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.
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.
ISPs are rich too?
Which is why the Supreme Court is hearing the case. Two wealthy industries fighting out who gets to extract the most wealth.
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.
Yeah, totally, unbiased reporting to advocate for those poor vulnerable ISPs…
People need to come into contact with the Internet that isn’t based on streaming asap. We need laws worldwide that prevent blocking access to knowledge - the most basic and guaranteed by constitutions worldwide right. Books, music, films and games. People should have at least some access to them. I can’t imagine a world where I’m licensed to my books by Amazon. It’s just awful. Something needs to be brought together before publishers make this a crime.
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).
Heartbreaking: Worst Corporation(s) you know, just made a good stand
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
A broken digital clock is never right.
Unless it’s a 24 hour clock.
So an average of 1.5 times?
Not everyday i agree with ISPs but here we are. Guilty of and accused of are two very different things. Innocent until proven guilty.
There’s got to be a way to just decriminalize piracy
Wow, unusual for them but based
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.
Looks like an old-politician idea to me; a generation late. Nowadays, cutting internet is as bad as cutting electricity.
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.
Everyone is different.
I personally think copyright and patent laws need to die. If you can’t protect your own secrets, don’t rely on taxpayer resources to do it for you.
White-collar workers were cool with machines and poorer nations taking blue-collar jobs. Now that it threatens them and their money, the hypocrisy is on full display.
White-collar workers were cool with machines and poorer nations taking blue-collar jobs. Now that it threatens them and their money, the hypocrisy is on full display.
Heh. Yes. It’s even beyond hypocrisy. Many will outright say that automation is supposed to churn over these “dirty, boring” jobs while making their own lives better. Even finding themselves on the receiving end of progress, they don’t call for a better social safety net. No, they just want to get rent for their property. I wonder how much copyright industry has to do with the steady move to the economic right, through its huge influence on culture.
Americans would not want the price of produce to get higher but a) it relies on employing undocumented labor and b) it’s very hard to find American citizens these days willing to do that kind of hard physical work.
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.
That is so true. If Steam goes away, so does all of my games. I should have the right to have a local setup binary on my computer, like GOG.
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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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There would be no more internet access for anyone anymore if that were allowed.
Soooo many insecure networks out there ripe for the picking if you know what you’re doing and have the tools available. And the tools are often free, not costing any money. From there, those networks are the places people will go to commit their “piracy”.
And what exactly is piracy? If I purchase an album on iTunes but choose to download it on ThePirateBay, is that really piracy? Because I have done that when the music THAT I FUCKING PAID FOR is no longer available for me to download off of iTunes and Apple won’t give me a refund for said music purchase. People do it for games that include shitty DRM and don’t allow them to easily install on another device like Linux too.
I know people really hate to hear this. You have a good reason to feel like you’re not doing anything wrong in some cases. But buying songs is a misnomer. These people running digital media stores know what they’re doing and the Terms of Use you click straight through without reading lays it all out in a way that you’re meant to understand. You don’t own the music, you have a license to enjoy the music under certain terms, including the ability of the owner to retract your license for a number of reasons beyond your control.
I’m not here to convince you to change your ways, nor to make a value judgment of you. Rather to simply answer your question: yes, that is piracy.
