38
votes
Supreme Court wants US input on whether ISPs should be liable for users’ piracy, in $1 billion Sony v. Cox case
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- Title
- Supreme Court may decide whether ISPs must terminate users accused of piracy
- Published
- Nov 25 2024
- Word count
- 241 words
Absolutely fucking not. Barring people from internet access is flat-out not viable, and people will have an ISP regardless of whether they're pirating or not. Also, what the fuck.
For a parallel: Suppose someone was smuggling drugs interstate. Should they be banned from using public roads, and banned from travelling interstate? After all, that would reduce their future capacity to smuggle drugs. The answer is obviously not, you absolute fucking lunatic.
While I don't think the metaphor is perfect, I fully agree that Internet should not be treated as a revocable service in this manner. It is a societally-necessary utility in all but legal definition.
Here's the worrying problem. SCOTUS is made up of a bunch of really old people (which is relevant for issues of technology impacts on society), and a majority of them are kind of jackasses from recent evidence.
Corrupt jackasses.
Yep.
Why no, there's no particular reason we aren't held to a code of ethics guidelines like literally every other justice position in the USA. Oh, those free vacations, dinners, private jet flights and lucrative private speaking gigs? Nothing to worry about, pay no mind.
I'm not sure we should put much weight on reasoning from imperfect analogies, but people do lose their license for drunk driving, or have other driving restrictions.
More akin to losing your licence for backing into a car at 3mph in the parking lot.
Copyright infringement, especially the kind
Sonythe RIAA is looking to punish, is a relatively harmless civil violation that requires mass surveilance for enforcement. We typically reserve these sorts of restrictions for crimes such as banking fraud, hacking, and child pornography.Kevin Mitnick got banned from computers for 10 years for being the most notorious hacker on the planet. Plus 5 years in jail before trial because the prosecutors convinced the judge that he could set off a nuclear war with access to a computer for less than an hour. And that was with the sentence ending in 2003. He was still given access to landline phones, which were the primary method of communication at the time.
Nowadays the internet is the primary (and default) communication method. Calling customer support lines often has them directing you to the website 9/10 times.
This would be less of a problem if every area had a dozen ISPs to choose from, as well as a maximum ban time, say 6 months.
Even then, we've been down this road before in the early 00s. Turns out actual mass enforcement of copyright laws against individuals is massively unpopular.
Fingers crossed somebody will throw a bunch of copyright violation notices at every government official and Judge if this goes into effect. That'll get it repealed in short order.
But there's still alternatives to access. You lose your right to internet, and you're fucked.
Plus how would that even work? What if you pirate using a public network?
There are also alternatives to ISP’s. As you say, there are public networks.
One ISP terminating service doesn’t mean you “lose your right to Internet” any more than one bank closing your account means you lose your right to banking. You could sign up with a different ISP or mobile network, WiFi is widely available at many locations like cafes and restaurants, and you could also access the Internet at a public library.
The alternatives may be significantly slower and/or more inconvenient, though. I’m not arguing in favor of cutting people off, but I think the rhetoric here is a bit exaggerated.
You absolutely cannot do this in most of the US. Local monopolies are the rule, not the exception, there.
Well, it’s true that many rural areas don’t have many choices and getting cut off from the only ISP could be quite a hardship if there’s also no cell service. Nowadays there is also Starlink, but it’s expensive.
But it seems unlikely that “most” Americans have only one ISP? Most people have both home Internet and mobile Internet, so that’s two ISP’s already.
They function at very different levels and many people's mobile network doesn't work great in their, again, rural area. But even when they do, how is my 15G of Mint Mobile data a month going to cover all of my family's home internet needs precisely? TV, games, web browsing, video calls, etc.? We mostly don't have metered home internet here, and I can only base it on my Aussie WoW player friends from 20 years ago, it wasn't great for them.
However this is not just a rural area problem, many municipalities granted cable internet monopolies to providers like Comcast/Xfinity meaning.
I think some arguments for why the Internet is important are better than others. “I need broadband to watch TV and play video games” isn’t particularly compelling, even though we do enjoy them and it’s worth the money. Sometimes we go on vacation to get away from these things!
