YouTube Class Action: Same IP Address Upload Pirate Movies and File DMCA Notices | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Class Action: Same IP Address Upload Pirate Movies and File DMCA Notices

torrentfreak.com

552 pointspicture126 comments

I spent some time at a university and got to field DMCA complaints. Typically they'd list the file getting shared and a timestamp (often without a timezone) and the university IP/port. They never included their own IP address...

Of course, the traffic was behind a firewall. I had the logs but wasn't about to accuse / punish anyone when there were a bunch of potential students behind any given complaint, and without the other end of the connection I couldn't identify which one for certain.

Funny thing is they refused to give their source IP because they didn't trust us to not leak it to whatever pirates to put on a blocklist.

But of course, I had their source IP because I had the network traffic. Were I in kahoots I'd have just listed all 5 of the possible snitching peers to the badguys.

Shady and incompetent then, same now I guess.

I worked in tech support at my university and also handled this type of request. Typically just triage to the network team because they didn't give students access to the network logs.

We had strict requirements on not exposing student data. On the other hand we had to minimize the University's risk. This meant at least a nastygram to the offending student. I think there was some kind of three strike system where students may get booted off the campus network.

The whole setup was pretty slick back then so if that happened they really wouldn't be able to do anything. Like they wouldn't even be able to get a wired connection in the library.

Was a pretty neat place to work actually. Still have fond memories. Buy me a beer some time and ask me about working phones and email in ~2007 after news was published that Sarah Palin attended the Univeristy.

Punishing students that aggressively over DMCA requests sounds like a terrible idea. They are so easy to abuse.

It also seems like it would affect their academic ability because they pirated a few movies. Who cares.

I was at a school who was just starting to do some similar things. They had students register the mac of their devices (wired and wireless). So they identified students by mac. With this it was actually pretty easy for a bad actor to frame someone else by just changing their mac to another device on the network.

Same school would also lock your university account after 3 bad password attempts and you could only unlock in person at the library help desk. Again you can see the problem.

We required MAC registration but you also had to auth with 802.1x to get an IP so we knew who was doing what and when. MAC registration came in handy several times for locating stolen laptops and phones. I think there may have been an exception for devices that couldn't auth but it could have been a different vlan and probably port.

We also had adaptive password expiration and complexity policies based on length. If you used a passphrase (~15+ characters) you could use dictionary words but if it was under that you couldn’t and had to include a number and symbol too.

Passphrases had like a 90 or 180 day expiration. Passwords were I think 30? You set them in the same text box and the rules were based on your entry.

I think the lockouts had a timer with an exponential increase. You'd get like five or ten tries before you'd have to start waiting minutes for the next attempt. Not sure if there was a hard lockout option. Phone support was daytime hours in the main office, all times when labs were open (some labs were 24 hour) and email support was 24/7. 24/7 lab monitors worked the ticket queues as well.

It was a great department actually. Lots of great work being done to make things easier for students. Relied heavily on students to operate the department and gave a lot of people careers.

Back in the 90s a student wrote a ticket management app in Perl. The university hired him and he was still in the department writing code 20 years later when I was there. One of the techs I worked with was hired by the law school to handle their IT. I got several jobs including my first out of school through people I met and worked with there.

Some Universities in the UK for a number of years have been making students download certificates that allow SSL decryption as part of counter radicalisation efforts.......

Oh god, Universities with CS divisions allow this sort of thing? Where are the sane people who go wtf?

These "IT" people who push to implement this probably end up working for the DoD or White Hall and push anti-encryption measures.

I find `mulmen`'s efforts very distasteful (trying to stop piracy on networks is like trying to stop kids from doing drugs) but not crossing the line as much as forcing certs on kids personal machines.

> I find `mulmen`'s efforts very distasteful (trying to stop piracy on networks is like trying to stop kids from doing drugs) but not crossing the line as much as forcing certs on kids personal machines.

You have badly misinterpreted my comments here. Everything we did was to protect the student's interests. We were the gateway between them and whoever was trying to sue them. The University took whatever action it needed to in order to maintain that position and keep students safe from abuse. We were often riding the line of legal action taken against us by those rights holders, frivolous or not.

I'm not aware of any student ever losing network access because of piracy. We just sent a lot of emails saying "please stop" and in general students did.

