Supreme Court wants US input on whether ISPs should be liable for users' piracy

From the arguments I've read against this, I think not enough emphasis is being placed on the strongest one:

In the modern world online access is as necessary as water, power and phone service. No one would suggest forcing the power company to cut service to a customer over trivial civil law matters (which is what copyright is) that are completely unrelated to the company or the service it provides. No one should suggest cutting internet access either.

I guess ISPs in the US don't want to use that argument due to the regulatory implications (the common carrier classification thing)? But someone should be making that argument to the court.

Should the phone company be liable for their customers performing a copywrited song on the phone? Why should an ISP be required to surveil their customers but not the phone company? When my dish washing machine can take voice commands does it get deputized by the copywrite police too?

Isn't the place which the ISPs were receiving notices from, one of the ones that was actually just Copyright Trolling?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_troll

i.e. they were more about generating bogus notices based upon no real evidence, and didn't even try ensuring they had court worthy evidence before sending notices

If that's the case, then how is that ignored when other, similar firms had their operators sanctioned and thrown in jail for doing the same thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

Surely this ship sailed a long time ago. This is just throwing money around to find someone to blame for piracy despite the fact that piracy is both inevitable and highly incentivized by the claimants.

I feel like someone in the Ars newsroom mixed up their headlines. I thought I was about to read an article about protecting user privacy. What I read instead is an article about to billion-dollar giants having a pissing contest over the oh-here-we-go-again piracy argument. Did Lars Ulrich secretly write this?

Can't the same question be asked on any other illegal activity done over connection. Say wire-fraud? With many computer crimes it gets even more questionable. Should internet connection of some cloud hosting company be terminated if their connection is used for attacking other systems?

Sony winning this will be a disaster. Media companies will use unproven allegations to deplatform people.

I think road construction companies should be liable for terrorism, since terrorist sometimes use roads.

Why don't the copyright holders go directly after the violators of the copyright? Why do they need the extra judicial policing by Cox?

Answer: because they want to shift the enforcement costs to Cox. If a copyright violation cost them $150,000 as they allege, it would make economic sense for them to go after individual violators. But it doesn't.

Should gun and bullet manufacturers be liable for school shootings too?

Cox is asking for clarification: are they responsible for policing content:

1. When it has economic value and some content creator has emailed Cox about torrents on an IP (Sony says Cox profits through subscriber fees)

2. When it arrives in a forum and hurts someone’s feelings (Cox enjoys safe harbor at the moment)

How about a full-length movie with a separate riff track and maybe superimposed robots in the audience?

Depending on how this goes (presumably anti-consumer/end user, given that "the business of America is business!"), it may be time to invest in a VPN.

First, copying anything availible to a "civilian" on the interenet is not piracy as it can be done without any breaking or tunnling,etc, and it is absoltlely clear that copying is bieng be done in complete inocence, click ,save, and it just works. Second, until all digital "property" can be bought, sold ,returned, insured against loss..... or theft,loaned out, rented out, it is not real property, and is not subject to the laws governing property, The idea of siezing real property to somehow protect one, of an infinite number of digital copys, is beyond comprehension. And now faced with the fact of not bieng able to identify, where or,when,or what, was taken, they suggest that based on there general unsubstantiated susspision, cutting someone out of the global comunication system? The real question, is how is this bieng given a hearing?Not good, not good at all.Face up folks, they want to smash the internet, and bring back cable. Boomer noise.

Let me ignore for a moment the legal problems with copyright infringement allegation notices.

ISPs should not be liable for copyright infringement by users, and cutting off internet access for copyright infringement should not be a legitimate legal remedy. The internet is increasingly essential for applying to work, working, applying to colleges, completing secondary and tertiary education, and interacting with governments at all levels. The internet is also a crucial tool for expression protected by the First Amendment. Cutting off internet access would be an illegitimate penalty for defamation, and would be an illegitimate penalty for copyright infringement. Violations of civil law cannot override the First Amendment. In particular, copyright can't override the First Amendment: the authority of Congress to pass copyright laws is in the pre-amendment portion of the constitution, and the copyright laws themselves are federal statutes (which yield to the Supremacy Clause).

Now what about when someone sends notices alleging copyright infringement by an ISP's users (where by ISP I mean providers of access to the internet, rather than owners of websites)? First, such notices have no affirmative statutory basis and were given legal weight by a mistaken court decision [1]:

> The first safe harbor, codified at Section 512(a), applies to providers of “Transitory Digital Network Communications.”[24] Examples of these intermediaries are the companies that provide internet access generally, or what we refer to as “ISPs,” including broadband ISPs like Verizon and Cox.

...

> The third safe harbor, codified at Section 512(c), applies to service providers that enable information to be “stored at the direction of users.”[27] When people speak of the “DMCA,” they are often referring to this safe harbor and the many internet services it covers, such as social media sites or YouTube, where users have published, or “stored,” some “information” they have expressed.[28] Most notably, this safe harbor, which is the most complex of the four in terms of its criteria, includes the requirement that providers abide by a “notice-and-takedown” system.[29] Under this system, the putative copyright holder or its agent sends a “notice,” which is sometimes colloquially referred to as a “takedown demand,” to the service provider alleging that some material a user has posted violates their copyright.[30] Having now been put on notice of potential infringement, the service provider must then act to quickly remove the allegedly infringing material to avoid sharing in liability for it.

...

> In addition, Cox effectively created a new requirement for the 512(a) safe harbor for providers to receive and respond to takedown notices that the statutory text had never before required. Takedown notices are entirely products of the 512(c) safe harbor.[76] While the takedown notices described in 512(c) are also used in the context of the 512(b) and (d) safe harbors, the 512(a) safe harbor makes absolutely no mention of them.

Second, the Section 512(c) safe harbor still violates the First Amendment by design [1]:

> the DMCA requires the intermediaries to apply this censorship without there ever being a judicial finding that the speech or speaker activity was even wrongful.[7] Mere accusation is enough to force the intermediaries to take action, lest they lose access to the protection of the applicable safe harbor and find themselves staring down a potentially expensive infringement lawsuit. Thus, the safe-harbor system creates a situation where non-wrongful and constitutionally protected speech ends up being removed by the intermediary service it was expressed on because the law has established a mechanism to penalize these services if they do not.

...

> If there is to be an obligation for a provider to act, that obligation should be triggered only after there has been a judicial finding of infringement, and not just when there has been the mere suggestion of it.

[1] https://www.rstreet.org/research/jawboning-in-plain-sight-th...

Hey Hollywood, time to bring out the strippers for Thomas, Alito and Kavanaugh (also he likes beer, lots of beer), and I guess some preacher to explain to ACB how ISP is helping the distribution of porn, so need to be punished.

Ah, Post-11/6 America, what a lovely place to birth this boring joke. And it had to be birthed, anything else would be illegal.