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.
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 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.
Yeah who else is going to pay for 1GB speeds knowing the most they’ll ever get is 400MB
The headline should read:
Despite best efforts and all odds, ISPs find themselves on the right side of history.
Yeah, totally, unbiased reporting to advocate for those poor vulnerable ISPs…
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 😄
L’esprit de l’escalier, should’ve said 1.21 jiggawatt flux capacitor
If someone is using municipal water in their meth lab, the whole city block shouldn’t have their water shut off
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Also need to stop the “oil burner” trade
Not everyday i agree with ISPs but here we are. Guilty of and accused of are two very different things. Innocent until proven guilty.
Hell, I don’t even want to ban users guilty of piracy. Oh no! Sony and it’s BILLIONS of dollars will surely be affected by pirating their dvd of a movie! Heavens to betsy!
Hell, I don’t even want to ban users guilty of piracy.
Yeah, if someone shoplifts from a store, the punishment/penalty should not involve confiscating the car they drove to the store, lol.
Not for potato supreme. I’m sure labels and sony bought vacations for those sub human coup supporting shits
I am not familiar with that, I’m guessing potato supreme is a username or something?
It’s an Idaho-exclusive new dish at Taco Bell.
Well it sounds delicious, and definitely not guilty of piracy
No, of course not. Piracy would sour the cream.
Probably a delicious baked potato dish. Not sure whether cheesy potatoes really care if you’re guilty of piracy, they just want to be eaten.
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.
imagine getting banned from the one monopoly ISP available to you in your entire city. what do you do after that? sell your house?
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puts on fake moustache “Hello I am new to the area and would like to procure one internet please.”
Terminating service over allegations of piracy. Kicking someone off the internet because an automated copyright system accused them of piracy. That’s crazy.
So Sony wants to punish ISPs for continuing to “allow” illegal things to happen? Hmm remind me again which company it is that has had so many data breaches that users have come to just expect it? Sounds to me like if they are allowed to pursue attacking internet providers then they themselves should start seeing lawsuits for continuing damages until such time as Sony is able to successfully recover all stolen personal data and other parties can no longer use it for profit.
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.
Heartbreaking: Worst Corporation(s) you know, just made a good stand
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.
You have a corporation that doesn’t want to spend money to care for individual copyrights, or even lose customers over it. That describes ISPs. Still, people side with the corporation.
When you say individual rights, you, of course, mean copyrights; intellectual property rights. Giving property such a high priority is such a clash to the otherwise anti-capitalist attitudes here. It’s not just pro capitalist. It’s pro conservative capitalist.
I don’t think anybody here is siding with ISPs. We’re just happy to hear that they’re having difficulties policing piracy.
When I say individual rights I mean any and all rights an individual has or should have. In the case of piracy, an individual should have a right to entertainment media at a reasonable cost. The more corporations increase the cost of media access, the more piracy proliferates. In the case of AI, an individual should have the right to earn a living. Corporations are using the works of individuals to ultimately increase their own profits without due compensation to the individual.
I don’t know how you got to pro conservative capitalism from a single anti-corporatist statement, but it likely took you several leaps of logic that I’m not going to even try to follow.
I see how I misunderstood.
This conception of individual rights seems rather ad hoc. I don’t think I could have guessed that that’s what you meant, rather than copyrights.
I don’t see the connection to copyright, in any case. How does fair use interfere with anyone’s right to earn a living? And if it does, why support the Internet Archive?
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?
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?
I’m not seeing anything remarkable from organized groups. For example, the Internet Archive and libraries favor strong fair use. The copyright industry obviously sees this as an opportunity to expand property rights against the public interest. Tech companies have always been on either side, depending on their particular interest. Basically, everyone is on the usual side, just as you’d expect. Only on social media are things kinda weird. I don’t think people are considering their own interests, but I really don’t get what drives this.
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.
It’s all the freedom of the high seas until AI gets mentioned.
The issue isn’t quite so much copyright as privatization. And the distinction between “freedom on the high seas” and “AI” gets into the idea of the long term ownership of media.
One of the problems I run into, as a consumer of media, is that I can purchase a piece of content and then discover the service or medium I purchased it on has gone defunct. Maybe its an old video game with a console that’s broken or no longer able to hook up to my TV. Maybe its a movie I bought on a streaming service that no longer exists. Maybe its personal content I’ve created that I’d like to transfer between devices or extend to other people. Maybe its a piece of media I don’t trust sending through the mail, so I’d prefer to transfer it digitally. Maybe its a piece of media I can’t buy, because no one is selling it anymore.
Under the Torrent model, I can give or get a copy of a piece of media I already own in a format that my current set of devices support. Like with a library.
Under the AI model, somebody else gets to try and extort licensing fees from me for a thing they never legally possessed to begin with.
I see a huge distinction between these two methods of data ownership and distribution.
I may not be understanding the logic here. It sounds like your issue is control. You want to have control over media you bought, and you want to have control over AI models rather than just a subscription.
There are a number of open models. As far as I can see, these are also largely rejected by this community. In lawsuits against their makers, the community also sides against fair use.
There are a number of open models.
The complaint is not with the consumer grade home rolled models.
As far as I can tell, this community hates open models just as much as any others. Some seem to hate them even more. That’s the point about this “nightshade” tool.
Perhaps they’re confusing “open model” with “OpenAI” which is more of a misnomer given it’s increasingly cloistered state.
But I tend to see people angry at the massive waste of resources in the enormous privatized patches of turf. Grok, for instance, fucking up a low income community in Mississippi with it’s fleet of gas generators.
That’s what’s so depressing about lemmy. People convince me that there is some genuine issue that should be addressed. The mob grabs torches and pitchforks and goes to demand that… Money be given to rich people instead of changing anything. It certainly makes you understand why the world is as it is and that it will only become more so.
Personally I think AI training is free use. I also think AI is a fad and generally used as a way to scam people.
However, artists complain about AI because it pulls from their business (in theory.) Artists generally don’t complain about piracy by the end user because the artist is usually still credited in someway (signature watermark etc.) and piracy doesn’t generally stop other people from paying for their art. AI in theory steals their jobs.
The main people who complain about traditional piracy are the executives of companies that purchased copyright on artist’s works through contracts that do not favor the artists.
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Hmm. That’s not how the US legal concept Fair Use works. What do you mean when you say fair use?
I would infer from what they wrote that they mean anything not for profit. Seeding isn’t “fair use” in the legal definition.
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Yes, but it’s still not quite clear. Arguably, when you pirate rather than paying, your profit is the money saved on the purchase. Courts tend to see it that way.
Besides, Meta releases its models for free and I don’t see them getting less flak. In fact, when they were sued by the NYT corporation looking for a profit, people still sided with the profiteers.
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.
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.
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?
Looks like an old-politician idea to me; a generation late. Nowadays, cutting internet is as bad as cutting electricity.