I'm not sure what you find distasteful about that but I stand by my words here and my actions at the time.

That seems like a very different requirement. The University I worked for just had hundreds of wired and wireless access points and limited staff to manage them so devices had to be registered to protect everyone. It was self-service IIRC. If you connected with an unrecognized device it just took you to a login page and then the device was registered to you. I don't think there was any tracking of what students were actually doing once they were connected. Certainly not at the kind of detail that could suggest anything about radicalization.

Wow, both of those describe the system at my alma mater Washington University. The 3 strikes logout was the biggest pain ever. I knew someone who got DOSed because his papercut printer driver kept trying to use old credentials, which somehow kept locking him out of his account until they diagnosed it.

We investigated each accusation and the strikes were only applied if the student was actually violating the terms of use of the network. Like actually pirating stuff. I forget what it took to lose network access but it wasn't something you could do on accident.

Every "strike" would have included a warning.

I mean they let us run Counter Strike servers out of our dorm rooms. It was a pretty relaxed environment really.

Not to mention that commercial ISPs also follow a three-strike system -- unless that's changed. I haven't been keeping track since it's not relevant to me. So it sounds like the only difference is that you all did a bit of investigation before issuing a strike.

My friend was in a brand new dorm built for honors students. Network topology was quickly worked out that each floor was immediately visible, and I believe other floors could be found with some work. There were several 24-hour Halo lobbies going.

While I understand the position that a university ISP has and the potential fear of getting cut by upstream ISPs if one does not address abuse issues, it still sounds a bit like removing a student's access to the university if they got three parking tickets. Sure, it is against the law, but is it the university's role to enforce those laws?

I can't recall a specific case of a student actually getting banned for anything DMCA or piracy related. We issued warnings to the most egregious offenders and that was always enough. To actually get banned from the network you'd pretty much have to get expelled first. The point was we did have the capability to enforce it and keep the network secure.

We were like a non-terrible ISP basically. Our job was primarily to facilitate learning. Secondary was to protect the university. Students pay the bills so their interests were always put first and we would go to bat for students if necessary. I don't recall if we used a three strike system or if it was more case-by-case.

> Not to mention that commercial ISPs also follow a three-strike system -- unless that's changed.

Nearly every commercial ISP I've ever interacted with has a three-strike system to fulfil their legal requirements, but also unfortunately has an undetected bug in said system that causes it to do absolutely nothing.

It's kind of a legal requirement for an ISP - failing to terminate repeat infringers loses your safe harbor. Cox actually got a billion dollar judgment for exactly this reason.

Similar at my uni. Our particular system handled tracking computers by MAC address. For absolutely no reason other than being a bored CS student working in IT I scraped the MAC addresses of all the uni-owned lab computers from the hardware inventory list, and configured my linux install to pick a random one to spoof at boot.

LOL, but what would happen if that computer was in active use?

Only a problem if you're on the same subnet.

Interesting, I too worked in tech support at that University in 2007--though I left 3 years ago. We could know each other, what a small world.

I think I started in ~2007? I left shortly after I graduated in 2010. My username is based on my actual name if that helps. I've bumped in to a few people from that place over the years, always a pleasure. Hope you're doing well, whoever you are :)

Frankly I'm surprised it was that lenient. The last time I was in university it took less than twenty minutes of torrenting to get my laptop's MAC address permanently banned from the wifi.

The system I setup would quickly detect p2p (and some worm/virus stuff) and put you in a quarantine vlan (for virus) or just drop 2-3% of your packets (p2p). That particular network didn't have infinite bandwidth...

As far as actually investigating / reporting file sharing stuff, we'd sometimes track down the students and let them know that they were suspected of doing things that were against the extremely lenient network access policies but we certainly never cooperated with the (non-LEO) agencies reporting.

The thing that was most irritating to me was that if they were reporting abuse, if we had enough information to do something about it we'd obviously also have the remote IP of the entity reporting the abuse yet they refused to offer it even when we'd send them "we have 3 potential people, with 3 remote IP addresses ; which is yours?" which would always just get the same vaguely threatening boiler plate...

> Shady and incompetent then, same now I guess.

