Submitted 2 months ago by flop_leash_973@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
It feels dirty to agree with an ISP on something. But even the worst corporations are on the right side of something from time to time I suppose.
Internet shutoffs should require a court order. Not some emails that are “this person did a bad 🥺🥺🥺 no proof but can you please take our word for it 🥺🥺🥺🥺”
Internet shutoffs shouldn’t be a thing, outside of non-payment or legitimate abuse. If I do something illegal, they should have to sue me, not shut off my internet.
Yeah, they don’t disconnect a criminals phone service because they committed a crime and made a phone call. It makes no damned sense.
If you do something illegal, you should be arrested.
Copyright infringement lawsuits are a far cry from bomb threats or the like.
Maybe not a court order. But I could get behind a process similar to other utilities where you have months or warning and paperwork.
I had to process these requests at a company I used to work for. They do send “proof” (proof in quotes because you have to believe in good faith they didn’t just make it up, which I have to believe they didn’t).
We never shut anyone off though. We worked with business exclusively and only ever sent “scary” letters. Though we had one client that was a major music venue (a very known venue that’s pretty famous) who would get these letters all the time. The irony was too much for me. I ended up calling them personally most of the time because it was too funny.
I remember getting a scary letter because I was torrenting. I thought it so funny because I had to the only person in the world only torrenting freeaoftwarr and public domain works.
I’ve never gotten a scary letter, and I’ve certainly torrented my fair share of stuff, both legal and otherwise.
The trick, I think, is to not use cable. I’ve had municipal fiber, Google fiber, DSL, and small local ISP (RJ45 hookup at the wall), and never once had an issue. The last one is probably annoyed at me because I tend to submit tickets and call them within a few minutes of my service going down (happens once/month or so). It’s extra funny when they ask me to check my wifi settings on my router, and I tell them my router doesn’t have wifi (it’s a Mikrotik router, my AP is separate), and that my wifi is absolutely fine, it’s the uplink that’s busted (i.e. I can access all the stuff on my NAS).
I made a promise to myself that once I left the house, I’d never get cable. And that’s a promise I’ve kept across multiple apartments and now my house. We’re finally getting muni fiber, so I’m pretty excited.
Absolutely the correct position, nothing dirty about it. At this point, for better and for worse, the Internet is a basic necessity. Imagine having your water turned off because you threw water balloons at your neighbour.
Not water baloons, but some companies will cut off your water if you’re sharing it with a neighbor. (especially if that neighbor had their water cut off for not paying a bill)
Which is absolutely ridiculous since you are paying for the water that you are sharing.
Garbage collection services dislike when people throw their garbage in neighbor’s cans even when the neighbor is paying for the larger can (e.g. the disposal volume being used). This has led to some garbage distribution piracy alongside recycling collection crews.
In case you wanted some cyberpunk dystopia in your cyberpunk dystopia.
Or Nestle asked your water utility to disconnect your service because you’re drinking free water instead of purchasing theirs. Not a direct correlation but closer.
Free water? Where do you live? Here I have to pay for that. 🤣
I was thinking, imagine the media companies demand the power company turn off your power because you downloaded a pirated movie. Or gas stations stop selling gas to you because you speed.
Imagine having your water turned off because you threw water balloons at your neighbour.
gasp!
I do that ALL THE TIME!!!
I want to say as an employee of an ISP I literally dealt with users who essentially couldn’t get high speed internet anymore at their address because we were the only option and their grandkids downloaded movies. This put the entire household at a grave disadvantage educationally compared to other households. It shouldn’t be a thing.
That this is even legal in the first place is insane. Digital communication is at least as vital, if not more vital that postage. Image someone is just banned form getting post delivered or he gets throttled to only once every other week…
Yep, good luck finding a job with no internet.
How about this: courts can’t order ISPs to disconnect customers.
To me, that’s like ordering my driveway barricaded because I have too many traffic tickets. If I’m breaking the law, charge me with a crime or sue me. But don’t block my internet access, that’s just uncalled for.
I had Verizon threatened to shut down my internet. I had been receiving notices for close to a decade via email, I assumed they were all toothless. And that was true in the past
I just called the Verizon copyright office and told them that it wasn’t me and I would change my Wi-Fi password 😂
It was suspiciously easy as if they really don’t care and are just trying to be compliant
I got a VPN and no longer have to deal with it
Heh, the one time (or that series of times) I got “caught pirating” was at university, and the IT dept was super chill about it. They “didn’t know what I was doing”, but we’re concerned about my data usage (managed a couple TBs in a month in the mid 00s) and they slapped my hands for it. Was really fun going ‘I must have gotten a virus’ 5-6 times in a couple months as I dialed in the throttle speeds to a level they were chill with.
