
You Could Be Kicked Offline for Piracy If This Music Industry Lawsuit Succeeds - nwrk
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywk9wm/you-could-be-kicked-offline-for-piracy-if-this-music-industry-lawsuit-succeeds
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WilliamEdward
To get in trouble for piracy, you need to:

A) live in a country where surveillance is huge (America, UK). This simply
wouldn't happen in a 3rd world country.

B) Own the actual content-distributing site (piratebay, etc). That's who
litigators / law enforcement go after the most.

C) If you don't own the site, you need to download ungodly amounts of content
illegally. I'm talking 1000s of Gigabytes worth of content every month.

D) Actually be worth the cost of a legal trial, meaning you have to respond to
the email/notice, have the money to pay them, and be downloading so much
they're somehow losing money.

If you don't tick 100% of these boxes you will almost never be caught. Piracy
isn't a big deal on an individual basis because people who do it were never
going to buy the content even if they got forced to. If anything, they're
doing your product a favour by checking it out and probably buying it in the
future. Or it's a warning sign that you need to get your shit off of HBO and
onto a more accessible platform. So nah, this lawsuit will change nothing. All
it does is take away point C of the above list.

Now, can you be kicked off the internet for this new law? I don't know the ins
and outs but the reason i see that not happening is because ISPs would lose a
huge amount of customers and would lobby against that hard, among reasons
stated in the article. Anyway don't panic, the internet is still a wild west
and nothing is going to change that anytime soon.

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xyzzy123
I liked the pragmatic response in NZ to robo lawsuits. Requesting an ISP
lookup of someone’s details cost $20 (some years ago, not sure of current
price).

In practice although rights holders might claim that damages were $lots,
except in the most egregious cases no-one found it worth $20/user to initiate
“legal action”.

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WilliamEdward
That's interesting, thank you. If i torrent 1 movie from netflix, that's only
worth about $12 (or whatever monthly subscription). Ignoring all other factors
that would make it not worth it to litigate (not a legal court case but just
send a letter to an ISP), this is still not worth $20.

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xyzzy123
I just looked it up as my memory of the process was from an ISP friend over
beers several years ago.

It seems the enforcement fee is currently $200 from the rightsholder:
[https://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/copyright/forms-and-
fe...](https://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/copyright/forms-and-fees/)

Damages are capped at $15k and awarded by the tribunal as per:
[https://www.iponz.govt.nz/about-ip/copyright/file-sharing-
in...](https://www.iponz.govt.nz/about-ip/copyright/file-sharing-
infringement/)

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appdrag
This already exist since years in france:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law)

In practice less than 20 peoples have been disconnected because of this law in
9 years

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a3n
"So far, the music industry has yet to challenge bigger players with deeper
pockets like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon, though these giants are likely watching
the case with great interest for liability reasons."

In a better world those larger ISPs would pony up, band together and help out
the little guys, in their own enlightened self-interest, a la Newegg.

But they probably see it in their thuggish self-interest to let the little
guys be sued out of existence, and take over those customers. And then they
may start fighting this.

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beefhash
I don't see why this method in particular would be a problem with regards to
achieving the goal. Enforcing copyright laws through traditional lawsuits and
criminal law enforcement has been, by and large, a failure. We do need a
change in the enforcement methods, as it's very clear the laws will not be
adjusted to match the reality of rampant piracy.

In the end, changing the method of enforcement it's just another method to
make law and reality match up (as opposed to changing the laws to reflect
reality).

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dnbgfher
What? Rightsholders aren't going to respond to reality, so in order to let
them continue to ignore it we should ramp up enforcement methods, further
isolating rightsholders from being forced to deal with it?

How does this make any sense?

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beefhash
There's no realistic way to combat the heavy lobbying that's going on around
intellectual property questions, copyright in particular. Thus, to make
reality and laws match, enforcement must be adjusted instead.

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ycmbntrthrwaway
You say you "don't see the problem" because you see no way to fix things. The
problem does not cease to be a problem because of that.

~~~
beefhash
I've made a clarifying edit. Maybe this helps capture what I'm trying to say.

