- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
It feels dirty to agree with an ISP on something. But even the worst corporations are on the right side of something from time to time I suppose.
You must log in or register to comment.
I had Verizon threatened to shut down my internet. I had been receiving notices for close to a decade via email, I assumed they were all toothless. And that was true in the past
I just called the Verizon copyright office and told them that it wasn’t me and I would change my Wi-Fi password 😂
It was suspiciously easy as if they really don’t care and are just trying to be compliant
I got a VPN and no longer have to deal with it
Heh, the one time (or that series of times) I got “caught pirating” was at university, and the IT dept was super chill about it. They “didn’t know what I was doing”, but we’re concerned about my data usage (managed a couple TBs in a month in the mid 00s) and they slapped my hands for it. Was really fun going ‘I must have gotten a virus’ 5-6 times in a couple months as I dialed in the throttle speeds to a level they were chill with.
Amazing how the tech students always struggled with viruses 🤔
I remember discovering that if I plugged my laptop into where an abandoned printer was at my school I would get a full 100megabit pipe. At the time that was incredible.
Just FYI. Comments nearly exactly like yours on Reddit were used in copyright troll lawsuits against ISPs as evidence they didn’t do enough to enforce copyright and were negligent and legally liable.
Further when that didn’t work the copyright agency sued Reddit to try to unmask the identities of those people to bring legal proceedings against them to coerce them into testifying against their ISP at threat of being in trouble for their activities. Reddit was big enough to fight off the lawsuit luckily but be careful.
I feel like most people don’t even check their ISP email anymore. Why use that instead of the Gmail you’ve had for 18 years.
No they sent it to my main email, I don’t even know if I have a Verizon email address
This is capitalism 101: whatever makes the most money is what they support. It doesn’t matter who is hurt (or not hurt), or what is right/wrong. As long as they can make more money than they are losing by lawsuits, they will keep doing this. If they can avoid doing anything at all and not get sued while getting paid by customers, that’s even better.
I’m glad I live in Australia where this doesn’t happen thanks to previous attempts by IP copyright holders (mainly US based ones) to have similar policies forced upon ISP’s here and being told by judges here that the penalties and expectations and demands made by these said IP copyright holding companies was over the top and excessive and thrown out of court……
I think the precedent set here was that downloading a copy of a movie carried the penalty of the monetary cost of obtaining the movie lehally, so its just not worth pursuing. I might be wrong about that.
Think it’s because they know the people pirating are the people paying for unlimited?
So I’ve rented a server for years. It’s in the US and it’s a couple bucks a month. It’s fun to play with and I use it however I want. I’ve had an email server, a next cloud instance, and an open VPN instance to name a few things on it. Well I decided to connect a torrent client from my home to the openvpn instance on my server to see if I could do it. It worked really well until the company I rent from forwarded the DMCA hit back to me for downloading Rick and Morty. I should’ve known better but I thought a nameless faceless server farm wouldn’t be worth the hassle of a DMCA but I was wrong.
You chose the wrong provider lol
Pretty much all cloud providers monitor their servers for piracy and malware distribution/downloads.
True, but it wasn’t the cloud provider that caught it. They just forwarded the letter to me from the company that monitors torrent swarms and records IPs.
whispers quietly in your ear: “Usenet”
Lol, I’ve been on that train for a decade. I just wanted to try using my own personal VPN server to torrent which kinda defeats the purpose of a VPN I guess.
Use…net? Buddy, we’re ALL using the net right now!
you paid for that with an identity attached im guessing, i’m not really sure what else you expected to be honest.
It’s becoming impossible to monitor. I have 5G Broadband Internet and I share a public IP address with everyone in my area. I look at https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com and it shows thousands of torrents that my neighbors have pulled downloaded.
What is this site? It feels like it’s a tool for anti-privacy copyright narcs. A domain it links to is “antitor.com.”
Especially since it specifically highlights porn in a different color, it labeled my VPN IP as “Likes Porn”.
Weird… I looked up the IP for my church group’s forum and it said the same thing.