I received a warning from my university over a complaint that was (apparently) filed against me. The complaint accurately identified a song that was part of a massive torrent from which I had downloaded a single song. If memory serves, I downloaded "Leader of the Pack" and was accused of downloading "Hotel California".

I concluded that they were happy to make accusations without even having any evidence that I had done anything wrong. (Technically, I had... but they didn't appear to have a clue what it was.)

At my university of 20K+, we automated everything as student devs. Parsed the DMCA emails, followed the traces through various types of networks and network logs (public network with leased IPs, dorm networks, MAC addresses, etc) to see who was holding the IP at the time, responded to the DMCA email, and sent students automated emails with warnings and quizzes and reprimands. We put on management frontend on top of it to display data and let admins do manual actions.

I had created a script tha found the common external ips that appeared around those timestamps and blocked them. Problem mostly solved.

Prenda Law used a similar tactic when they uploaded films to pirate bay and then sued anyone who downloaded them.

You can bet if Schneider loses the case, she'll be left holding the bag as Virgin Islands-based Pirate Monitor Ltd disappears.

Creative folks who hire these law firms that specialize in pirate hunters or "monitoring" companies need to realize they have incentives to pirate your content to keep your business. And when you sue people off information they provided you, it's your name on the lawsuit. Sure you can try to sue the companies after you lose, but good luck with that.

It was even shadier than that. They were also producing content solely to upload to The Pirate Bay and sue whoever downloaded it.

After years of running the scheme and raking in millions, they finally got caught when a defense attorney noticed some oddities while trying to identify who Prenda was representing.

The Prenda attorneys continued to be evasive about the identity of the complainant in court. Pulling that thread eventually unveiled their shenanigans. The judge then referred the Prenda attorneys to the US Attorney for criminal indictment.

Two of the attorneys behind Prenda were convicted and sentenced last year: One for 5 years, the other for 14. [1][2]

[1]: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mn/pr/florida-attorney-sentence...

[2]: https://www.startribune.com/judge-throws-the-book-at-minneap...

> They were also producing content solely to upload to The Pirate Bay and sue whoever downloaded it.

In 2013 Germany had a pretty high-profile case where a company bought up the rights to some movies on RedTube and then proceeded to send out C&D letters to anybody who streamed them [0].

The situation was extra nasty due to the nature of the content: Getting caught watching porn is already embarassing enough for a lot of people to simply pay up and not pursue any legal means.

[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urmann-Abmahnaff%C3%A4re

> Two of the attorneys behind Prenda were convicted and sentenced

Thank you. A little heart warming sanity.

> They were also producing content solely to upload to The Pirate Bay and sue whoever downloaded it

Holy crap that's a brillant business model. I'm always amazed by how much out-of-the-box thinking can be made when you remove ethics from the equation...

You're making me miss GrokLaw, where the best coverage of the Prenda debacle went down in discussion sections.

This reminds me of something hilarious happening on Twitch that I recently learned from younger relatives.

There are normal people on the game ‘Among Us’ playing copyrighted music into their mic, so that if a celebrity Twitch streamer gets too close to this individual there is a chance their account would get banned due to the DMCA.

They are using DMCA as an in-game defensive aurora. Ha

There is a joke in India. If you are in Airbnb and are concerned if there is a camera recording you, just play any song from T-Series label. They will find every corner of internet to get it removed.

YouTube just mutes the music of that section of the video automatically. They only take the video down if there is video too. Maybe they used to take the whole video down in the old times, but nowadays they never do that.

It depends on the rightsholder. They can take down an entire video and send a copyright strike to a channel for using their music. A few strikes and your channel is banned. But most rightsholders leave the videos up and either collect the revenue or mute the music

same joke here to play disney music in the background of any risky videos you send your significant other so if they upload it to a revenge porn site later, Disney will take it down.

I think you mean "risqué"

If you're trying to keep it off a revenge porn site, it's both.

Playing Disney music in the background of a "risky" video sounds... weird...

let it go

Wasn't T-Series started by selling pirated mixtapes?

Didn't Metallica make it big by surfing a wave of tape traders [0][1] before becoming the face of the Napster lawsuit?

[0] https://www.salon.com/2000/05/09/metallica_fan/ [1] http://www.metalforcesmagazine.com/site/feature-metallica-mf...