But there are more important reasons like needing it for work or for school. It’s a mixed bag.
It also seems a lot more important in rural areas where it’s basically connecting you to civilization versus in a city where you could probably walk to a cafe and use WiFi.
My partner's video games are what connects him to the outside world and his friends. He cannot really go down the street even alone, particularly in cold weather, much less to a non-existent cafe. Can't walk to a cafe when you can't walk either. Half of his friends are disabled as well. Also therapy. It's also how we order medical supplies. Plus, families do all of those things at home, for work, and play and social connection, not just one of the things.
The point behind all of these things is that it doesn't matter which reasons you personally think are "worthy." Internet provision should never have been anything but a utility in my opinion. But cutting people off from the internet means cutting them and everyone they live with off from all of the many reasons they need it, not just the reasons you think aren't good enough.
For what little it's worth, I think that's a pretty good argument.
And no, my opinion doesn't really matter much - we have no influence on the case. But I was thinking along the lines of "what would be likely to convince a judge."
To me this is where things get ridiculous. Any guest of my house could conceivably break copyright law without me noticing until I get the ban hammer. I work from home, so I guess that means I then have to move into an area with comparable Internet through a different provider, or abandon my career in computers and look for some other way to make money that doesn't require internet. The whole thing is just ridiculous if you give it a few minutes of thought.
That isn't really a thing in America. Maybe the mobile network, although I very much disagree that they're equipped to handle ISP-level traffic on a mass scale. The ones around me can barely handle loading websites without timing out half the time.
I have precisely 2 ISPs available to me: A 128kbps IDSN line for $150 a month. Or Comcast. And I have it better off than a lot of people. My sister lives in an area of Virginia with Comcast, and mobile signals so spotty that they had to install a 4g signal booster on the roof to be able to reliably receive phone calls and text messages.
The 90s equivalent would be "you don't need a phone at home, you can go to the payphone 5 miles away if you need to make a phone call."
And the real exercise for the reader is: What happens to all these public networks when they are used for alleged piracy?
This seems like a rather privileged perspective. Based on this poll, 80% of the population has broadband at home, which means 20% don’t have it at all. Presumably they rely on cell phone access. Also:
I used to get by without a data plan on my phone, relying on WiFi when traveling. It was inconvenient but doable. That was many years ago, though.
Internet access gets used for all sorts of things and the usage that requires the most bandwidth is often the most frivolous, like playing games and watching videos. Yes, many websites have gotten rather bloated, but it’s not government websites that are bloated with video ads. The websites actually designed for universal access need to be usable with cell phones.
You are somehow not connecting that this arguably could extend to you losing your mobile phone access as well as your internet access as broadband providers would be subject to the same rules.
Also your understanding of web requirements and limitations is naive at best. I've seen military websites that required IE6, which isn't running on your phone, and i've had multiple entities that bill through websites that only work on specific browsers (at specific times of day no less).
"watching videos" is also not remotely frivolous and is in this day and age literally part of your job and education. There's a much larger issue of the commingling of company/school resources and hosting them on youtube, but thousands of them do exactly that.
In all these cases the only real alternative is likely going to be "use the library" much like "use the bus" for your drunk driver analogy, but you're going to see a shitload of predatory practices if laws like this get passed. It's already becoming harder and harder to argue that the internet isn't just a utility, but this is akin to the "hangings for theft" level of overkill as a punishment and with likely all the same problems.
I'm not taking any position on the court case. I'm annoyed at people making exaggerated, categorical statements about Internet access in the US. It's big country and situations vary a lot. Can we try a little harder for nuance?
I was thinking of video as entertainment, but one thing that's changed is that a lot of people work from home since the pandemic and rely on video chat for work. So then, getting cut off would affect your livelihood. I think that's a pretty strong argument that getting cut off from broadband Internet would be unjust.
Although, it's also true that many people rely on their cars for their work, and this doesn't mean you can't lose your license or have your car towed.
People rely on their freedom for...freedom. And yet the government can deny you that, or you life, legally speaking. No one has been trying to argue the government "can't", not even in the original example. The point was that it's, at best, an egregious over punishment and that's what most of the analogies have tried to get at.