Wow it actually knew 5 of the 50 torrents I downloaded recently
Didn’t find anything from me… Then again I’m using a private tracker, which should insulate me from that. (Random people knowing, the ISP probs does know… But I don’t think they care)
I didn’t find anything from me either. Since I’m using Alldebrid to download torrents. It’s a torrent cache that downloads the torrents to their own server and then you can download directly from those servers at high speed. And most of the time the files are already cached so you can download immediately.
Oh another cool site for my bookmarks.
I use proton VPN for torrenting. It doesn’t show I’ve downloaded anything. I think that means my VPN is working? 😅
Internet shutoffs should require a court order. Not some emails that are “this person did a bad 🥺🥺🥺 no proof but can you please take our word for it 🥺🥺🥺🥺”
Internet shutoffs shouldn’t be a thing, outside of non-payment or legitimate abuse. If I do something illegal, they should have to sue me, not shut off my internet.
If you do something illegal, you should be arrested.
Copyright infringement lawsuits are a far cry from bomb threats or the like.
Not everything that is illegal is punishable by arrest
So you’re saying copyright infringement is on par with speeding or parking past the meter’s end? Eh, fair enough.
I was just pointing out a logical fallacy. It’s literally impossible to do the thing you said.
This is just facts, they aren’t an opinion
Did you reply to the wrong comment?
I did not
Honestly it is less severe than speeding. Copyright was an invention of the pre-digital era. Now that we all use computers, so many things we do every day are technically copyright infringement that it is absurd to even have these kinds of conversations.
Yeah, I’ve been ticketed for speeding, and that certainly doesn’t come with the threat of arrest unless I’m driving super recklessly or something (but that’s a different offense altogether).
Yeah, they don’t disconnect a criminals phone service because they committed a crime and made a phone call. It makes no damned sense.
Only happens as a matter by court order and is a limit on the person not on the corporations. Though if found out after by the court it can be ordered terminated. And you will face further punishment. But this is levied against the person. As in “You are not allowed to do a thing and if we find out you did the thing you will face further punishments.” Corporations should not have the responsibility or ability to determine any ones eligibility. They are a businesses not a government.They are responsible for their own tos and should never be anything more.
government.They are responsible for their own tos
Piracy almost certainly violates their TOS
Actually, that’s been done several times over the decades. As well as banning computer access. The guy caught hacking into the fbi gets his mouse and keyboard taken away.
Maybe not a court order. But I could get behind a process similar to other utilities where you have months or warning and paperwork.
I had to process these requests at a company I used to work for. They do send “proof” (proof in quotes because you have to believe in good faith they didn’t just make it up, which I have to believe they didn’t).
We never shut anyone off though. We worked with business exclusively and only ever sent “scary” letters. Though we had one client that was a major music venue (a very known venue that’s pretty famous) who would get these letters all the time. The irony was too much for me. I ended up calling them personally most of the time because it was too funny.
I remember getting a scary letter because I was torrenting. I thought it so funny because I had to the only person in the world only torrenting freeaoftwarr and public domain works.
Wait then what was it for?
They don’t give a shit about targeting accusations only towards people torrenting copyrighted stuff. Why would they? They have no consequences for being incorrect.
They are doing this automatically. They just grab all the magnet links they can find and target any IP they connect to, regardless of the content.
They have no consequences for being incorrect.
Which is why the DMCA shit is also bullshit.
Multiple false claims should result in you being banned from making future claims.
That’s not how it would work for us. We’d receive a report from the MPAA/RIAA that showed the torrent they were downloading, the IP address involved, if they were seeding or leeching and an affidavit saying that all the information was correct to the best of their knowledge.
The letter we sent basically was a notification that we received that letter (with a copy) and that if we received two more for the same IP (three in total) we would have to release their information to the reporting body and that they could be open to legal action. It also included some information on how to secure their network and check for viruses in case that was the cause.
In my 15 years working there, we never once released information about a client. Because this was business accounts, most clients had multiple IPs (at least a /29) and would cycle what IPs they showed up as on the public Internet to keep them from getting multiple notices on the same IP. The music venue I mentioned had an entire /24.
Add increasing penalties to that.
I’ve never gotten a scary letter, and I’ve certainly torrented my fair share of stuff, both legal and otherwise.
