Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing is already done heavily by content rights-holders. If you torrent movies or games in Canada without a VPN, you will get nastygrams in your email from the rights-holders via your ISP. They're legally required to do so AFAIK, because even consumer-oriented ISPs that are very privacy driven also forward on those letters.

Apparently if you don't reply to those emails you're fine, because they can't escalate the process unless you reply - I've heard stories of people receiving dozens of these "we saw you downloading pirate stuff, stop doing that" emails.

View on HN

We should really stop calling copyright infringement 'piracy'. Piracy is a violent penal crime which results in a theft of property by the use of physical force / weapons. Accepting this label helps media conglomerates distort the public perception of the issue into their favor.

A german blogger likes to call it 'hold up murder downloads' (Raubmordkopie) to show the absurdity (the German word 'Raubkopie' literally translates to 'heist copy').

If you don’t want to use the term “piracy”, the best alternative I’ve heard is “bootlegging”. Credit for the idea goes to the author of https://daringfireball.net/, who suggested that term way back in 2009.

I'm sure the use of that word goes back way further with illegally duplicating and sharing music, i.e bootleg recordings.

I "had a friend" with a Comcast (or maybe Cox) email address that was given to them when they started with their internet service, but didn't know about. They didn't use a VPN and downloaded thousands of movies and TV shows. Several years after signing up they logged into their account to update their auto-billing info, and it notified them that they had new emails at the email address they had no idea existed. They had literally thousands of these threatening sounding emails and called me in a panic, thinking they were going to have to pay several million dollars. But I calmed them down when told them that they had been getting these emails for several years and nothing else had happened.

Comcast had their personal information to include their home address, so they obviously could have snail-mailed them something or sent a process server if they were actually being sued, but they didn't. I figure that most individuals don't make enough money to make actual lawsuits worth it- what is the court going to do, garnish $10/month from someone flipping burgers?

That means the notices aren't even worth the amount it would cost to snail mail.

What, you only get emails? In Germany you straight up get snail mails from lawyers demanding you to pay for the damages.

But in Germany the only real bad thing is uploading, downloading by itself is more of a grey thing.

Canada currently uses a "notice and notice regime" [0], meaning the rights holder notifies the ISP, who turns around and forwards the notice to the infringing customer, but does not give the rights holder the account information, nor do they take any punitive action towards the customer.

However, the ISP must retain historical data on these notices, so if in the future the laws change, rights holders could in theory request information on past notices and go after subscribers once they have their personal information.

so yeah, don't pirate stuff...

0: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/Oca-bc.nsf/eng/ca02920.html

Changing the law takes a fair amount of time, and it would unlikely be retroactive. Not to mention that if everyone is doing it (and it doesn't go against the Charter), good luck legislating against it.

Historically, predatory behaviour by media companies in Canada has been pretty badly received by both major parties, which is how we ended up with notice-and-notice, where the emails have a long intro about "this is just a notice and you don't have to do anything".

I don't encourage piracy, but it's probably the kind of thing that most people do occasionally, while also being 'good' paying consumers.

p.s. oddly enough, I get these emails sometimes from Teksavvy, but not from Bell.

They can't make something retroactively illegal, but piracy is already illegal. They'd just be retroactively making it harder to get away with. Much like how we've used forensic evidence to put people in jail years later, even if our forensic techniques didn't exist yet at the time of the crime.

Well if they actually decide to sue the customer, and get a court order, they could force the ISP to identify them. But that's way more trouble than it's worth in most cases.

And safe harbor laws mean that as long as the ISP is adhering to the notice-and-notice policies, they can't be directly sued for infringement.

>if in the future the laws change

Almost no legal system works this way. You can't suddenly be found guilty of violating a law that didn't exist.

Haha, that's a funny take along the lines of "it's not illegal if the cops didn't see." The reality is that the sharing is the infringement one gets prosecuted for. Copyright law already exists.

I agree, but it's not a legal requirement, it's just how things usually work. Here's a counter example: http://www.assnat.qc.ca/en/travaux-parlementaires/projets-lo... - tl;dr: Quebec abolished the statute of limitations for sex/child abuse crimes. Shortly after the law was passed, a group of priests were arrested.

(it took a while to pass the law, and was a multi-party, multi-year process)

Just curious, are you a lawyer here in Canada?

A BitTorrent client uploads data to other peers who want the data blocks you have already downloaded (even while you're still in the process of downloading the content, depending on the peers in the swarm around that time). I think it'd be difficult to argue technically that you were just downloading and not uploading when using BitTorrent. If you leave the torrent running after the download completes, you're seeding (uploading) to any other user's client that connects to yours and asks for blocks from your client.

Most BitTorrent clients have settings to control whether you are seeding, although they typically default to yes.

What if you use BitThief?

That is incorrect. Neither uploading nor downloading is strictly speaking forbidden. Only once it's been fully downloaded does it become illegal. Though a judge will likely defend the spirit of the law over the letter, making you guilty anyway.

The issue why uploading is even more dangerous is because then the urheber can demand damages for lost sales as well.

Don't take it on the light shoulder in Germany. Torrentung without a VPN can quickly get super expensive here

So, what you are saying is, that uploading is worse? That's what I said but in other words.

I believe it was Comcast who was performing payload injection (possibly over https with cert fuckery) a few years ago to display warning overlays that you've been caught torrenting.

That was egregious.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com