Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say::undefined

  • Dave@lemmy.nz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    185
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • prettybunnys
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • Spotlight7573@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.”

  • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    10 months ago

    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?

  • bitwolf@lemmy.one
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    28
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    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

      • RememberTheApollo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        10 months ago

        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.

    • Lifecoach5000@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      10 months ago

      Can you give an ELI5 for this site? Is it just a record of torrents you’ve downloaded/seeded from your current ip address?

      • bitwolf@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        10 months ago

        I’m not sure exactly how but they show which torrents were downloaded from that IP address.

        It clears after a certain interval though.

      • bitwolf@lemmy.one
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        10 months ago

        Oh yeah it’s super helpful. They also have a bitorrent tester so you can see what the seeders see you as.

        • Rooki@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          10 months ago

          Yeah i already suspected such thing, but probably because i dont torrent things, i have no experience in there ;D

  • asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

    • Spotlight7573@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      10 months ago

      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.

  • THCDenton@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    21
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    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.

  • Akrenion@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    10 months ago

    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?

  • nomad@infosec.pub
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    ·
    10 months ago

    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

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    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!