Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users
Uh oh, some sort of court ruling?
film studios say
Oh right, nothing to see here.
this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
280 points (94.6% liked)
Technology
59148 readers
2352 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
That doesn’t mean they won’t do it, the more the “money taker” class takes control the more their internal regulations actually matter.
Unless we regulate that they can’t do this you can rest assured the businesses will play with each other.
Reddit is going public, they won’t give a fuck about your privacy anymore.
"Film studios" can eat a bag of rotting dicks. Hollywood was literally founded on the specific plot of land that was not only cheap AF, but also as far away from the European filmmakers (they were stealing from) as they could afford.
Fuck. Off.
Yes. Lot of rotten dicks in that industry, but unfortunately the sucking is done by the wrong people.
Weinstein? Do you say Harvey Weinstein? I could've sworn you said Harvey Weinstein has had festering dick rot for so long that he's become an oozing open wound entirely, but that assumes he wasn't already.
deleted
Now you just gotta post that stuff to the DCS forums.
In this case, it's less about the actionability of going after the pirate and more about using them as a witness to go after the ISP with deeper pockets by showing they failed to kick pirating users off of their service. They don't care that they downloaded it, they care that the users knew they wouldn't get in trouble for piracy with that ISP and that the ISP benefited from that by keeping pirating users subscriptions active. Testimony from pirating users about why they chose that ISP and how even they knew the ISP wouldn't do anything to resolve copyright violation issues could be pretty helpful in court.
From the article:
In this week's filing, the film studios claim that six Redditors' IP address logs are “clearly relevant and proportional to the needs of the case" because the Reddit users all made comments that either establish “that Frontier has not reasonably implemented a policy for terminating repeat infringers sufficient for a safe harbor affirmative” or that “the ability to freely pirate without consequence was a draw to becoming a subscriber of Frontier."
Last year, a Reddit user wrote that they received 44 emails from Frontier threatening to cut off their service due to torrent downloads, but “if they didn’t do it after 44 emails ... they won’t."
In 2022, another Reddit user said that they had used Frontier DSL for years and “despite the shitty internet, they didn’t give a shit what I downloaded.”
Oh, well, if the film studios say so then by all means...
Imagine you have a right to know who's talking about doing something illegal without proof they actually carry it out. What is that, a cop run film company?
Seems a little outdated to ask for IP addresses. Many use apps to browse reddit and phones get new IPs all the time.
Heck I can see some weird shit people download by toggling airplane mode on/off and visiting iknowwhatyoudownloaded
They can get the ip history from isps
How about the four billions VPNs on the market
I believe if you visited using a VPN it would show a lot of downloads.
Yep. People act like they’re suddenly safe because they switch IP addresses. All those addresses are logged and can be traced by history. Heck, even VPNs can be rendered useless if they keep logs and are subpoenaed, or you forget to log out of services that communicate automatically your IP address when you switch to a VPN. Just takes a little more effort to link the VPN traffic.
People don’t understand that the only thing between them and legal trouble is the willingness of the system to expend the effort to track them down, not that there’s any real security in the easiest methods people use to avoid detection.
Can you give an ELI5 for this site? Is it just a record of torrents you’ve downloaded/seeded from your current ip address?
I'm not sure exactly how but they show which torrents were downloaded from that IP address.
It clears after a certain interval though.
Neat page lmao
Never knew there was such a website.
Oh yeah it's super helpful. They also have a bitorrent tester so you can see what the seeders see you as.
Yeah i already suspected such thing, but probably because i dont torrent things, i have no experience in there ;D
Film studios must kiss my ass, says I.
Even if they got the IP addresses, I thought I read an article from a while ago saying that the supreme Court decided that IP addresses aren't good enough to take any legal action on someone since they're shared.
Also IP addresses can be spoofed, an extreme example was a teacher who's life was ruined because it was discovered he was stashing kiddy porn on the school issued computer, and then was exonerated because evidence was found that revealed that the actual pedo was using the victim's laptop address as basically a VPN to find this stuff without being tracked.
It appears they aren't taking legal action against the pirates but instead wanting to use them as witnesses against the ISP who has more money to go after and from the sound of it didn't have decent repeat infringer policies in place. They also are after more than just the IP address, such as name, email address, and logs. That would presumably be enough to identify someone more clearly.
Sponsored by Nord VPN
You know what? I fucking hate movies now. Every movie that comes out these days if trash. But I'm gonna dl all these new blockbusters and fuckin seed them indefinitely. Why? Because fuck em that's why.
I was merly discussing how to stay away from these easy to use services that allow people to pirate. Why do they need my IP?
Reddit must not, says I.
Seems we're at an impasse
Just wait for the IPO then buy a controlling stake. Seems easier than forcing reddit in court. Spwz loves dick as long as it pays well. No need for the hammer
Should be worth cents on the dollar since they fucked it up so bad
should, yeah.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.
In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users.
Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a copyright infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.
In her ruling, Beeler noted that while the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, the film producers had already received the names of 118 Grande subscribers.
She also said the film producers had failed to prove that “the identifying information is directly or materially relevant or unavailable from another source.”
This week, as reported by TorrentFreak, film companies Voltage Holdings, which are part of the previous two subpoenas, and Screen Media Ventures, another film studio with litigation against RCN, filed a motion to compel [PDF] Reddit to respond to the subpoena in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 61%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Such redundant 8nfo in post. States the same info 3 time for some reason.
Time to get the retractable baton out of storage.
That's an old callback. Fun times reading those posts back in the day.
Trying that one again? Thought they lost last time
I wonder what all the people attacking AI data harvesting are going to say. Sorry the face eating leopard is looking at your face