- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
you paid for that with an identity attached im guessing, i’m not really sure what else you expected to be honest.
whispers quietly in your ear: “Usenet”
Use…net? Buddy, we’re ALL using the net right now!
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.
Cox Communications being the ISP for the customers.
You will not ever, ever see Verizon, Comcast, Spectrum .etc doing this. They would happily snip your internet access and leave you high and dry.
Cox, the same company that would send me emails and cut my internet when I tried to torrent years ago 😂
Probably cause you’ve never heard of this thing called VPN.
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.
I’m going to have to slightly disagree with you here. Yes I know, I’m disagreeing with someone who actually works with the company. Based on pirate experience that I’ve noted over the years on Reddit’s piracy subreddit, what I’ve read on TorrentFreak for the first 9 or so years I’ve been reading it off and on and vice versa. Spectrum falls under the category of an ISP to be wary of.
I was going to say that Time Warner also owned them, however, it’s actually the opposite. And now I’m knowing that Time Warner Cable isn’t really much of a thing anymore. But before it’s demise, pirates had been wary of it’s existence because of Time Warner’s relentlessness of targeting piracy.
I’m going to guess that maybe the reason you’re saying all of these warnings is probably because there having been that shift in control. But I do recall that Charter/TW was not to be trifled with.
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.
They’re 100% only doing this for money, but still, nice to see them in the right for once.
I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day.
A lot of it is the sheer bureaucracy of chasing down actual pirates and weeding them from people who just happen to be on the same IP address.
If one guy visiting an apartment block downloads a torrent from a public connection, what is ATT supposed to do? Shut down Internet to the entire building?
This is an undue burden for ISPs, even if the content isn’t living in a gray zone of legality.
Yeah IP owners really want to have all the benefits of ownership with none of the drawbacks. After lobbying for and receiving a blank check to be able to rent seek indefinitely, they are constantly acting to outsource any cost of detection and enforcement of “their” property. Disgusting how goddamn entitled they are.
this is why everyone should pirate literally anything they can, even if they don’t particularly want it.
er, with a few very gross exceptions that shouldn’t exist.
… IP addresses are assigned to modems… They don’t assign IP addresses to… Cables going to buildings I guess lol but ok.
And if you’re in some fucked up place that has the entire apartment complex’s internet going to one modem, then God save your soul.
Some apartments double nat
I don’t know why you’re being downvoted for this. Even with CGNAT and related technologies, each modem still has a unique MAC address at the cable/DOCSIS level (even without loading Ethernet on top).
Where you could be wrong is buildings with large networks, say an apartment building with wired Ethernet to all the units but all being routed through the same WAN(s), but even still I’d hope that the network is managed in a way that it’s not hard to tell which unit is which IP internally. Unrelated but I’d also pray that each unit is on its own VLAN for security.
There are some apartment buildings with shared Internet connections that are just open and public; It’s crappy but cheap if someone can’t afford individual connection
Personally I’d die for Ethernet straight into my unit, I had that once in a new building and it was fantastic (though you still had to pay an ISP individually), if only to avoid cable modems and the like. My current cable ISP wouldn’t provision IPv6 to their very own (old, clunky) modem so I had to go out and buy one that doesn’t care whether or not it’s provisioned.
If you disconnect them you can charge them fees
something something broken clock
deleted by creator
Sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Something something broken clock
Task failed successfully.
or achieved unsuccessfully?
i cant decide
Ohh for sure, they know that if they get rid of the pirates, they’d lose half their customer base and will struggle to pay the CEOs bonus.
Critical support
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 🫢
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).
Maybe not a court order. But I could get behind a process similar to other utilities where you have months or warning and paperwork.
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.
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’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 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 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.
Think it’s because they know the people pirating are the people paying for unlimited?
