Reddit Beats Film Industry, Won't Have To Identify Users Who Admitted Torrenting (arstechnica.com) 55
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Film companies lost another attempt to force Reddit to identify anonymous users who discussed piracy. A federal court on Saturday quashed a subpoena (PDF) demanding users' names and other identifying details, agreeing with Reddit's argument that the film companies' demands violate the First Amendment. The plaintiffs are 20 producers of popular movies who are trying to prove that Internet service provider Grande is liable for its subscribers' copyright infringement because the ISP allegedly ignores piracy on its network. Reddit isn't directly involved in the copyright case. But the film companies filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to a subpoena demanding "basic account information including IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address and other account registration information" for six users who wrote comments on Reddit threads in 2011 and 2018.
"The issue is whether that discovery is permissible despite the users' right to speak anonymously under the First Amendment," US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler wrote in her ruling against the film copyright holders. "The court denies the motion because the plaintiffs have not demonstrated a compelling need for the discovery that outweighs the users' First Amendment right to anonymous speech." The film companies seeking Reddit users' identities include After II Movie LLC, Bodyguard Productions, Hitman 2 Productions, Millennium Funding, Nikola Productions, Rambo V Productions, and Dallas Buyers Club LLC. As Beeler's ruling on Saturday noted, they sought the identities of two users who wrote about torrenting on Grande's network in 2018 [...]. The companies also sought identities of four users who commented in a 2011 thread. "I have grande. No issues with torrent or bandwidth caps," one user comment said. Another Reddit user wrote, "I have torrented like a motherfucker all over grande and have never seen anything." Reddit's filing (PDF) pointed out that the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years. The film companies said (PDF) the statute of limitations is irrelevant to whether the comments can provide evidence in the case against Grande.
"The issue is whether that discovery is permissible despite the users' right to speak anonymously under the First Amendment," US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler wrote in her ruling against the film copyright holders. "The court denies the motion because the plaintiffs have not demonstrated a compelling need for the discovery that outweighs the users' First Amendment right to anonymous speech." The film companies seeking Reddit users' identities include After II Movie LLC, Bodyguard Productions, Hitman 2 Productions, Millennium Funding, Nikola Productions, Rambo V Productions, and Dallas Buyers Club LLC. As Beeler's ruling on Saturday noted, they sought the identities of two users who wrote about torrenting on Grande's network in 2018 [...]. The companies also sought identities of four users who commented in a 2011 thread. "I have grande. No issues with torrent or bandwidth caps," one user comment said. Another Reddit user wrote, "I have torrented like a motherfucker all over grande and have never seen anything." Reddit's filing (PDF) pointed out that the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years. The film companies said (PDF) the statute of limitations is irrelevant to whether the comments can provide evidence in the case against Grande.
Re:Strange take (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when does making use of torrents automatically make you guilty of copyright infringement and allow someone to demand your personal information from a 3rd party?
Why would Grande even care what its customer's data contains? My ISP should be blind to how I use the service I pay for.
If I use torrent through a VPN can they now unmask me through my VPN provider? The buck needs to stop somewhere, private companies cannot just deem you guilty of something and start demanding info about you from anyone and everyone that might happen to know you.
Very convenient to ignore any possible legitimate use of torrents.
Re: Strange take (Score:1)
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There is an important difference between spam callers and a residential ISP customer. The spam callers may be blocked because they are hiding their address (phone number) and effectively participating in a DDOS. I fully expect that if I start trying to DDOS a website from home, my ISP will take action.
But if I am contacting a site that is open for me to contact, what that site/service and I exchange is none of their business. Just like if I call my doctor and have a conversation, it's none of their business
Re: Strange take (Score:1)
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They just need to look at the envelope, no need to steam it open.
Re: Strange take (Score:1)
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You seem to be intentionally avoiding the point.
Envelope. For IP, that would be the IP header that they have to look at anyway to correctly route the packet. For a call, it would be the call setup and teardown that they are obliged to handle in order to provide service.
The rest is payload and none of their damned business.
They may indeed fail to notice "bad things" that way, but so it goes. They just won't be identifying those things.