Amazing how the tech students always struggled with viruses 🤔
I remember discovering that if I plugged my laptop into where an abandoned printer was at my school I would get a full 100megabit pipe. At the time that was incredible.
I feel like most people don’t even check their ISP email anymore. Why use that instead of the Gmail you’ve had for 18 years.
No they sent it to my main email, I don’t even know if I have a Verizon email address
Small ISPs have zero interest in enforcing piracy. They don’t want to lose the customers on their highest tiers. Comcast though, they suck
enforcing piracy
NOTICE
YOU HAVE NOT MET YOUR MONTHLY PIRACY QUOTA
YOU WILL BE TERMINATED,
THANKS.
This is actually how private trackers operate lol, I got banned from one because I forgot to torrent anything in over 3 months since I was playing a huge game during that time.
The ISPs? doing something nice?? for the customers???
Shit, I must have slipped into the wrong timeline or something
It’s without a doubt motivated by their own loss of revenue but a consumer friendly take is still commendable
Nope, they just don’t wanna be bothered
Don’t wanna be bothered/Don’t wanna lose that sweet, sweet monthly
It means they can fire the one guy that sends the angry letters and get rid of a printer.
It’s less work and cost for them if they don’t have to do this.
ISPs can’t take your money if they cut off your internet
iiNet in Australia used to fight for their users’ privacy until they eventually sold out.
It’s becoming impossible to monitor. I have 5G Broadband Internet and I share a public IP address with everyone in my area. I look at iknowwhatyoudownload.com and it shows thousands of torrents that my neighbors have pulled downloaded.
Oh another cool site for my bookmarks.
What is this site? It feels like it’s a tool for anti-privacy copyright narcs. A domain it links to is “antitor.com.”
Especially since it specifically highlights porn in a different color, it labeled my VPN IP as “Likes Porn”.
Wow it actually knew 5 of the 50 torrents I downloaded recently
Didn’t find anything from me… Then again I’m using a private tracker, which should insulate me from that. (Random people knowing, the ISP probs does know… But I don’t think they care)
I use proton VPN for torrenting. It doesn’t show I’ve downloaded anything. I think that means my VPN is working? 😅
Think it’s because they know the people pirating are the people paying for unlimited?
Meanwhile, VPN providers be like “come on download stuff 😉😉😉”, wouldn’t that be a much easier case for them to prove willful disregard for piracy?
A day is going to come when the VPNs are going to be targeted for regulation.
It’s only a matter of time before someone shoots up a school with a 3D printed gun or Epstein’s a terabyte of child porn to a Senator’s office or some other silly bullshit, and then VPNs will become the whipping boy for our litany of problems.
In autocratic states where VPNs are blocked, they use VPNs that are harder to detect. So by the time they decide to criminalize VPN use in the free (read slightly less un-free) world, we’ll still have a cornucopia of options.
It’s like FBI trying to ban encryption or get it regulated when we already have encryption technology that is deniable.
Considering how many corporations rely on VPNs for their workers, I don’t think this would gain much traction.
Well,
a) even the labels and studios pirate stuff that isn’t theirs. They don’t really believe what they preach.
b) All that content they produce involves unethical treatment of the actual creators and technical staff who are under-compensated, and often lose all rights to their own creative work. and
c) regional blocks are just marketing bullshit, and is the primary thing VPNs advertise they’ll circumvent for you.
Yeah, but ISPs are rich and VPN providers are not. The most recent numbers I can find for Cox (2020) show $12.6 billion in revenue.
I’ve had VPNs email me that they’ll terminate my account if they find me pirating again after getting notified of DMCA. That was a few years ago by the same VPN I’m still with and have been pirating ever since. I haven’t gotten any more emails so either I didn’t get caught again or they’re just not notifying me any more.
I didn’t want to lose the VPN though since it gives me a long term IP and allows incoming port for torrenting
Abolish copyright
I’m glad I live in Australia where this doesn’t happen thanks to previous attempts by IP copyright holders (mainly US based ones) to have similar policies forced upon ISP’s here and being told by judges here that the penalties and expectations and demands made by these said IP copyright holding companies was over the top and excessive and thrown out of court……
Fuck the dmca!
Can’t wait to find out which industry benefits the SCOTUS justices more.
This is less than interesting.
ISPs don’t want to cut off their income here. I’m certain they have a very good idea of how many of their customers, especially those paying for higher tier plans, are either getting constant DMCA requests, or have a persistent connection to a VPN service. They have a good idea of how much money they’re making from people pirating content, so this position for them is hardly surprising.