Got to love the chutzpah in the hypocritical disparity between the content and other behaviour of Metallica and their ilk.

RAWK THE SYSTEM!!!!! Apart from that bit of the system which pays for my flash car, that bit of the system is just fine. BUT RAWK THE REST OF THE SYSTEM! Just to be clear, if you rock the bits of the syetm we like, we'll be sending the big boys round in their fancy suits, BUT RAWK EVERY OTHER PART OF THE SYSTEEEEEEEMMMMMMMM!!!!!!!

I'm going to do something that 10 year old me would absolutely hate and defend Metallica... a little.

While it's true that they definitely did grow thanks to tape trading, Napster wasn't just a bunch of tape traders. They were trying to turn tape trading into an actual business that makes money. It would be sort of like if a record store decided that instead of selling CDs, they were just going to sell tape machines and CD-R drives and have half the store be open for people to trade CDs around. Furthermore, Metallica didn't just get angry that people were trading their old songs around. They found out about Napster because new songs they were writing were starting to circulate through it and wind up on the radio. It's sort of like if you were halfway through writing and editing a book, and then suddenly your second draft shows up on Amazon Kindle Unlimited.

T-Series and Metallica weren't doing the same things back in the 80s, either. Metallica was giving away their own songs as a way to gain publicity, sort of like the music equivalent of shareware. T-Series was just outright selling you other people's songs. There's a huge gulf between noncommercial sharing - especially if encouraged by the creator - and commercial bootlegging. The former is more or less just collectors throwing files at one another. They don't really harm the market, they were going to buy it anyway and filesharing is just a hobby. The latter, the bootleggers, are actually harming the market by trying to compete with the original creators of a work. 80s T-Series looks a lot more like Napster than 80s Metallica, IMO.

AFAIK, Metallica was already pretty big in early 90s.

Metallica got big in the 80s, that's before the lawsuit.

The same is a bit of a joke for recording "home videos" with your partner.

Always play copyrighted music and prominently display Disney properties like Mickey Mouse in the video. If it leaks, it'll be taken down at the speed of light by The Mouse's lawyer army :D

Unless the website it got leaked into ends in ".ru"...

So just scream Navalny instead of whatever you'd scream.

Is this like some real life polyglot thing? Instead of a program that is valid perl, python, bash, erlang, etc.; you "taint" your home movies to cover as many jurisdictions as possible?

I'll try. Play the Frozen soundtrack, scream "Navalny", have a Winnie the Pooh plush doll in the frame, do some questionable saluting, and feature a poster-sized image from South Park S5E4 (or that Charlie Hebdo cover) on the wall.

Be careful about the last part, you might get more than you were asking for.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=4344105&page=1

Or play taylor swift.

Release the audio as your first musical track then file your own DMCA takedown when people repost the video.

Like it's hard to strip audio from video

Like people posting leaked porn would bother to change the audio or pixelate mickey.

If they wanted to damage their target, they have the option

> There are normal people on the game ‘Among Us’ playing copyrighted music into their mic, so that if a celebrity Twitch streamer gets too close to this individual there is a chance their account would get banned due to the DMCA.

You mean “due to copyright law”. The DMCA doesn’t do anything to encourage the ban, it just stops Twitch from being liable for copyright infringement the moment the copyrighted content is on the stream at all.

It's not really copyright law either, it's just Twitch's policy.

DMCA provides a safe harbor for Twitch as long as they take down content in a timely fashion when notitified; they can put it back if counter-notified, and they don't have an obligation of prior restraint. They just don't want to deal with the hassle involved with accounts that get a lot of DMCA notices, so if you do, they kick you off.

Fair point. My point was just that copyright law outside of the DMCA is the legal impetus here; the DMCA, if anything, weakens the incentives to a ban policy, it doesn’t create them.

DMCA is the copyright law in question.

No, DMCA weakens the incentive for Twitch to implement a policy like this compared to copyright law outside of the DMCA. With the DMCA, serial offenders are just a bureaucratic headache as Twitch has to deal with takedowns. Without the DMCA, Twitch would be potentially liable for copyright infringement at the first offense by a streamer, and facing much greater risk of large damages for contributory infringement for continuing to fail to prevent repeat violations by known serial offenders.

The copyright law motivating the ban policy is the basic exclusive rights of copyright, not the DMCA.

