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Comment by stevenwoo | Hacker News Reader

When I worked for office with about 40 employees in 2001 or so, the FBI came to our office to arrest a guy using I think Limewire over our high speed internet access to share music and videos. It may be so common these days they only crack down like that on really egregious abuse.

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Around that same time my own brother was working at the second largest record label in the world and their own servers were hacked and serving about 1/3 of global warez downloads.

Law enforcement didn’t get involved and nobody did shit about it.

Not even the last time that company was massively hacked. ;)

It had to be more complicated than simple copyright infringement for the cops to get involved.

The music industry had more political power in 2001 than it does now.

Or he was sharing other material that was kept quiet.

The raid being due solely to music copyright infringement is really the most likely situation. There's no need to imply it was anything else.

For example, in 2009 I worked at a record store that got raided due to such claims. The RIAA's informant claimed he had seen people selling hidden bootlegs, which absolutely wasn't happening, and that was all they needed to have cops raid the store, arrest several people and cart off boxes of not-bootlegged, sold-by-major-CD-distributors CDs. Court dates followed and the case was eventually dismissed (or settled due to being more convenient than continuing the case? I can't remember), but it still took time, money, and lawyers. And this was in 2009, when the recording industry wield less power than in 2001.

(I was running late for work that day or else I would have ended up arrested too, since I was one of the managers scheduled then. Thank god I was running late!)

As a procrastinator, I applaud you.

Tomorrow.

I don’t know, rolled into work at 10 and only saw they were giving him the perp walk to the car and I only heard about the details from coworkers, wasn’t close to him.

The RIAA still has insane amounts of power both political and actual. They got away with successfully suing an ISP for billions over of what their customers downloaded and only lost on appeal. They've shaken down several other ISPs for settlement money to avoid going to court. Lately they've also been going after stream rippers, AI start ups, and archive.org

I think the MPAA has more money to throw around these days, but don't let the RIAA tell you that piracy is killing them. They're doing just fine (https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/2026-Mid-Yea...)

Cox v. Sony Music went all the way to the Supreme Court. The lawsuit started in a Virginia US District Court in 2018 and the Supreme Court opinion was in 2026. [1][2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox_Communications,_Inc._v._So...

[2] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/cox-communications-inc-v-so...

This is crazy. Worked at a national ISP/telecom and one of the directors openly had a seedbox and was torrenting massive amount of things. Chalked it up as the poors being held to different standards as this person had a close relationship with one of the executives.

I think they are training ai porn so ... this should be a lawsuit

More likely training porn detectors for moderating the feed

You are most likely correct but that sounds less fun. Also they can do it much smarter way. Just ask these companies for content so they can detect it and prevent copyright infringement

I mean basically that. If you hit a corporate IP, unless they have flow level logging or you have very extensive timestamps, then the game ends, company says they've enacted new training or controls, but they can't identify a specific person and it's not their fault.

Essentially - this is not a suggestion.

Residential ip's map to a specific person, and it's a lot harder for them to deflect and say I'm not responsible for my own Internet connection

> Residential ip's map to a specific person,

Since when does every household member have their own residential IP?

Even in single households that's not true (friends visiting, on-and-off partner, one night stands, helping the neighbor out cause their wifi is broken, ...)

And I don't know the logging + data retention requirements for CGNAT.

> Since when does every household member have their own residential IP?

Isn't that the dream of IPv6? Every member and device in your home trackable all the time?

Thank you for making it clear why IPv6 must not succeed. Long Live IPV8.

Most devices should be using temporary dynamic IPv6 addresses, for this exact reason. I believe this is the default on most Linux distributions, not sure about others.

I felt quite let down when I realised Fedora which bills itself as "free & private" didn't use temporary addresses by default and I had to go hunting for configuration files to enable it as it's not exposed in the UI either.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/ipv6-privacy-option-a...

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2280924#c3

From the ISPs perspective, companies are still just as responsible for whatever takes place over their connection. From the law's perspective, the person responsible is whoever a jury can be convinced did it.

In cases where the company wifi is open or places like hotels the person who did it could be long gone. Unsecured residential wifi connections aren't much of a thing anymore, but I've seen a lot of people lending out their residential connection when they airbnb their vacation homes to strangers.

>Unsecured residential wifi connections aren't much of a thing anymore<

most residential wifi are not very secure, put the black hat on for a second, then send a message telling a user there is something they cant have; cant do; or will lose, unless they log in, or sign in. then you see the joe password, and many times its the same password for everything.

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