If the government passes a law saying they can push for federal death penalties for crossing state lines while chewing with your mouth open, then they can do that.
The entire issue here is one of scope and reasonableness, and it's just not. Even from the standpoint of "You abused the system so you should lose privileges" which seems to be what you're devil's advocating, and ignoring the mess that is our modern internet being a private utility, it's extremely hard to look at this as anything other than grossly heavy handed.
And like the history of disgustingly heavy handed punishments, it will be doled out unfairly. "oh that IP tracks back to the kid of some senator? Probably bad data. This IP tracks to a "known" neighborhood so yeah kick them off"
I don’t want anyone to lose their Internet access. I’m not arguing in favor of anything in particular. I was criticizing what I saw as overheated rhetoric.
To put this in perspective, when I grew up, nobody had Internet access and we barely had TV (no cable on our road). I would dial into local BBSes, which was somewhat unusual. Although I spent most of my career doing Internet things, I only had dialup access at home in the dot com era and had to go to work to get broadband.
There is a stark difference between no Internet access and dialup access and you can do quite a lot with a dialup connection. In many places, today’s mobile networks are much better than what we had - after all, video often works and we take it for granted.
So, it’s a little hard for me to see broadband Internet access at home as a necessity rather than a luxury and the arguments people make just assuming that rather than making the case for it seemed kind of weak.
But I suppose it’s true that luxuries become necessities when you start to rely on them and abandon alternatives. People can study or work from home assuming a broadband connection, and that didn’t used to be true - we had to go to work to do work, or go to a library for books. The land lines we used to have are mostly gone and sometimes, people have moved so they couldn’t go to work very easily.
Only when a police officer and a court is involved. Not a private corporate entity telling another private corporate entity that you must have been driving drunk because someone saw your car on the road.
Edit-
Sorry the road that is owned by one of the private corporate entities who you pay to access.
I really think internet needs to be a proper utility like landline phones were (are?). The internet is how people communicate these days, hell most "landlines" are just VoIP these days anyway.
Even though nothing is decided yet in the courts, I thought this story is timely, given that Sony is trying to buy Kadokawa, and now Sony is still pushing for ISPs to police their customers in the US
is there really any relationship between those 2 stories? if you open the lawsuit almost every music publishers is involve in this suit against Cox. And the Sony Music that owns all the anime stuff is not the same as the one involve in this lawsuit, they are two different companies.
The biggest issue with this case is that it's been 2 decades and congress hasn't pass any legislation protecting Americans internet privacy. This is the same case the RIAA has been bring up since Napster.
Well I'm not sure how much it matters that it's two subsidiaries, I mean, it's all one stock ticker for Sony Group Corporation in the end
It just happens that all the Sony news comes out at the same time, that's how press cycles work, I guess?
I agree on the legislation point though, if this tune been on repeat for decades, someone ought to put an end to it
So, basically; "It is now your responsibility to protect my IP"
Uhuh.. do they also realize we live in a world where social media platforms are generally not accountable for their users posts?
What makes them think this would make sense to police on the packet level?
You're misunderstanding. They don't want packet inspection. The don't want any investigation. They just want their accusation, their assertion to be the final say. It's what they've always wanted. To be the arbiter, to scare people out of pirating because all they have to do is point their finger and get you cut off from a vital aspect of modern life.
From the article:
Others have mentioned this, I just want to make it extra clear: This is another round from the RIAA. Forget Cox and Sony, that's just who they picked to play this out.
I don't love the thought of the current supreme court hearing this case, they've been pretty up front that they can bought.
The idea that ISPs should be forced to deny service to certain people is bad on a lot of levels. But if we were to go down that slippery slope, it definitely shouldn't be up to the ISPs and special interest groups to decide who those people should be. It should involve due process.
One ray of hope... so far the courts, supreme included, have been protective of service providers where liability for what their users do is concerned.
yup, ray of hope because ISPs have a lot of money and the court can be bought.
Edit:
What I really need is this with something like this blown as pathetically as possible. If I didn't have so many things I should be doing, I'd go take a video of it myself since it's finally raining here.
Yeah it's hard to say which wealthy industry they would go with. The ISPs do have the most money.