Isn't mic support 3rd party only? I don't understand how this would help a "normal person" playing Among Us - care to explain? My kids play but I've never heard them using a mic.

There's a mod that adds proximity voice chat to the game which a few Twitch streamers have started using after exhausting the vanilla game and house rules

I love how creative people are on the internet. I read something amazing like this just about everyday and is part of the reason I spend so much time on the net.

Any reason to believe people are any less creative off the internet?

I said I liked apples. I didn't say they were better than oranges. Did you enjoy making a negative reply to my positive statement, or is there something else that is bothering you about my comment?

You do you.

It just seems odd to me that peoples' creativity would be any different on vs off the internet.

I would make the analogy differently.

> People wearing hats have a lot of good ideas. I trust people wearing hats.

The enthusiasm behind my statement was really about the internet enabling people to be creative in never before seen ways. I have a high need for novelty. Using DMCA as a defensive shield in games gave me the hit of novelty I crave, so I was feeling that when I commented. Ordinary life generally doesn't provide people with novel ways to be creative. Many people do it, but not in a way that is as easily accessible to me. Somewhere out there is a structural engineer with a solution that would blow my mind if I knew about it.

Youtube is some kind of madman playground. I have created YT channel for my daughter's cello teacher, where I uploaded Dmitri Shostakovich "Prelude" played by them.

A few moments later I've received information that this piece is "demonetized" (I wasn't even trying to monetize it) because part of this "song" is a copy of some other "song" owned by someone else. That other "song" was in no way related to the Prelude besides it was also played on two cellos.

I've started some "dispute" process not because I am planning to earn money on this channel, but to somehow stop that idiocy that YT keeps pushing.

If Google is using the same "AI" that was used to compare those movies for the purpose of matching ads with those who does not use ad block, I am really sorry for advertisers, who are paying money for this.

Their copyright bots have no understanding of what public domain is, all it understands is resemblance to copies of work that somebody else has uploaded and claimed copyright ownership of.

Zero regards to the possibility of many people being able to legally create independent works that are derivatives of the same public domain work, without any one of them preventing others from creating new independent copies.

Paired with that is that they simply don't care about small time uploaders of personal works. The system is designed to let major uploaders fight via a complicated process that they are familiar with and have somewhat automated participation in - ie Disney vs WB, etc...

The system isn't designed to allow John Smith to appeal successfully.

Will be interesting to see how this pans out. A similar ploy was committed by the infamous Prenda Law firm, resulting in their eventual imprisonment:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/prenda-law-porn-...

When an agent acting on behalf of an IP holder uploads that IP anywhere it should be legally construed as granting an implicit license to use that IP within the context of that upload.

My memory is a bit hazy, but I think that was the conclusion in the Prenda Law case (same thing as in the title, but with porn and torrents).

> According to the Google-owned platform, the same IP address used to upload 'pirate' movies to the platform also sent DMCA notices targeting the same batch of content.

Could be CGNAT? (I mean, it probably isn't, but IPv4 exhaustion is real!)

I wonder what ISP has customers in both Pakistan and Hungary...

An ISP that recently bought IPs formerly used in Pakistan and Hungary (or is in one country and bought the other block), and IP location data hasn't updated yet.

They also note that in some cases the notices were filled before anyone even looked at the videos.

They can look into more logs and check fingerprinting elements (screen resolution, browser, OS, time zone etc) and they'll very likely all match up. Timezone alone actually should be sufficient to convince most doubters.

They can tell just by the first byte of the IP address. CGNAT addresses start with 100.

uhm CGNAT can be any ipv4 address

edit: i realized you're talking about the internal private ip addresses which youtube cannot see... so still confused

More likely a VPN endpoint.

> one of the ‘RansomNova’ users that had been uploading clips via IP addresses in Pakistan logged into their YouTube account from a computer connected to the Internet via an IP address in Hungary

Can someone parse this for me?

Edit: A RansomNovaX-account was usually accessed from Pakistan ip. Then it was accessed from Hungarian ip.

I kept trying to read it as "users that had been (uploading clips via IP addresses in Pakistan [while] logged into their YouTube account from a computer) connected to the Internet via an IP address in Hungary"

RansomNova is the pirate and "is in pakistan"

Copyright owner is "in hungary", and uses a hungary IP address to file DMCA claim against video uploaded from RansomNova.