The trick, I think, is to not use cable. I’ve had municipal fiber, Google fiber, DSL, and small local ISP (RJ45 hookup at the wall), and never once had an issue. The last one is probably annoyed at me because I tend to submit tickets and call them within a few minutes of my service going down (happens once/month or so). It’s extra funny when they ask me to check my wifi settings on my router, and I tell them my router doesn’t have wifi (it’s a Mikrotik router, my AP is separate), and that my wifi is absolutely fine, it’s the uplink that’s busted (i.e. I can access all the stuff on my NAS).
I made a promise to myself that once I left the house, I’d never get cable. And that’s a promise I’ve kept across multiple apartments and now my house. We’re finally getting muni fiber, so I’m pretty excited.
It’s more likely you aren’t using popular freely indexable trackers on currently airing popular media.
Try torrenting a current episode of a top 10 watched show within a week of release and see how fast you get one lol.
Yeah, I generally only torrent older media (like a few years old).
I don’t pirate these days, but when I did (and was stupid about it) the emails/letters had pretty exact evidence.
They included the name of the work, my WAN IP address at the time, and the amount of data transferred (uploaded) out from it.
This was in the US and I’m unaware of how such notices work in other countries that work similarly.
That’s all they can get though they have no proof it was actually you and not someone else using your Internet, how they find out is they join the public trackers and just log everyone in it generally even without a VPN on private trackers they have no idea what you are doing
I think their goal is to tie the evidence to the ISP account, not necessarily name exactly who was pirating that work.
I want to say as an employee of an ISP I literally dealt with users who essentially couldn’t get high speed internet anymore at their address because we were the only option and their grandkids downloaded movies. This put the entire household at a grave disadvantage educationally compared to other households. It shouldn’t be a thing.
That this is even legal in the first place is insane. Digital communication is at least as vital, if not more vital that postage. Image someone is just banned form getting post delivered or he gets throttled to only once every other week…
Yep, good luck finding a job with no internet.
Difficult to feel sorry for an organisation whose only responsibility is to generate profit for their shareholders. If their policy happens to align with normal human ethics it is a coincidence and they will not spare a moment to consider the plight of their customers when the shoe is on the other foot. Fuck them. Long live the pirates.
Why should ISP lose revenue enforcing laws for another corpos benefit?
If media industry was serious, they should pay for it 🫢
Their game is just to try to make the ISPs liable; they don’t actually want it enforced. In fact, failure to enforce is the feature. They paint the ISP as complicit in the piracy then sue the ISP for hundreds of millions in damages hoping for a no-fault settlement. That’s a much better revenue stream than suing someone for 10k who can’t pay it.
There is a lesson in here about decentralization here folks 🫢
Small ISPs have zero interest in enforcing piracy. They don’t want to lose the customers on their highest tiers. Comcast though, they suck
enforcing piracy
NOTICE
YOU HAVE NOT MET YOUR MONTHLY PIRACY QUOTA
YOU WILL BE TERMINATED,
THANKS.
This is actually how private trackers operate lol, I got banned from one because I forgot to torrent anything in over 3 months since I was playing a huge game during that time.
This is why I have a seedbox. A small monthly fee to maintain access to sites that are impossible to join nowadays
deleted by creator
Cox, the same company that would send me emails and cut my internet when I tried to torrent years ago 😂
deleted by creator
Feels great not having to pay to pirate.
I work for Spectrum. I cannot officially speak for the company, of course, but…We don’t want to be doing this shit, either. We give people 12 strikes. First 4 I just a notice, next 4 is modem quarantine until notice is acknowledged, next 4 we also sent snail mail, with the last one being a 1 year suspension. Anyway, I worked in repair for 5 years. Not a single person at any level gave a crap. Sups, managers, VP’s. “We give them 11 chances to figure out they should use a VPN” was the common attitude. All these warnings and man-hours taking calls and dealing with unblocking modems is a waste of time and money.
deleted by creator
Here in NL the ISP’s are refusing to give client info to the government due to privacy policy, giving a big “go fuck yourself” to any agency trying to convict internet pirates. A judge needs to sign for an ISP to release information on soneone, which only happens with large criminal cases like drug sales and child porn distribution. The fight to change the law so ISP’s are forced to release all client info has been going on for years and years now, constantly ending in favor of privacy. ISP’s are asshole companies lurking for your money, but at least they protect client privacy over here.
