BitTorrent pirates won't receive ISP warnings in NL, but details can be revealed | Hacker News Reader

BitTorrent pirates won't receive ISP warnings in NL, but details can be revealed

torrentfreak.com

71 pointsgslin57 comments

Saving you a click: This seems to be about a court ruling in the Netherlands, and the "something worse" is that pirates' personal details can be revealed if the BREIN anti-piracy group makes a valid legal claim.

Something a VPN will defeat easily.

Also fuck BREIN :)

Or a seedbox.

Wonder if they could force a seed box provider to provide the account owner’s info

They can just go to the underlying data center and demand access and not even bother with the seedbox. Most sre/DevOps/system admin folks have very weak morals and are happy to just hand over data to the police without bothering to do a legal review or challenge. If you go to Reddit r/sysadmin and take a look at the stories, sharing data with law enforcement and three letter agencies is just Friday for them. The attitude is completely different from HN and there's very little institutional resistance to customer data requests by authorities.

Ah yes, fruit of the poisonous tree.

Looks like this one is rented by Heywood Jablome, man that dude rents a lot of boxes!

Thank you! I was hoping to avoid RTFA.

Also known as: State of things in Germany for many years (decades?)

The something worse also includes potential damage reimbursement for the violation. The exposure of personal details is just the first stage of "something worse."

"Depending on the circumstances of the case, this involves signing a declaration of abstention with a penalty clause for future infringements, full or partial reimbursement of the costs incurred and, if necessary, compensation for the damages of injured rights holders.”

> The plan was to monitor BitTorrent swarms, identify IP addresses sharing content most frequently or long-term, and then match them to local ISPs.

Wouldn't the most prolific seeders also be the ones most likely to have a VPN or a seedbox, making this pointless?

As far as I know, the entertainment industry almost entirely stopped going after individuals after their attempts in the early 00s ended up as a PR disaster as they mostly ended up suing clueless grandmothers and preteen girls[0]. Then Netflix came along and made piracy mostly irrelevant, as it was a lot easier for the average consumer to pay $10/month for Netflix than deal with torrenting.

Now that piracy is on the rise again due to the fracturing of streaming platforms, I wonder if we'll see these individually targeted lawsuits resurface.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/riaa-settles-wi...

BREIN is run by lawyers, not IT professionals, and it shows.

It's astonishing to me how resistant Hollywood is to just offering their products at reasonable prices and conveniently. We had a brief stint of it over the pandemic and now it seems they've forgotten it all, are determined to make all their bespoke streaming services as expensive if not moreso than cable, and work advertisements in for additional profits.

Like how did the MBA class become so deathly allergic to the simplest business model of all: Make a thing, and sell the thing?

It's because they forgot the middle step: make the thing worth buying.

Good point but I don't think they forgot so much as think it's much cheaper to just skip that step.

In the short term, sure. Once people realize your entire catalog is tired remakes... not so much.

I think there are some parallels here to the commercial real estate market, which is incentivized to keep rent artificially high because of the underlying funding model.

If Hollywood made the content cheap and easily accessible, it would be a confirmation that the content was not that valuable, and by extension, the salaries of the people that make it would not be justified.

> resistant Hollywood is to just offering their products at reasonable prices and conveniently.

Agree. However - Hollywood have been financially hit by pandemic, the writer/actor stike and other AI impacts. Filmie type people tell me studios are in troble. So, a perfect storm of pain points.

Businesses are trees in a forest. Infinite growth requires decay/enshittification, which produces tinder. When conditions are ripe, flames of disruption burn down old edifices, fertilizing the ground for new growth.

It's the classic birth/growth/death/rebirth cycle.

I really try to understand what is new about that? Isn't this the status quo for years now?.

They wanted to implement at scale warning system that identify alleged pirates through ISPs but failed. Then they now have to sue ISP for refusing to share information about individuals and will have to do this case by case so no large scale automated system. And this is very expensive. If I understand correctly then in such situations the ISPs will not send individual warnings. This means that my ISP can be sued to reveal my identify if I torrented Linux distribution iso files!! [1]

We live in a strange world!

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/nkztyv/copyright_not...

Sounds like it's time to set up a cron job to torrent and delete Linux ISOs. The more noise, the merrier.

What makes you think BREIN would be monitoring the swarms for Linux torrents?

Because they use automated systems that find ridiculous connections. Just look at all the false positives generated in similar areas, all the stupid dmca takedowns for "google.com".

https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/

Seems like they don't have any information on torrents from private trackers.

only sorta right.