RansomNova suddenly logs in (to their youtube account) from IP address used by copyright owner, at the same time.

Therefore, RansomNova and CopyrightOwner are in same place at same time, using same IP address -> Somehow connected to each other -> Therefore bad faith DMCA claim.

Key context: the content in question was obscure Hungarian-language content being uploaded from Pakistan. There were also a series of accounts (RansomNova11, RansomNova12, etc) doing this.

The intent seemed that if Youtube thought they were a "good" agent, they would have access to the automated takedown tools that YT reserves for the big players.

Isn't it interesting that there appears to be somebody named "Ransom Nova" in Pakistan, studying computer science? https://www.linkedin.com/in/ransom-nova-73b214191/

Now they'll have a huge come-to-Jesus moment about how IP addresses aren't sufficient to identify individuals.

There are multiple good reasons to enable wifi guest network from home. It is nice thing to do; like in case someone gets in a car accident nearby and doesn't have cell coverage/service.

I have mine throttled and they can't access the rest of home network.

Having a guest network also means you are not liable if someone misuses it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/open-wifi-and-copyrigh....

911 doesn't need cell coverage from your specific provider or even a SIM card to be in the phone. It'll use whatever cellular network is there.

https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-can-mobile-phones-...

If that was your sole reason for having it enabled, you can turn it off now.

Public places can easily claim its not them, but for a house I can imagine it can get tricky, specially if its long-term abuse by a neighbor.

Case in point:

https://www.registercitizen.com/news/article/Man-mistakenly-...

The truth was found after all, but the loss of reputation and legal stress are not worth it, specially in your Good Samaritan scenario.

As a side note, I like that almost all new cars will automatically call the police for you when they sense an accident, using built-in cellular systems.

This is not the case in all countries. I am aware that telcos in New Zealand, for example, will not accept emergency calls from phones that don't have a SIM card. However they will accept emergency calls from any phone with a valid SIM card.

OP referenced a US-specific rule, so I assume they can still turn off their guest network. Thanks for sharing about New Zealand!

SIM cards should get less relevant over time with e-SIM. Smart watches are leading the way in their adoption.

Will your ISP or whoever is suing really care? It’ll cost you too much to defend yourself, I’d think.

In the US maybe, but internationally this varies. Be very careful doing this and consult your local laws before doing so.

In many countries the owner of the contract is liable for anything originating from that line.

> Having a guest network also means you are not liable if someone misuses it

Wrong. Remember Dmitry Bogatov's case. Yes it was a Tor exit, not an open WiFi, but it doesn't matter. Even worse, there is now a law here in Russia that prohibits running WiFi access points that don't take technical or organizational measures to identify (e.g. get passport or phone number of) the person who is connecting.

Genuine question: How exactly do you get access to Content ID? Is there some kind of regular process or do you need to have a special partnership with Google?

I don’t know how you would do it yourself as a layman, but the musicians in circles I follow use a vendor like HAAWK to manage their content ID related stuff.

Fun fact: The artist in question has been dead since 2011. The wording of the article, more specifically when it says:

> Grammy award-winning musician Maria Schneider and Virgin Islands-based Pirate Monitor Ltd teamed up in the summer to file a class-action lawsuit against YouTube.

It somehow led me to believe that the artist was being ... not nice, shall we say. But it turns out it's just the company then. Huh.

I think you may have confused the musician [0] with the actress [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Schneider_(musician)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Schneider_(actress)

My mistake. I indeed did make that exact mistake. Thank you for correcting me.

Sort of off topic but this story is probably the only time we’ll see Maria on the front page of HN:

I just want to point out that she’s a wonderful composer, and if you aren’t familiar you should check her out. (I wish she’d make it easier to do so though - if she’s going to work so hard to keep her music off digital platforms it would be nice if she’d release her albums on vinyl!)

I guess we sort of need a p2p content sharing platform that uses some kind of technology to make things like DMCA's impossible or irrelevant.

We are at a point where laws are hindrance and nuisance.

IPFS?

What does "accessing content ID" mean? The article says they did all that to gain that access, but doesn't mention what is it or what do they gain by it.

