While we can be pretty confident that Reddit has its own motivations (i.e. self-interest) for fighting these lawsuits, this is still a good news story for pirates.
It kinda does if a judge has decided that an IP address does not identify who the offender was and thus is not enough evidence to bring a case against someone.
I feel like I don’t need to explain to folks around here that companies will lawyer up and basically use the legal system to harass and intimidate regardless if they have standing or not if they think you are small enough to be bullied into stopping a behavior. Which I assure you your average instance admin is.
Might I direct you to the huge flaming catastrophe of bullshit known as “the police don’t give a fuck lol”. All they need to do is make it difficult, costly and time consuming to win and fuck you once you get hit with charges. And would you look at that, the US legal system specializes in all 3 of those! How convenient.
The sad reality is no matter how winnable your case is, companies can still bury you for years and consume every free moment of your life and then some. For many people, these court battles become their entire life for several years. It can cost them everything.
They’ll need one but that doesn’t mean they will be able to afford one. The point of these lawsuits is to intimidate, even if they don’t win, if people see lives ruined because of the cost to defend, they’ll be scared into not pirating. This is a fear campaign.
And yet they still want them, so there must be more to the story. I also don't understand why since I have dynamic IP address in EU, unless they can match the ownership to a person at any given time in the past its not useful info.
Not really, though. If they're ordered to turn over IPs, they'll turn over IPs. Whether those are legit or VPN IPs is another story, but the burden placed on the instance admin doesn't really change much.
I can access old.reddit.com with VPN. The new shitty layout will block you but there are browser extensions to automatically redirect. I’m never logged in since I deleted my accounts a few months ago.
Reddit blocks access to all major VPN services (on desktop for sure) when they click a link from a search engine (maybe even navigating directly to it but I don’t do that). This has been happening for about a month now. There’s a specific page it shows that basically says “come back without a VPN.”
I don’t think it does it if you’re logged in and have cookies enabled.
Caveat: there is a simple way to bypass it, I’ll let you old.heads figure that one out.
No lmao, I tried to upvote his comment and Thunder spat out that error. A few subs have started doing that (or it’s instance-wide but only for certain VPN servers) in the last week or so.
That would probably be because your instance is different. Lemmy.world has recently blocked VPN traffic apparently because of bad actors uploading CSAM behind VPN. I also had issues with Lemmy with my VPN this week and either need to split tunnel or need to browse Lemmy as view-only.
Those bad actors are really stupid, a VPN isn’t going to protect them. You’re not magically anonymous behind a VPN, and such material is obviously going to attract the attention of very skilled cyber security experts & law enforcements.
Idiots doing crimes never understand basic OpSec.
Not all instances keep logs…
Some intentionally discard them, look into the policys of the instance you’re signing up to.
All your comments and posts are hosted on your parent instance then shared to the federated instances.
Some instances don’t even let you sign up with an email or make it optional.
Lemmy.world keeps logs, but much more controversial instances often don’t.
Also it’s much more complex, because you have to think about the scope of the potential lawsuit as well as the given evidence that a user is actually sharing the material infringing on their copyright; which will not be a large amount of the user base. They can’t simply sue a user for having an account, the user has to actively be sharing infringing material.
It’s data that could have value, so I doubt they don’t store it. I think the movie studios didn’t offer enough. Or Reddit thought it was too damaging for this particular sale.
I always assumed this would happen, so had a second account. Which had a special email address both of which I only used via Tor and private brower mode.
It was insane to think they would comply with this to begin with. Downloading pirated media isn’t illegal, neither is discussing piracy. What is illegal is redistribution, and good luck proving that on a large scale community like this.
EDIT: These are 2 USA based companies, US Laws apply to this context.
More specifically there is no US Federal Law about obtaining pirated works, only the Redistribution
<span style="color:#323232;">17 U.S. Code § 506 - Criminal offenses
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(a)Criminal Infringement.—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(1)In general.—Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(A)for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(B)by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180–day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(C)by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public, if such person knew or should have known that the work was intended for commercial distribution.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(2)Evidence.—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement of a copyright.
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(3)Definition.—In this subsection, the term “work being prepared for commercial distribution” means—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(A)a computer program, a musical work, a motion picture or other audiovisual work, or a sound recording, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(i)the copyright owner has a reasonable expectation of commercial distribution; and
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(ii)the copies or phonorecords of the work have not been commercially distributed; or
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(B)a motion picture, if, at the time of unauthorized distribution, the motion picture—
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(i)has been made available for viewing in a motion picture exhibition facility; and
</span><span style="color:#323232;">(ii)has not been made available in copies for sale to the general public in the United States in a format intended to permit viewing outside a motion picture exhibition facility.
</span>
So, basically, downloading cracked adobe products is always right. It’s always morally acceptable. But your provider is risking their ass.
The big industry names want to make you believe that you’ll be punished for downloading a car. It’s all fearmongering.
Listen, they either reply to the comment they wanted to reply to, or they did it wrong. They replied to the comment that prefaced with a statement about US Law in particular. It should be clear to them that the statement applies to US Law.
America is such a small country though, no one would assume anything said online is directed at it’s miniscule population without an explicit reference.
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