
AT&T to cut off some customers' service in piracy crackdown - threatofrain
https://www.axios.com/scoop-att-to-terminate-service-over-piracy-for-first-time-1541465187-749442e3-7b71-4cc7-a694-865779b6fb96.html
======
tantalor
The podcast Reply-All had a good episode about why this is problematic earlier
this year.

[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/118](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-
all/118)

Excerpt:

 _ALEX: So finally, I find this website that is called the Center for
Copyright information.

PJ: And what’s that?

ALEX: It’s a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the
ISPs, they’re working together. And the deal is, if you feel that you have
wrongly received a DMCA notice, you can go to this website, pay $35, and you
can appeal it. And if you’re successful, then they will tell your ISP they
were wrong, and they retract it, and you shouldn’t have any strikes on your
account.

PJ: You found internet court.

ALEX: Yeah, I found internet court.

PJ: So are you taking this case to internet court?

ALEX: I sent them an email and said, hey this person Cayden was wrongfully
accused.

PJ: And what did they say?

ALEX: They didn’t say anything, they never got back to me!

PJ: (laughs) Got it.

ALEX: So basically what I found was a completely unaccountable system that was
frustratingly opaque. It was maddening. So I decided to try something else._

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _It’s a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs,
> they’re working together_

The entertainment industry wants takedowns eagerly enforced. The ISPs don't
want to do work. Ignoring complaints is the predictable outcome. (As is AT&T
becoming stricter about copyright enforcement after buying a content company.)

~~~
mywittyname
Anymore, the ISPs and the entertainment industry are the same entities.

AT&T owns WarnerMedia, formerly Time Warner, which owns cable networks, movie
& music studios. Most of the entertainment Americans consume are owned or
produced by AT&T or a subsidiary.

~~~
notyourday
Which is why the next multi-billion dollar company is a simple ISP, the one
charging $$ for delivering IP packets. Unfortunately, it is not sexy enough
for VCs to fund.

~~~
mywittyname
I doubt it. Google couldn't break into this market with all of their money,
influence, and incentive. I see nothing to suggest any other company could.

Regulatory capture has turned the internet into a de facto monopoly. There
won't be any new players because they can be sued or acquired long before they
become a threat. Our only hope is for regulations that prevent ISPs and media
companies from being under the same umbrella.

------
obblekk
I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws
like 150yr copyright), but are still made uneasy by this development. I think
the source of that discomfort is - what happens if your service is cut in
error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process?

Competition in the form of space internet can’t come soon enough, not to
enable pirates, but to ensure normal people have reasonable service levels and
alternatives to unfair decisions.

~~~
eiaoa
> what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a
> fair, easy appeals process?

This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down.
If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with
massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that
those institutions are even _less_ accountable to the average person than the
government, and they have obvious interests in tilting every table to
advantage themselves.

Dealing with a corporate bureaucracy is dealing with a regulatory body that's
been totally captured by that corporation.

~~~
sbov
But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a
competitor!

~~~
msbarnett
> But if AT&T unfairly cuts you off from the internet, you could just go to a
> competitor!

If we pretend geographic monopolies don't exist, maybe

------
jrockway
I wonder when this will spread to other industries? Say someone doesn't pay
their newspaper bill. Maybe contact their water company and ask them to shut
off their water, to encourage them to pay. It's worth a try, right?

I get why content rights owners go to the ISP to get at the ISP's customers
who are doing things they don't like. I don't get why ISPs play along. It's
extra work, and it makes the customer hate the ISP for being the bearer of bad
news.

~~~
usefulcat
In this particular case, the answer is rather obvious--the ISP _is_ a content
rights owner. Vertical integration FTW!

~~~
woobar
How is it different from when Time Warner media business and Time Warner Cable
(ISP) were the same company?

~~~
dvtrn
I don't think they're saying it is?

------
sp332
It's taken a while to sort out in the industry, but I think the finding
against Cox last year has ISPs running scared. [https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2017/02/cox-must-pay-8m-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2017/02/cox-must-pay-8m-in-fees-on-top-of-25m-jury-verdict-for-
violating-dmca/)

Edit: I thought there was something more recent, and sure enough there's a new
lawsuit from August this year.
[https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2018/08/sensing-blood-in-
wat...](https://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2018/08/sensing-blood-in-water-major-
labels-sue-isp-cox-for-ignoring-their-dmca-notices.html)

------
kevin_b_er
But remember, it would impinge AT&T's corporate "free speech" to have their
service be a dumb pipe like any other utility. Corporations should always be
free to do whatever at the expense of flesh and blood humans.

------
bitxbitxbitcoin
Some of you might be wondering why "a little over a dozen" people being booted
from their ISP is newsworthy. This is figuratively the beginning of a very,
very slippery slope.

