You Could Be Kicked Offline for Piracy If This Music Industry Lawsuit Succeeds
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motherboard.vice.com
A) live in a country where surveillance is huge (America, UK). This simply wouldn't happen in a 3rd world country.
B) Own the actual content-distributing site (piratebay, etc). That's who litigators / law enforcement go after the most.
C) If you don't own the site, you need to download ungodly amounts of content illegally. I'm talking 1000s of Gigabytes worth of content every month.
D) Actually be worth the cost of a legal trial, meaning you have to respond to the email/notice, have the money to pay them, and be downloading so much they're somehow losing money.
If you don't tick 100% of these boxes you will almost never be caught. Piracy isn't a big deal on an individual basis because people who do it were never going to buy the content even if they got forced to. If anything, they're doing your product a favour by checking it out and probably buying it in the future. Or it's a warning sign that you need to get your shit off of HBO and onto a more accessible platform. So nah, this lawsuit will change nothing. All it does is take away point C of the above list.
Now, can you be kicked off the internet for this new law? I don't know the ins and outs but the reason i see that not happening is because ISPs would lose a huge amount of customers and would lobby against that hard, among reasons stated in the article. Anyway don't panic, the internet is still a wild west and nothing is going to change that anytime soon.
TFA is warning that what they're pushing for now is for ISPs to be required to deny service to people based on these complaints. No trial involved.
Just for clarity, I only mentioned the trial part of things because that's how it currently works. Sorry for confusion.
This case is for movies rather than music but ISPs are already ending up having to go to supreme court to fight , I hope more ISPs are prepared to do so https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180508/06040539799/danis...
> But they will be forced to learn this soon.
The real issue is in fact with people: in order to "fix" the way people want to communicate and exchange data and informations, you really need to switch from a blacklist approach to a whitelist approach, effectively banning everything that's not pre-approved.
That's the technical lesson record companies are going to learn. And an escalation of this kind is extremely dangerous. Because with time this may lead to self-censorship, people turning each other in to the authorities, scenes associated with China, East Germany or the Soviet Union. Models I'd not be proud of.
I think you underestimate how tightly knit telecom and digital media corporations are.
In the US, we are talking about less than a dozen companies controlling the majority of both markets.
Two of the biggest ISPs are Comcast and AT&T. Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and AT&T owns HBO, CNN, and many others.
Neither of those corporations will be against this sort of action. They will be for it.
In practice although rights holders might claim that damages were $lots, except in the most egregious cases no-one found it worth $20/user to initiate “legal action”.
It seems the enforcement fee is currently $200 from the rightsholder: https://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/copyright/forms-and-fe...
Damages are capped at $15k and awarded by the tribunal as per: https://www.iponz.govt.nz/about-ip/copyright/file-sharing-in...
You mean a Terabyte? Either you're still on dial-up and that number actually seems big to you or you're either purposefully making it sound bigger than it reall is.
> C) If you don't own the site, you need to download ungodly amounts of content illegally. I'm talking 1000s of Gigabytes worth of content every month.
I suppose that depends on the current legal environment. Brenda made a pretty good living for a while. All it took was downloading one movie.
If this makes it easier for shady law firms to apply leverage, like Brenda, I could see this practice coming back.
In practice less than 20 peoples have been disconnected because of this law in 9 years
In a better world those larger ISPs would pony up, band together and help out the little guys, in their own enlightened self-interest, a la Newegg.
But they probably see it in their thuggish self-interest to let the little guys be sued out of existence, and take over those customers. And then they may start fighting this.
In the end, changing the method of enforcement it's just another method to make law and reality match up (as opposed to changing the laws to reflect reality).
How does this make any sense?