Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued.
Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting.
This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability.
Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.
I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.
I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore.
Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.
It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
Back in the days when the music industry stole from artists the justification was that it cost money to pay for recording studio time, print records, set up distribution channels, promote shows, organize shows, and so on.
Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases.
Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over.
I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.
Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.
Are they likely taking excessive percentages of an artists sales? Yes. But- artists are also more able than ever to wing it themselves. AAA level recording studios may still be huge money- but Good Enough (equipment) can be had for less than a used Car.
I will agree that its better than the old days where just the tapes to hold an album's tracks cost more than a car.
> Households—especially in low-income and communities of color, which disproportionately share broadband connections with other people—would face collective punishment for the alleged actions of a single user.
Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!
The premise of intermediary liability is such a scourge. You have a dispute between two parties but the plaintiffs don't want to be bothered to actually prove their case, so instead they want to a) deputize some conglomerate as the judge and then b) be able to sue the conglomerate if it sides with the accused; but not allow the accused the same privilege.
And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process?
I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.
It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society.
So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that.
A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.
> Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media
The freeloaders also include the copyright holders. Copyright was originally 28 years, but now it's life of the author plus 70 years, which from a consumer's perspective is effectively indefinite.
The purpose of copyright was to secure a limited monopoly so creators can profit off their works and be incentivized to create more. Nowadays, the copyright is no longer limited, and the copyright holders are most often not those creating the works. The social contract with copyright has long since been broken.
I think from an encouraging-the-arts perspective, the worst thing about the current crazy-long duration is that artists aren't free to react to and build on the contemporary influences of their youths. We're missing out on so much good stuff because artists can't go whichever way the mood strikes when they play with elements of works of the living artists that they enjoyed and admired and followed as they were developing. Copyright's so long that they can't too-closely engage with anyone's work unless the artist was dead before they were born. There's a latent, invisible whirlwind of creativity in the heads of writers, directors, et c., that they can't do anything with, and that we'll never get to see realized.
I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.
Most media piracy is a direct result of it being somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to consume that media legally. See, for example, the tremendous drop in music piracy resulting from various music streaming purchases and Apple's popularization of direct track purchases before that.
Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes.
IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way.
But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
>Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media,
Beg pardon, but society doesn't suffer from freeloaders of media. The flame of inspiration is passed from each, never diminishing it's brightness. Media though wants to control it's propagation into society such that it remains monetizable in spite of the fact we have a medium that sets cost of distribution/reproduction to 0.
The problem, it seems to me, is there's an awful lot of publishers/studios etc... who haven't/don't want to imagine a solution in which their control over media is diminished.
Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves.
The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
It is complicated. Ultimately a 100-year-long government sanctioned monopoly on certain intangible things is unsustainable and piracy has long been the pressure-relief valve on it.
I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy.
edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.
And yet, in Germany like elsewhere, piracy spiked during COVID's lockdowns. Some places say greater than 180%. Showing that their enforcement alone, was not an effective tool.
Yeah, that was more than a decade after the fines were noticeably capped and fees limited to < 1k€. I remember during my school years when there were lawyers giving talks to us and classmates getting fines in the 10s of thousands of euros.
The perfect solution to all crimes, totally out of scale punishments for every infraction! If we just charge people 10,000 euros per km/h over the speed limit, we could do away with speeding! Stop crime forever by bankrupting everyone who does anything bad!
>
IlikeKitties 2 hours ago | unvote | parent | prev | next [–]
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.
I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.
I run a Tor exit node (not just relay) in Australia from my residential home for about a decade now, and I’ve gotten contacted by multiple law enforcement officials now, although not frequently anymore.
Thankfully each and every one was resolved quickly when I explained I run a Tor exit node, to help people in dictatorships bypass their censorship. I’m surprised actually.
It’s probably on file somewhere which is why I haven’t been hassled for years now.
The principle in question here is very different; the ISP itself has been found liable for contributory infringement.
Back in the days when the music industry stole from artists the justification was that it cost money to pay for recording studio time, print records, set up distribution channels, promote shows, organize shows, and so on.
Then in the 90s, the cost of distribution went to 0 and by maybe the 2000s the cost of recording went to 0 in many cases.
Somehow the artists are still not getting paid well and instead of setting up distribution channels the labels are spending their time trying to prevent people from distributing too much.
And that's not even mentioning how much of the American music catalogue was stolen from local artists by music reps going state to state collecting songs and not crediting or compensating the performers. And then copied repeatedly by other musicians over and over.
I don't really have a point here other than that from one lens this all looks like a bunch of thieves complaining their stolen goods got stolen. From another lens it seems like we want to have good music and reward artist we enjoy. It's just less clear what exactly we're paying them for and how that should be collected.
Recording and distribution aren't anywhere close to zero, and a myriad of other costs haven't changed.
Are they likely taking excessive percentages of an artists sales? Yes. But- artists are also more able than ever to wing it themselves. AAA level recording studios may still be huge money- but Good Enough (equipment) can be had for less than a used Car.
I will agree that its better than the old days where just the tapes to hold an album's tracks cost more than a car.
It is hard to overstate the impact of social media here. There are acts making a go of it which were unthinkable back in the day.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_Sabbath
This is far from the weirdest band these days touring. I love it.