~~~
dawnerd
and I bet those "over a dozen" people are also their highest in terms of
bandwidth use.

Smart pirates use vpns anyways.

~~~
Spivak
ISP sees high amounts of traffic over a public VPN and kicks you off their
network for suspicious activity. You go to appeal it in one of their 'courts'
and since there aren't really any rules the burden of proof is on you.

You really were pirating so such positive proof doesn't really exist and
you're off the internet for good.

~~~
craftyguy
There are perfectly legitimate reasons for 'consuming' a large amount of
bandwidth. For example, I help seed a number of Linux distro ISOs over
bittorrent, and once got a letter from my absolute shit of an ISP (Frontier,
if you are reading this, it's you).

~~~
Spivak
Plenty of legitimate usage, I'm talking about the fact that masking your
traffic with a VPN isn't really protection when these 'courts' can demand you
prove you weren't pirating content in order to restore your service.

So getting away with piracy by way of plausible deniability is much harder.

~~~
dawnerd
They’re not real courts so no they can’t demand you to prove anything. I don’t
know where you’re coming from but it’s nothing but unsubstantiated fear.

~~~
Spivak
Forget the term courts. An ISP is within their rights to refuse to do business
with you on the suspicion that you are a suspected pirate. If you then decide
to go through their process they are also within their rights to continue not
doing business with you until you voluntarily turn over evidence that you were
in-fact not pirating content.

And since, for me at least, if I got my internet shut off I would pretty much
have to move that's plenty of coercive power.

------
tlrobinson
If you are fortunate enough to live somewhere with a choice of ISPs please
vote with your dollars and choose an independent ISP.

Or, start your own:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16160394)

------
philipodonnell
> The bottom line: Very few copyright infringers ever get booted from their
> broadband provider, pointing to the severity of these cases and the number
> of steps at which the customer is told they are violating copyright before
> they are cut off from AT&T's service. Copyright infringers are often
> illegally pirating hundreds of hours of stolen content, not a song or two
> from their favorite band.

Its far more likely AT&T cares now because they own content now instead of it
somehow pointing to the "severity of these cases", a point the article itself
makes several times before walking it back? Also nothing to back up the out-
of-nowhere claim that infringers "often illegally pirate hundreds of hours"?

------
ronnier
How does this differ from the deplatforming we've recently seen with Twitter,
Apple app store, Gab from hosting providers, facebook, youtube, etc?

~~~
MysticFear
People actually are accused of doing something illegal by law.

~~~
cft
Sorry, "illegal" versus "legal" in America is determined by the courts, not by
private corporations.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Didn't you get the memo (2016)? Corporations now write the law, and they don't
even prevent for impartiality.

------
myegorov
The irony is that AT&T's agents have to pirate the content in order to track
down the pirates. Pirate Party is the answer, and VPN in the interim.

------
ocdtrekkie
"Don't violate the law over our network" is not an unreasonable expectation,
and "we will shut off service to people that violate the law using our
network" is not an unreasonable penalty. It's hard to imagine any business of
any kind taking the position "feel free to violate the law over our network"
or deciding that they just won't do anything about it if people do. Imagine a
restaurant that could see you operating an illegal handgun market out of the
corner booth and just decided that was fine as long as you tipped your server
alright.

This is the most softball approach possible, they're giving you nine warnings
before they just stop doing business with you, which is quite a bit nicer than
them handing out your info specifically to enable the entertainment industry
to take you to court for hundreds of thousands of dollars or reporting you to
the FBI.

~~~
cft
The law in America is enforced by the courts, not by private corporations.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
They aren't enforcing the law. They're managing their risk as a business, by
not doing business with people who could put them at legal risk. If they were
"enforcing the law", they'd send you a fine for tens of thousands of dollars
and throw you in jail if you didn't pay it.

If a gun store owner knew a guy was buying a gun to shoot up a school,
wouldn't you want him to refuse to sell it? Wouldn't you want to hold the gun
store responsible for knowingly enabling illegal activity?

(Note that I am using gun analogies in my comments because I feel the
positions here are oddly tied to a specific issue, and hypocritical when
applied to others. I'm aware these aren't really similar in severity by any
means.)

~~~
cft
You wrote "don't _violate_ the _law_ over our network". Who determines in this
case whether the law is violated? If you changed your statement that this is a
precaution to manage legal risk, then we get into an entirely different realm.

What if AT&T's risk management software scores that its customer is "likely"
to commit a petty crime by analyzing his traffic? Turn him off as well?

