeat infringers.
Cox’s appeal was supported by advocacy groups concerned that the big-money judgment could force ISPs to disconnect more Internet users based merely on accusations of copyright infringement.
If not overturned, this decision will lead to an untold number of people losing vital Internet access as ISPs start to cut off more and more customers to avoid massive damages."
In today’s 4th Circuit ruling, appeals court judges wrote that “Sony failed, as a matter of law, to prove that Cox profits directly from its subscribers’ copyright infringement.”
The original article contains 543 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 68%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Dear Lemmy.world. can you kill ALL bots? they’re the first sign of a website going to shit.
You know you can just turn off bots in your profile settings… right? That is an option here.
:) You do know that bot is banned in lemdro.id right?
And to be fair, it is unsolicited bot spam (I miss BotDefense) although it ultimately is up to the admins and mods in this…instance and there is always the possibility of useful bots. Blanket blocking them via your profile seems a bit, meh, e: especially if you want to invoke one which is always the better way?
At least these bots are not “the” bots you think they are.
But they lead to “the” bots you think they are.
When will Sony be sued for stealing their customer’s legally purchased digital media
February 31st.
Too long. I hope on Feb 30
Oh that’s very soon then! :D
I live in Brazil, there are many problems here and stuff. But at least no one gives a fuck about piracy, lol. Never needed a VPN for torrents, not gonna need anytime soon.
It’s like that in many countries. The USA is just kind of shit in this regard.
If I’m not mistaken, Brazilian law allows people to download and make digital copies of copyrighted material, so long as it’s for personal use. I should probably look into that sometime
1 billion dollars over pirated music? Who pirates music amymore
Spoons made me fat!
Billion? What are they smoking???
Ikr? It’s like they’re counting every act of digital piracy ever to be their lost profits when that’s obviously not the case.
It’s not “like”, that has been the argument with these piracy cases for ages. If I pirate 100 movies, it obviously means that if I couldn’t have I would have gone to the shop to buy each and every one of them. It’s even worse for anyone caught distributing the downloads, where a site host can be hit with this logic for every user download ever.
Apparently these days they are claiming that movie and TV piracy costs the US film industry $29-71 billion a year and the US GDP a cool $115 billion in total
Because, you know, we have all that money just floating in our pockets now thanks to piracy.
Video game piracy has led to more purchases from me, because I’ll download a game to try on a whim that I wouldn’t have purchased, find out that’s it really good and buy it
It has been shown that pirates spend more on media than anyone else, so companies are effectively attacking their best customers because they are short sighted idiots
Same, I blame games not having a trial version anymore. Streams free weekends are actually great for this. I’ve bought a couple free weekend games I’ve played in the past.
Best way to get me to not pirate your game and buy it is to have a decent demo available. Against the Storm is a bizarre pitch (Rouge-lite City builder), but they had a good demo that allows unlimited play on the standard biome with a level cap. Was incredibly easy to try it and play enough to decide I like it.
US GDP is not 115 billion. My tiny European country’s GDP is like 700 billion. The US’s must be well into the trillionsEdit:It’s 28 trillion. That’s 28’000 billions.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_United_States
He said piracy costs the us GDP 115billion. Not that it is 115billion
Right, I misread