There's an impending "no tax on tips" rule that may benefit artists going direct to fans.
Artists are not classified as a typically tipped job, so they do not benefit from this.
> Households—especially in low-income and communities of color, which disproportionately share broadband connections with other people—would face collective punishment for the alleged actions of a single user.
Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!
The premise of intermediary liability is such a scourge. You have a dispute between two parties but the plaintiffs don't want to be bothered to actually prove their case, so instead they want to a) deputize some conglomerate as the judge and then b) be able to sue the conglomerate if it sides with the accused; but not allow the accused the same privilege.
And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process?
I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.
It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society.
So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that.
A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.
> Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media
The freeloaders also include the copyright holders. Copyright was originally 28 years, but now it's life of the author plus 70 years, which from a consumer's perspective is effectively indefinite.
The purpose of copyright was to secure a limited monopoly so creators can profit off their works and be incentivized to create more. Nowadays, the copyright is no longer limited, and the copyright holders are most often not those creating the works. The social contract with copyright has long since been broken.
I think from an encouraging-the-arts perspective, the worst thing about the current crazy-long duration is that artists aren't free to react to and build on the contemporary influences of their youths. We're missing out on so much good stuff because artists can't go whichever way the mood strikes when they play with elements of works of the living artists that they enjoyed and admired and followed as they were developing. Copyright's so long that they can't too-closely engage with anyone's work unless the artist was dead before they were born. There's a latent, invisible whirlwind of creativity in the heads of writers, directors, et c., that they can't do anything with, and that we'll never get to see realized.
I think any copyright term where a 50-year-old director can't take their own crack at some movie they watched in high school without having to ask for permission, is certainly too long.
Most media piracy is a direct result of it being somewhere between inconvenient and impossible to consume that media legally. See, for example, the tremendous drop in music piracy resulting from various music streaming purchases and Apple's popularization of direct track purchases before that.
Movies and shows, by comparison, are not just absurdly fragmented* but often literally unavailable not long after release for bizarre tax dodge purposes.
(* Check out the official guide on what services have the Pokemon cartoon: https://www.pokemon.com/us/animation/where-to-watch-pokemon-...)
IME the cost savings of having a good piracy set-up (good = won't lose a ton of stuff on a single disk failure; streams well to your viewing devices in a way that normal people and visitors in your house can use without help) isn't even that large. I definitely wouldn't bother if I didn't have to have it to have (convenient) access to quite a bit of stuff I can't get any other way.
But once that's set up... adding more to it adds basically zero more marginal work, and when everything's in one interface the UX is crazy-better than any legitimate option on the market. So, may as well.
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.
>Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media,
Beg pardon, but society doesn't suffer from freeloaders of media. The flame of inspiration is passed from each, never diminishing it's brightness. Media though wants to control it's propagation into society such that it remains monetizable in spite of the fact we have a medium that sets cost of distribution/reproduction to 0.
The problem, it seems to me, is there's an awful lot of publishers/studios etc... who haven't/don't want to imagine a solution in which their control over media is diminished.
Piracy is a service problem.
Consumers have shown an overwhelming preference to pay for content. The only barrier to this are the distributors themselves.
The pendulum has swung way too far to the side of serving predatory corporate interests. If we want a utopian society (even a capitalist one) for people then corporations must permanently experience existential terror.
It is complicated. Ultimately a 100-year-long government sanctioned monopoly on certain intangible things is unsustainable and piracy has long been the pressure-relief valve on it.
I believed this for a while but no. Piracy is an enforcement problem. Make pirates face jailtime or lifedestroying fines for torrenting a single movie, constantly scan all public torrents for IPs from your country, make VPN Providers liable for their customers and the use of out of country providers illegal. Enforce that Google, Apple and Microsoft do not allow foreign VPN providers software or non-registered VPN Connections and you end piracy. I've seen this in Germany when the fines where high enough, people were scared shitless. Make the fines life-destroying and circumvention a felony offense and you decimate piracy.
edit: to be clear, if don't advocate for this, i personally believe that copyright should be abolished completely. But I have seen what high fines will do here in germany before they reigned them in.
And yet, in Germany like elsewhere, piracy spiked during COVID's lockdowns. Some places say greater than 180%. Showing that their enforcement alone, was not an effective tool.
Yeah, that was more than a decade after the fines were noticeably capped and fees limited to < 1k€. I remember during my school years when there were lawyers giving talks to us and classmates getting fines in the 10s of thousands of euros.
The perfect solution to all crimes, totally out of scale punishments for every infraction! If we just charge people 10,000 euros per km/h over the speed limit, we could do away with speeding! Stop crime forever by bankrupting everyone who does anything bad!
[flagged]
Why are you, in one post, talking about how you will never stop pirating, while in this thread you're calling for executions for that very action?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45236861
> IlikeKitties 2 hours ago | unvote | parent | prev | next [–]
Just to be clear: There are people like me that will NEVER EVER stop pirating media. I've done it my whole life and I will do it for the rest of my life. You can now chose to accept that because I and others like me exist, your freedoms must be destroyed or recognize that freedoms necessarily allow for "abuse" and realize that these media conglomerates would rather see the internet, the only truly global technology, fundamentally destroyed before giving you just enough freedom to maybe abuse it.