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.
> 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.
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.
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.
>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!
Bankrupting isn't enough, there must be incarceration on the table or poor people will continue to ignore the law. Remember if you can't make it impossible to do, make it suicidal to and you can really clench down on any undesirable behavior. Perhaps even North Korean Style executions are required for piracy to finally stop it[0]. Only then will copyright holders be safe again.
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.
There's an impending "no tax on tips" rule that may benefit artists going direct to fans.
> 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.
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.
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-...)
>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!
Bankrupting isn't enough, there must be incarceration on the table or poor people will continue to ignore the law. Remember if you can't make it impossible to do, make it suicidal to and you can really clench down on any undesirable behavior. Perhaps even North Korean Style executions are required for piracy to finally stop it[0]. Only then will copyright holders be safe again.
[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgqdz17ye3o