CMIIW, by being trustworthy enough to get access to content ID you can automate takedowns at will or demonetise videos at will instead of via reviewed DMCAs.

huh, now their YT username makes sense (RansomNova). the potential of extortion if they get that kind of power is incredible.

Edit: Apparently its not the first time this has been abused

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190205/10064941534/youtu...

So maybe they and the seeders were both under the same DHCP? /s

By the same logic nobody can be identified by IP alone.

I wonder if this means "double jepoardy" is in play: once youtube gets this easily-dismissed lawsuit cleared away, no one can sue youtube again about state of DMCA takedowns on the site.

> I wonder if this means “double jepoardy” is in play: once youtube gets this easily-dismissed lawsuit cleared away, no one can sue youtube again about state of DMCA takedowns on the site.

No, because:

(1) “Double jeopardy” applies to criminal charges only.

(2) “Double jeopardy” applies to charges for conduct that is part of the same transaction, not a similar pattern of conduct carried out at different times against different people, much less suits whose similarity is that they are merely in the same broad category (“has something to do with how DMCA takedown notices are handled”.)

As a general rule, you can’t lose the right to file a civil suit because of a lawsuit you didn’t participate in. (Class action might seem to be an exception, but class members are viewed as participants unless they opt out, so its technically not.)

While double jeopardy itself only applies to criminal cases, there is a principle in civil cases that you can't litigate the same issue twice. In practice, this is much narrower than double jeopardy's rule in criminal cases, and comes even less close to applying here than double jeopardy would [were it to apply to civil cases].

Double jeopardy does not mean that, after being acquitted of your first murder, you're immune to prosecution for a subsequent killing spree.

Though there is a dumb movie called "double jeopardy" where the premise is that it works that way.

Actually in the movie [SPOILERS AHEAD] a wealthy man, wanting to start a new life, decides to fake his death and frame his wife for his murder.

His wife is subsequently tried for the murder that she did not commit, and found guilty. She then goes to prison and serves out the sentence for this murder. While in prison she learns that her husband is not actually dead and instead had framed her in order to start a new life. So after she is released from prison, having completed the sentence for her crime, she then proceeds to track down and publicly murder her husband.

Because of Double Jeopardy, she can not be tried again for the same crime of murdering her husband. She had already been found guilty of it and had already served the sentence for the crime. She argues that it is not possible to murder the same person twice. So she is simply acting on the crime that she had already been convicted and punished for.

If she were to go murder her friend or colleague after getting out of prison that would be a different murder and Double Jeopardy wouldn't apply. But murdering the husband that she has already served the sentence for is the same crime she already was found guilty of and can not be convicted of again.

A Famous REAL LIFE example of this would be OJ Simpson. He was found NOT GUILTY in the 1994 murders of his ex-wife and friend. Since then he has basically publicly confessed to having murdered them (via an interview with FOX). He has also written a book where he writes in detail how he "would have" murdered them. His book publisher has also come out and claimed that he admitted to the murder to his publisher. The reason he can be so careless about these confessions is because he can not be tried for this crime again. He was already tried for it and found "not guilty" so even if new evidence (or a full-blown confession) comes to light, he can not be tried for it again under the protection of Double Jeopardy.

England and Wales (maybe the whole United Kingdom?) fixed this specifically for such important crimes. You can face a second (or indeed subsequent) trial for some crimes despite being earlier found NOT GUILTY if there is substantial new evidence for the prosecution. In OJ's case, it's likely (under those rules) prosecutors could put together enough evidence to show OJ actually did kill those people, go back to court and get him convicted.

Historically it was possible in England and Wales to re-try people in some particular extreme cases. For example if prosecutors could show tampering with the jury allowed you to get off, they can get the High Court to run a new trial, having presumably successfully convicted people (maybe including you) for the jury tampering meanwhile. Or if the original trial judge made a decision that is manifestly wrong e.g. you're on trial for murder, the judge says you seem like a nice man, acquits you on the spot, that can be appealed because a jury was never asked about it.

But in 2003 as a result of the fall out from the murder of Stephen Lawrence (basically a bunch of white guys murdered a teenager apparently for being black but they weren't found guilty of murder) the law was changed. Now it's possible for prosecutors to go to court to get the court to decide that your original acquital was unsafe (the same way they'd decide if e.g. new CCTV evidence showed you were actually half way across the country at the time of a crime your conviction for that crime is unsafe and should be undone) and order a new trial. This option is only open for a handful of offences like murder or kidnapping.