What random people with my current temporarily assigned public IP address did download. Unsurprisingly the list is empty because I'm looking at it on my phone on a 4G network. That's going to be interesting with an address on a fiber network of a large operator in a large city.

For what it's worth, despite the name, this is torrents their client sees that you've announced interest in any part in.

If you feed it the IP of a DHT Crawler, for instance, it will claim to have seen pretty much every torrent ever being shared at that IP.

Completely wrong, unfortunately. My lawyers will happily go after any other for-profit shysters who abuse flawed data collected improperly.

I do not pirate content, but I hold a special dislike in my heart for the BREIN Foundation. Somehow, we've decided we're okay with them being the judge, jury and executioner regarding piracy in the Netherlands.

Sadly it seems to be a pattern with many initially good organizations that go rouge under the pressure of their rapid popularity. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers comes to mind, also if you read on last few years on Spamhouse you will get goosebumps.

https://www.activistfacts.com/organizations/17-mothers-again...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3409259

“If intermediaries wrongly refuse to voluntarily provide name and address data, BREIN must incur costs in order to obtain a court order. If these are not reimbursed by the intermediary, BREIN may choose to recover them from the infringer,” the anti-piracy group explains.

In a just world, if an ISP provides PII without a court order, it they would incur massive fines paid to the aggrieved party.

This is a great advertisement for a VPN.

VPN browser extensions should make a deep link that prompts open the VPN

like how a web3 hook opens Metamask or other wallets

all torrent sites should have it

edit during rate limit: just as a more effective reminder and protect users when they separately open the torrent in their BitTorrent client

That's not how VPNs work. You don't download a torrent by opening it in a VPN service.

VPN. AKA Man in the middle attack

What do you mean?

He means VPNs can perform MitM attacks against you.

It's not a realistic risk though (as long as you use a well known provider) because a) the reputational cost would probably destroy them so they have a very strong incentive not to do that, and b) most traffic is encrypted these days anyway. There's not much you can MitM even if you are in the middle.

I don't understand the logic of the GP's armchair speculation. VPNs would lose business if they did shady shit such as data modification.

While torrents are hashed but not signed, in-flight modification of torrent files and torrent data themselves would require a level sophistication but, again, there wouldn't be any motivation for VPN providers to do this.

I mean, if I was a well funded security agency, I'd absolutely poor lots of money into setting up a well-known VPN provider with an excellent reputation - wouldn't you?

That's... not what a MitM is.

A VPN provider can't get any more information about your traffic than your ISP can. Given that most ISPs are pretty scummy, I don't see a material difference, even with a fairly shady VPN provider.

Having said that, I trust the VPN provider I occasionally use way more than I trust my ISP.

Still you talk about trust. It's just a feeling. Not much relevant to what is more secure or not.

If a copyright holder/advocacy group decided to DDoS IPs engaged in seeding/leeching of copyrighted material, or to to intentionally seed ransomware posing as the copyrighted work... do you think they would get away with it in the eyes of the law?

No. Murdering a murderer isn’t legal either.

What I had in mind was more like self-defence. The attack would only be carried out so long as the copyright offender is attempting to leech.

Isn't this already a thing in Germany for I don't know how many years?

Waldorf Frommer ... a rite of passage...

Yes, if unlucky you get an Abmahnung from some shady law firm.

But you can just ignore it, nothing will actually happen; at least in the cases I personally know of.

German courts also think a DNS resolver is liable as perpetrators of copyright infringement for a hostname they resolve, I'm not sure how anybody can take that country seriously. Their laws on copyright certainly have no legitimacy.

https://basic-tutorials.com/news/leipzig-regional-court-dns-...

Piracy arguably benefits society (by providing access to media etc) more than these other entities (the copyright holders, BREIN etc).

Piracy does not produce media. Copyright holders are kind of lame for charging to watch something made decades ago and that already made a profit. Copyright law should be changed.

Did anybody say that piracy produces media?

Yes, I did.

In order for access to media to be provided media has to exist. If those who create media cannot recover tte investments they make to create that media, less media will exist. Therefore piracy, which denies media creators the chance to recover their investments, harms society by reducing the potential amount of media that exists.

...at least, that's a hypothesis, but reality makes things trickier because not all media is a benefit to society. (As an example, those anime that were produced under the guidance of the Happy Science group.)

And also, Brein delenda est.

VPN to Russia (or similar countries) will be the only option for a free internet.

Maybe not Russia, though.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/russia-plans-try-block-vp...

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