Meanwhile, VPN providers be like “come on download stuff 😉😉😉”, wouldn’t that be a much easier case for them to prove willful disregard for piracy?
Yeah, but ISPs are rich and VPN providers are not. The most recent numbers I can find for Cox (2020) show $12.6 billion in revenue.
Well,
a) even the labels and studios pirate stuff that isn’t theirs. They don’t really believe what they preach.
b) All that content they produce involves unethical treatment of the actual creators and technical staff who are under-compensated, and often lose all rights to their own creative work. and
c) regional blocks are just marketing bullshit, and is the primary thing VPNs advertise they’ll circumvent for you.
Can you elaborate on point a?
Famously the music for that famous ‘you wouldn’t download a car’ anti piracy disclaimer was stolen and used without permission from the creator.
I’ll look that up
A day is going to come when the VPNs are going to be targeted for regulation.
It’s only a matter of time before someone shoots up a school with a 3D printed gun or Epstein’s a terabyte of child porn to a Senator’s office or some other silly bullshit, and then VPNs will become the whipping boy for our litany of problems.
In autocratic states where VPNs are blocked, they use VPNs that are harder to detect. So by the time they decide to criminalize VPN use in the free (read slightly less un-free) world, we’ll still have a cornucopia of options.
It’s like FBI trying to ban encryption or get it regulated when we already have encryption technology that is deniable.
n autocratic states where VPNs are blocked, they use VPNs that are harder to detect
Paying for the VPN that’s harder to detect with my credit card which is very easy to detect.
It’s like FBI trying to ban encryption
Devices are already riddled with backdoors imposed by federal authorities. The only real way to avoid them is to obtain a device not designed or assembled within the NATO block.
Incidentally, import of these devices has become increasingly difficult, on the grounds that these devices may have backdoors implemented by foreign governments.
Time to get on it privacy coin bandwagon
In case you weren’t aware, it’s actually pretty easy to pay for a VPN in unmarked funds. Most will allow for BTC transactions, but some VPNs will even allow you to use giftcards for a place like Target.
Most will allow for BTC transactions
This is the dumb guy panacea for committing every financial crime. You’d never even know the block chain is a public ledger.
Mullvad even lets you send them an envelope with cash in it, with no identifying info other than your account number.
Devices are already riddled with backdoors imposed by federal authorities. The only real way to avoid them is to obtain a device not designed or assembled within the NATO block.
this smells distinctly russian for some reason, anyway, just use open source software and hardware, the protection net while not perfect, is entirely open, and theoretically, capable of perfect safety.
this smells distinctly russian
Of course, disregard everything Snowden and Assange leaked. Your devices are secure, citizen. Carry on.
my brother in christ you literally referred to it as the NATO block.
What makes you think chinese devices don’t have backdoors for example? It’s also likely russian devices do, though idk how many if any they produce. We do know that russian malware often has a russian locale kill switch because apparently they’re a little silly like that.
What makes you think chinese devices don’t have backdoors for example?
Incidentally, import of these devices has become increasingly difficult, on the grounds that these devices may have backdoors implemented by foreign governments.
Considering how many corporations rely on VPNs for their workers, I don’t think this would gain much traction.
A number of countries are experimenting with registration of VPNs and blocking of TOR traffic.
And there are more than a few VPN series that are explicitly or implicitly compromised by the security services in their own countries.
I wouldn’t try planning to do the next 9/11 on a ProtonVPN, for instance. The NSA is all over that shit.
I’ve had VPNs email me that they’ll terminate my account if they find me pirating again after getting notified of DMCA. That was a few years ago by the same VPN I’m still with and have been pirating ever since. I haven’t gotten any more emails so either I didn’t get caught again or they’re just not notifying me any more.
I didn’t want to lose the VPN though since it gives me a long term IP and allows incoming port for torrenting
Critical support