    Historically it was possible in England and Wales to re-try people in some particular extreme cases

Historically, it wasn't all that extreme or uncommon and one of the reasons why protection from double jeopardy is enshrined in the US Constitution.

Yeah I recall when the movie came out lawyers were saying it didn't work the way the movie depicts it, but I didn't remember the details.

I assume in real life she could be found guilty of killing the husband in modern day, a separate crime from killing the husband in the past.

OJ is a good example, but different than in the movie since there's only one murder back in 94, not two supposed murders on two separate events.

They were not acquitted for the first murder, they served the full sentence. Then later subsequently threatened to murder the same individual whom they had supposedly already murdered.

Yeah, DJ still doesn’t work that way. That would be a distinct offense (now, it would be inconsistent, since the same person can only be killed once), but just as there have been, IIRC, a few instances where multiple different people were convicted of murdering the same person (like, directly, not some of them under vicarious liability rules that allow someone other than the proximate killer to be convicted of the offenses) in different trials despite the fact that it is logically inconsistent that all of those convictions could be accurate, it is quite possible to be (wrongfully) convicted of murdering someone and then convicted (rightfully) later if you then actually murder them thinking that having been previously convicted of doing that would give you a free pass.

The same evidence used against you in your second trial might be useful in getting any lasting legal consequences of your first convinction expunged and negated as a wrongful conviction, but that’s likely to be of limited value if you are convicted of the second crime (though it might be useful to negate three-strikes or other repeat-offense enhancements.)

It's still stupid: they could be prosecuted for murder, because if they were wrongly convicted for a murder that allegedly happened in 2003, a murder that happened in 2020 would be a different offense, even if it's the same alleged victim.

they should be tried again, but the sentence should be reduced by time served.

DJ is for criminal situations, and only for specific instances. For example:

If I am accused of killing a man, and I am proven innocent, I cannot be accused of killing THAT SPECIFIC MAN again. If I was to go and kill a man, I cannot claim "but I was already exonarated for killing a man". Because it is not the same crime. DJ is all about being prosecuted for _the same instance of a crime_ more than once. Not that once I broke a law, I cannot break it again in the future.

This can apply to civil cases if a judge dismisses the case with prejudice, which means that this specific case cannot be put to trial again. Sometimes a judge dismisses the case without prejudice which indicates that the judge felt there was a case, but not enough supporting evidence yet. If a case is not resolved, it goes up the chain of courts, eventually a court may reject the case, in which case a lower court's ruling takes hold. If a case is resolved I cannot go to trial for that same case again. Nor can I use the exact same evidence for a new case. Or rather... I can but it will get dismissed with prejudice.

There is technically nothing stopping me from filing cases against you which were already resolved to harass you. But after like 2 times my lawyer's license will be revoked and possibly I will have a case against me for obvious harassment forcing me to cover any legal expenses. Overall courts really really don't like it when you act in bad faith, even if not criminally.

Emphasizing "that specific man" is misleading. The only reason double jeopardy is likely to apply in this particularly situation is that most people don't generally die twice. For any other crime, you can most certainly be accused of perpetrating it upon a specific person multiple times.

>I cannot be accused of killing THAT SPECIFIC MAN again

Nitpick: It's actually that you can't be accused of the SPECIFIC INSTANCE of killing that man.

I only say this because there was a movie with a plot of a husband faking his death and the wife being convicted for it. The movie implies that the wife could find and kill the guy and not be tried because she'd already been convicted of killing him. While only one person was murdered, it was the two separate acts of killing the person that are the offenses, so double jeopardy would not apply.

HA! I was thinking the same thing. Sorry such a late response.

In the situation of the movie though... it would get really complicated real fast.

But yes, specific instances. Though its not like the cops can say 11:59am. Nope next case is for 12:00pm. And now another case for 12:01pm. This is where the judge's judgement will be used.

I'm sure in the exact scenario of the movie this will end up in the supreme court.

Can you imagine if you got a robbery charge dismissed once, you'd be able to rob as many people as you wanted for the rest of your life?

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