Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Piracy Movies

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.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Reddit Beats Film Industry, Won't Have To Identify Users Who Admitted Torrenting

Comments Filter:
  • by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @04:25PM (#63732216) Homepage

    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.

    • You've heard of NY Representative Anthony Weiner... forced to resign for sending dick pics?

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      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.

  • ... 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.

  • 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

    • 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

      • 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

  • 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.

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday August 01, 2023 @05:32PM (#63732342)

    I stole a map from the local gas station, on a dare.

    Okay, Exxon/Mobil - come at me!

  • ""I have torrented like a motherfucker all over Grande" sounds like somebody describing a particularly hot bukkake he participated in.

  • It's the internet... Sure I've downloaded thousands of movies...Says a 11 year old who has never used a torrent or filesharing. Then I have downloaded movies I already own, takes 12 minutes to download a file vs an hour+ to find the dvd, rip it and encode it.
    • by Falos ( 2905315 )

      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.

  • 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.

  • I've never, ever, ever torrented anything, ever. FYI.
    • Hopefully, the lawyers and prosecutors are taking note of your post. You are now immunized from doxxing.

Truly simple systems... require infinite testing. -- Norman Augustine

Working...