Hacker News Reader

Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

I suspect the conversations went something like this:

Film industry lawyer: Tell us everyone who pirated our movies.

Frontier lawyer: We've told you everyone we know of.

Film industry lawyer: What about those people on reddit bragging about getting away with it?

Frontier lawyer: We don't have any way of knowing if those are actual customers, let alone if they're telling the truth. If you have a specific IP you want us to look into, we'd be happy to help.

(later)

Film industry lawyer: Give us the IPs of these users who made comments bragging about getting away with pirating.

Reddit lawyer: No.

Film industry lawyer: Okay, see you in court.

View on HN

I'm actually kind of surprised Reddit didn't just cooperate? As a company which frankly has been acting with particular contempt for users of late, how does Reddit profit from fighting this?

People like their anonymity on Reddit. Every action reddit takes to make it less anonymous looks really bad. That kind of thing scares people and reddit already has some PR problems.

If word spread that Reddit would name people writing specific comments about various "controversial" topics i think millions would flee?

The entire spirit of Reddit is because of anonymity, from askreddit, to intimate questions, to political talk. Also there's lots of lying, fantasy, larping and fiction.

On the flip side, what's in it for them if they cooperate? There's no profit involved with procuring information for another for-profit entity that they have no business relationship with, and then likely having to show up for some other court battle to testify about the accuracy of the data.

> On the flip side, what's in it for them if they cooperate?

My thinking was, cooperating would mean they don't have to go to court, which costs money...

> and then likely having to show up for some other court battle to testify about the accuracy of the data.

...I suppose that could potentially cancel out the savings. However, I would expect testifying to cost much less money than being sued!

If you get sued and it turns out to be bullshit, there are potentially ways to recoup your legal costs.

Or if you do it once, then the film industry expects and requests for you to do it all the time, maybe? This is me just spit balling. If pulling this data costs m, then its m * number of request indefinitely. m is lower than the cost of a lawsuit over a sufficient number of requests. Where as, Reddit eats a lot of cost up front to try to prevent the film industry from racking up costs constantly requesting this information. And it perhaps bleed outside of the film industry. If they capitulate to film, then music might be next, followed by game studios, followed by software companies.

Not to mention the fact that in recent memory, they've already had to contend with the threat of a mass exodus of users due to unhappiness with how the site was run. Whether or not it ended up making any sort of impact in the long run, I have to imagine that their management has no desire to risk that sort of controversy again.

It'd probably reveal how many of their users are actually bots, which would hurt their upcoming IPO valuation.

I think that you are unfairly extrapolating from a couple of high-profile decisions that upset, in particular, nerds.

I think it was a bigger deal than that, but regardless: absent evidence to the contrary, my default assumption is that a for-profit company will prioritize profit at the expense of everything else. Recent events by Reddit merely deepen my conviction.

Goodwill, for an easy "fight" for a well-funded org with legal people "sitting around" on retainer.

Which they can subsequently burn on "more important" or more profitable user betrayals.

They are planning an IPO ... so this is good publicity for cheap and helps counter the bad PR they've been receiving from all their actions.

Cooperate how?

Do you think they are going to install LLM based surveillance and then hand check the comments in case the LLM is inaccurate?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com