At the same time, I’d rather they fight with the copyright trolls than me. Regardless of the reason for why they’re doing it, it’s a good thing to fight for.
IMO, they shouldn’t be responsible for this because they’re not tasked with enforcing laws. They must abide by them, and they have a legal, or at least, moral obligation to report any felonies/crimes that they’re aware of (with varying degrees of obligation depending on the severity of the crime. Eg, I’m less bothered if they don’t report, say, piracy, than I would be if they don’t report CP/murder/violent crimes, etc).
If the LEO’s want a service cut off for a good reason, then let them get a court order for it. They should not be obligated by law to enforce such laws. Any enforcement should be handled by an independent organization, and be filtered through the court system as a check/balance for the whole cabal. They shouldn’t be forced to both find and enforce infractions. Reporting suspected infractions, maybe. Forwarding legal requests to customers, sure (like DMCA notices). Oblige disconnect requests from law enforcement by request (when confirmed necessary by courts in the presence of reasonable evidence), absolutely.
But having the ISPs do all that themselves with little oversight, is both a danger to their clients, to their liability, and to the public at large, mainly in the context of free speech. The ISP is just the middle man, the messenger. They don’t host the content, nor should they police it, or the access you can get to it. I’m all for collaboration in the interest of enforcing the law, but putting the entire obligation on the ISP seems foolish to me.
Cyber crimes is one area of law enforcement that I don’t think should be defunded. It may be that ACAB, but those doing the investigative work, away from public interaction (and possible abuse), are not the root of the problem there.
I dunno, just my opinion man.
Even a broken 12-hr analog clock is right twice a day
This is capitalism 101: whatever makes the most money is what they support. It doesn’t matter who is hurt (or not hurt), or what is right/wrong. As long as they can make more money than they are losing by lawsuits, they will keep doing this. If they can avoid doing anything at all and not get sued while getting paid by customers, that’s even better.
Shut down their access to computer stores and the power companies while you’re at it. Only fair. No piracy without computers or power.
So I’ve rented a server for years. It’s in the US and it’s a couple bucks a month. It’s fun to play with and I use it however I want. I’ve had an email server, a next cloud instance, and an open VPN instance to name a few things on it. Well I decided to connect a torrent client from my home to the openvpn instance on my server to see if I could do it. It worked really well until the company I rent from forwarded the DMCA hit back to me for downloading Rick and Morty. I should’ve known better but I thought a nameless faceless server farm wouldn’t be worth the hassle of a DMCA but I was wrong.
Critical support
Here in NL the ISP’s are refusing to give client info to the government due to privacy policy, giving a big “go fuck yourself” to any agency trying to convict internet pirates. A judge needs to sign for an ISP to release information on soneone, which only happens with large criminal cases like drug sales and child porn distribution. The fight to change the law so ISP’s are forced to release all client info has been going on for years and years now, constantly ending in favor of privacy. ISP’s are asshole companies lurking for your money, but at least they protect client privacy over here.
Difficult to feel sorry for an organisation whose only responsibility is to generate profit for their shareholders. If their policy happens to align with normal human ethics it is a coincidence and they will not spare a moment to consider the plight of their customers when the shoe is on the other foot. Fuck them. Long live the pirates.
Thekingoflorda@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They’re 100% only doing this for money, but still, nice to see them in the right for once.
Godort@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
snooggums@midwest.social 2 months ago
Task failed successfully.
xavier666@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Something something broken clock
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 2 months ago
A lot of it is the sheer bureaucracy of chasing down actual pirates and weeding them from people who just happen to be on the same IP address.
If one guy visiting an apartment block downloads a torrent from a public connection, what is ATT supposed to do? Shut down Internet to the entire building?
This is an undue burden for ISPs, even if the content isn’t living in a gray zone of legality.
the_post_of_tom_joad@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Yeah IP owners really want to have all the benefits of ownership with none of the drawbacks. After lobbying for and receiving a blank check to be able to rent seek indefinitely, they are constantly acting to outsource any cost of detection and enforcement of “their” property. Disgusting how goddamn entitled they are.
blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 2 months ago
… IP addresses are assigned to modems… They don’t assign IP addresses to… Cables going to buildings I guess lol but ok.
And if you’re in some fucked up place that has the entire apartment complex’s internet going to one modem, then God save your soul.
umbrella@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
something something broken clock
dumbass@leminal.space 2 months ago
Ohh for sure, they know that if they get rid of the pirates, they’d lose half their customer base and will struggle to pay the CEOs bonus.
gedaliyah@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
sibannac@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If you disconnect them you can charge them fees