We could catch a lot of crimes if we mandated that everyone have a police
Re: Strange take (Score:1)
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I'm just saying that any "compromise" that involves reading our mail (metaphorically) is not reasonable or acceptable in a free society. It's the kind of thing the Stasi did.
The camera thing is a rhetorical tool known as reductio ad absurdum.
In this case, if you would grant that the need for law enforcement is greater than any other concern, why wouldn't you advocate bolting cameras to people's skulls?
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Your second question was, "Since when does being
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As I understand it, a court ruling said that copyright holders couldn't obtain user information from ISPs based on IP addresses anymore so they could no longer sue individual users.
So instead they started sending ISPs letters notifying them of the infringements and demanding ISPs take action against repeat infringers. ISPs refused to act against said repeat infringers which lead to another court ruling that said one ISP was in fact liable for not acting against those infringers. Now the copyright holders ar
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Since when does making use of torrents automatically make you guilty of copyright infringement and allow someone to demand your personal information from a 3rd party?
It doesn't. I asked about a constitutional right to anonymity. Whether you are guilty of anything is up to the courts to decide. The question is whether or not you have some kind of magic right to hide from an accuser in a civil case. The answer there is no, at least not a constitutional once.
Ironically enough if you scroll down the front page on Slashdot you'll find a judge ruled exactly the opposite way in a similar case which is precisely why I said it's a strange take.
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what about the 5th and civil challenges! (Score:2)
what about the 5th and civil challenges!
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The fifth gives you the right to not incriminate yourself, but if you are posting on a public forum that you are breaking the law..
well that's on you.
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"Since when has [the First Amendment] guaranteed anonymity in the face of a civil challenge?"
Since Saturday, at least. ;)
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"Since when has [the First Amendment] guaranteed anonymity in the face of a civil challenge?"
Since Saturday, at least. ;)
Only to be overturned a day later since there's two stories on the front page at the same time with opposite views on the same situation (hiding behind anonymity in a civil case).
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Re:Strange take (Score:5, Informative)
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In Seattle, the 1st Amendment covers Graffiti. Quite literally vandalism is not a crime - or more accurately, Graffiti is not vandalism.
And civil cases are not crimes either. Even if your take is correct (I have my doubts), it makes sense that the first amendment will cover your from a government infringing on your right to expression. But that doesn't mean you're protected from the person who owns the private wall from suing you for vandalism. The first amendment doesn't apply to cases between two people, nor does it grant a right of anonymity.
A courts can then (hopefully) decide that there's nothing wrong with torrenting, but for them to
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The first amendment gives you protection from government infringement of speech. Since when has it guaranteed anonymity in the face of a civil challenge?
Oh, just since a few hundred years ago.
The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that the right to anonymous free speech is protected by the First Amendment. A frequently cited 1995 Supreme Court ruling is McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission:
Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation . . . at the hand of an intolerant society.
But the tradition of anonymous speech is older than the United States. Founders Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius " and "the Federal Farmer" spoke up in rebuttal. The US Supreme Court has repeatedl
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Right to anonymity against the government. Not right to anonymity against another accuser in a civil trial. And you only need to scroll 3 stories down to see a court rule the exact opposite to this.
Re:Strange take (Score:4, Insightful)
The first amendment gives you protection from government infringement of speech. Since when has it guaranteed anonymity in the face of a civil challenge?
Imagine a particular highway has a ridiculously low speed limit and you complain on some forum how the limit is dumb and you always go 20 over.
Should the government be able to unmask your account and charge you with speeding?
An important part of free speech is people being free to discuss controversial things like for instance, how they violate copyright law.
That doesn't mean you're immune from being prosecuted for these crimes, but they can't just go trolling forums looking for people to go after.
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Should the government
Let me stop you right there. The government isn't involved in this case. This is a civil matter between two private parties, which is precisely why the first amendment doesn't apply.
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Should the government
Let me stop you right there. The government isn't involved in this case. This is a civil matter between two private parties, which is precisely why the first amendment doesn't apply.
Except the government is involved. One side of the case is trying to get the government to force someone to hand over information. While the first amendment may not cover the civil matter itself, the discovery process in which parties must comply with the judges decision or face criminal charges is 100% covered.
