ISP to Supreme Court: We shouldn't have to disconnect users accused of piracy | Hacker News Reader

ISP to Supreme Court: We shouldn't have to disconnect users accused of piracy

arstechnica.com

89 pointsduxup17 comments

I never thought I'd say this, but Cox is right. What if you have a kid or relative who is downloading something illicit and gets the entire family disconnected. Or something gets flagged as piracy that wasn't.

Godspeed Cox Cable. Get this ruling overturned.

In any case even if it’s you pirating you should not be cut off from internet.

Your power company doesn’t cut you off if you’re using the power to chainsaw people to death.

Well, they probably would cut you off—but it would be with a court order. And that’s how it should work.

There’s no due process here, and that’s a problem. Sony is saying that they should be entitled to tell your ISP to cut you off without a court order. That should be scary.

It’s no different from Sony arguing that they should be entitled to tell your power company to shut off your power because they believe you’ve watched a Blu-ray Disc more than the number of times permitted by the license printed on the box.

If Sony doesn’t like what they think I’m doing, they’re free to take me to court over it. None of this extrajudicial nonsense.

I though eliminating courts was the point of it. People who download pirated stuff no longer have to fear being sued and forced into an expensive settlement. This was the compromise over the old way of doing it. There has to be accountability somewhere, you can't get something for nothing. (Well you can, you just have to be careful about it.)

> There has to be accountability somewhere

Simple: make the person who falsely signed such an order as a representative of the company personally responsible for their wrongdoing, i.e. jail such a person.

That still requires you to prove your innocence after getting cut off from the internet. Make them go through the courts for every single case. Make them accuse you first, before the punishment, so that you can defend yourself. That’s the whole point of due process.

> That still requires you to prove your innocence after getting cut off from the internet.

Indeed. But it at least destroys the life of any person who attempts to destroy yours via the process.

> People who download pirated stuff no longer have to fear being sued and forced into an expensive settlement.

That's certainly not true. Nothing prevents Sony from suing these people. They could go to court, present evidence, get a court order, and go after these people the same way they always have. They don't seem to want to do that, probably for a variety of reasons. It's awfully convenient if you can scare service providers into enforcing your will without all that pesky "evidence" nonsense.

If you're referring to laws like DMCA and CDA, those provide safe harbor to the likes of websites and hosting providers that serve user-generated content. They don't provide safe harbor to the individuals responsible for posting that user-generated content. You're still on the hook for what you post online, and Sony could sue you. Nothing stops them from doing so.

Going extrajudicial also turns it into an immovable object "policy says no" rather than a deliberative process to achieve balanced justice.

I'm sure there would be plenty of cases where, even if the argument didn't end at "an IP address is not a person", a judge would recognize that cutting off service would injure third parties (for example, the children of the household enrolled in online schooling), or just acknowledge that in a 21st-century economy, blocking someone from Internet access may as well be sending them to a relocation camp in Amish country.

"It would be real disappointing if someone used the guest wifi at Sony HQ to do something illicit."

I have an open wireless network that my grandson setup for me. I have no idea how any of this stuff works, I just use Facebook on my iPad. How am I supposed to be responsible for what people who connect to my wireless do on the Internet?

An IP address is not a person.

> How am I supposed to be responsible for what people who connect to my wireless do on the Internet?

In the US at least, you're not. Some even run open wifi on purpose for plausible deniability: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/01/my_open_wirel...

I think the theory is that if you can't prove it was actually you who downloaded something (they never can), then the fact that you have an open wifi makes it reasonable to conclude that it could have been anyone, and the case gets thrown out.

In other countries, in other times:

Roadshow Films Pty Ltd & others v iiNet Ltd (Decided 20 April 2012)

    (commonly known as AFACT v iiNet) was a case in the Federal and High Courts of Australia between members of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) and other movie and television studios and iiNet, Australia's third-largest Internet service provider (ISP) at the time.

    The alliance of 34 companies unsuccessfully claimed that iiNet authorised primary copyright infringement by failing to take reasonable steps to prevent its customers from downloading and sharing infringing copies of films and television programs using BitTorrent.

* The trial court delivered judgment on 4 February 2010, dismissing the application and awarding costs to iiNet.

* An appeal to the Full Court of the Federal Court was dismissed by Emmett and Nicholas JJ (Jagot J dissenting).

* A subsequent appeal to the High Court was unanimously dismissed on 20 April 2012.

    This case is important in Australian copyright law because it tests copyright law changes required in the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement, and set a precedent for future law suits about the responsibility of Australian Internet service providers with regards to copyright infringement via their services

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet...

Despite this, in my experience, many Australians are scared to pirate. The American experience of harassing ISP letters and examples being made of individuals in court is well known.

Reminds me of the Hadopi debates in France. Wonder if that ever went anywhere.

Is this the same reason Kim Dotcom is being extradited.

That seems unlikely. This is a civil spat between Sony and Cox, without the involvement of the government beyond what's necessary for them to preside over the court case. The investigative burden falls on the two private entities.

They can go around convincing government A to extradite random person B to jurisdiction C over their civil disagreement, especially when that would have severe consequences for random person B.

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