Hilarious quotes from the judge's ruling (Score:5, Funny)
We are in a great era when a federal judge's ruling contains words like "roboweiner" and "SquirtyBottoms"
In a 2018 Reddit thread titled “Texas ISP [Grande] slams music biz for trying to turn it into a ‘copyright cop,’” user roboweiner says, “I have Grande and torrent a lot. Always thought it was pretty cool of them to not snitch.”14 User SquirtyBottoms said, “[l]ike everyone else I miss Grande and I’m stuck with Spectrum or AT&T in my area. I use Spectrum. Those fuckers have turned my connection off completely on one occasion and would not turn it back on until I agreed to stop
pirating media.”
One day, somebody will run for president and the media digs-up that they are WeinerPickle69 or something.
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You've heard of NY Representative Anthony Weiner... forced to resign for sending dick pics?
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I'm just amazed that people can figure out how to torrent, discuss it with like-minded individuals on Reddit, and yet aren't using a VPN.
funny guy hollywood (Score:1)
https://youtu.be/6mYSE2xWjcI [youtu.be]
How about (Score:2)
... the film industry spends their time and effort on making something genuinely good enough that people think it's worth paying RRP for.
Everything now is rubbish that it just isn't worth watching, even if someone said it could be pirated, it just isn't worth the 1.5 hours to watch.
I'm so confused by these media giants. (Score:2)
The RIAA and the MPAA and their member companies spend SO MUCH EFFORT trying to track down every person that dared download something just to smack fans of their output. I can't imagine it's adding anything at all to their bottom line, yet they continue to do it. Acting as if every kid that dares download a song or a movie is somehow destroying their entire industry. No, the fact that most of your output sucks blue whale (I thought we were going for size, not obscurity!) is what's destroying the entire indu
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Its stupid too. The *ONLY* thing thats ever shown to stop pirating is providing alternatives to pirating. Itunes stopped me pirating back in the day, $9 for an album seemed fair to me (Compared to the $35 for a CD australians where getting slugged for). For the younger folk Spotify, Youtube music seem to have done the job too, although as a musician I feel obliged to note Spotify has done far more damage to musician incomes than piracy ever did (My last band , our album sales tanked completely the day we w
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Its stupid too. The *ONLY* thing thats ever shown to stop pirating is providing alternatives to pirating. Itunes stopped me pirating back in the day, $9 for an album seemed fair to me (Compared to the $35 for a CD australians where getting slugged for). For the younger folk Spotify, Youtube music seem to have done the job too, although as a musician I feel obliged to note Spotify has done far more damage to musician incomes than piracy ever did (My last band , our album sales tanked completely the day we went live on spotify. Thankfully as a smaller band we where not reliant on the itunes and CD income and got more out of exposure, but if we where in a position where previously CD sales and iTunes could have sustained us without day jobs, Spotify would have been a complete catastrophe)
Yeah, I'm not at all a fan of the "stream all music" concept, but it does provide a legal way around piracy. I don't love any situation that leaves you at the whim of some media company. And it's only a matter of somebody saying something mildly disagreeable these days and that band's music will be gone from the streaming sites. It's a bit maddening, but I guess the claim is younger people prefer to not own anything because ownership is a burden. Or, at least, the owner class tells us that's what young peop
I killed a man yesterday (Score:2)
Posting something on social media doesn't mean it's true. You could just be some idiot with a keyboard and some spare time.
Allowing a corporation to harass people for making unverified claims of offences against their coffers is not a reasonable path for society to take.
When I was 6 or 7 (Score:3)
I stole a map from the local gas station, on a dare.
Okay, Exxon/Mobil - come at me!
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I stole a map from the local gas station, on a dare.
Okay, Exxon/Mobil - come at me!
+1 Funny...if I had mod points
Are they sure it was about sharing movies? (Score:2)
""I have torrented like a motherfucker all over Grande" sounds like somebody describing a particularly hot bukkake he participated in.
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Ariana, you naughty girl!
They may not even be telling the truth (Score:2)
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I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills.
Why did this went into trial? (Score:2)
I mean, who is stupid enough to litigate "he said he did" without any proof?
He can say whatever he want in any media and I didn't hear them going after all companies on Earth that allow people to stay such thing.
Never (Score:2)
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Hopefully, the lawyers and prosecutors are taking note of your post. You are now immunized from doxxing.