Legacy Copyright Industries Obsession With Infringement Is Pathological
from the copyright's-dangerous-obsessions dept
As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions) details, for decades the copyright industry has lobbied consistently (and successfully) for more and harsher laws targeting alleged infringement. Against that background, it is hardly surprising that these laws are used on a massive scale every day. But some companies take this to extremes. Here, for example, is a story on Ars Technica from earlier this year:
In an attempt to prove that RCN (now known as Astound Broadband) turned a blind eye to customers illegally downloading copyrighted movies, the [film] studios subpoenaed Reddit seeking identifying information for specific users who commented in piracy-related threads. While some of the comments were posted in 2022, other comments were made in 2009 and 2014.
The lawsuit was originally filed in 2021, which means that the studios were demanding the names of people for posting a comment anonymously more than a decade ago. Fortunately, the judge quashed the subpoena, for reasons discussed in the Ars Technica post. Despite that clear defeat, the same film studios are back 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.
Once again, the film studios are obsessing about something somebody wrote 12 years ago. Aside from the fact that the studios are repeating an argument they have already lost before, it is absurd for them to be wasting people’s time and money on something that was written this long ago, that may or may not have some tenuous connection to alleged copyright infringement.
This level of obsession with a tiny and most likely irrelevant post that took a few seconds to write over a decade ago, borders on the pathological. It is another demonstration of how copyright not only distorts technology, markets and the law, but has also warped the minds of some people.
Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon. Originally posted to Walled Culture.
Filed Under: copyright, inducement, logs, reddit users, subpoena
Companies: rcn, reddit
Comments on “Legacy Copyright Industries Obsession With Infringement Is Pathological”
The best way to stop that would be to invoke double jeopardy laws so that the site owners don’t have to face the same courts over and over again. Innocent is innocent, though if they have to face the same attacks again and again, they might become guilty of something else, which I’ll leave up to your imagination
Sorry Glyn, but while I definitely agree there are warped minds, I am NOT at all convinced the causal relationship works in that direction. There have always been humans who seem to have a fundamental need to be a monster (maybe wrong, but I have no other explanation). I find it more likely that cause modern copyright rather than the other way around.
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Copyright maximalism is a degenerative brain disease.
How many of these law suites are intended as a means of hammering away at sites until they fall into line with the demands of the copyright industry?
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All of them. This has been their tactics for decades. They know no other solution, so the burial of anyone or any site via tons of legal-sized paper is their 1st solution, although not their only solution. It is their most common solution.
To be fair, there’s a very good chance that the writers have yet to see any profits. The Star Wars films remain unprofitable after 40 years, despite revenue being about 10 times the production costs. (Take your pick as to which side of the argument this supports.)
FTFY, new headline
Legacy Copyright Industries are Pathological, Greedy Fucks.
Copyright plaintiffs have not had the most successful of lawsuit track records. They’d already been facing resistance in the mid-2000s after the peak of their college student-suing campaigns started running into roadblocks when they inevitably sued the disabled, the single parents, the elderly and so on. People were starting to actively question whether their crusades were justified, and the widely quoted fines of $150k per infringement were starting to pose a detriment to their campaigns instead of the fear factor it had once been.
Then came the porn lawsuits, and what might have been a moneymaker a decade ago quickly proved to be the undoing of copyright infringement trials, as the sheer scandal inflicted on defendants made judges actually sit up and pay attention to how the copyright enforcement sausage was made, and realize that plaintiffs were enforcing copyright based on shitty evidence and ruinous financial threats.
It would not surprise me if the backlash that resulted from Prenda and Malibu Media helped to force plaintiffs into some course correction. Going after Google and pirate hosts would, at least, be less damaging to their PR. Sure, they were probably not going to recoup lawyer costs, but it wasn’t like they were going to make their money back going after blind veterans.
So this seems to be a pretty peculiar strategy, demanding user information that goes back over a decade for films that have maybe a tenth of the notoriety of the Dallas Buyers Club lawsuits. You’d think that if film studios wanted to attack ISPs and websites (to be honest, going by Torrentfreak, there’s been a good number of such lawsuits working), they’d use something more recent – not user data from over a decade ago, when ISPs didn’t even need to shield themselves from money-hungry executives. I don’t see the judges looking at these studios too favorably for taking a leaf out of Norman Zada’s strategy book.
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An update on that front: the relevant judge sided with Reddit despite the filmmakers trying to go for a second bite at the apple, ruling that the studios’ claims did not invalidate Redditors’ anonymity rights just because they pointed out that copyright infringement was possible on a Grande Internet connection.
Imagine the police getting a fine or jail time each time someone remarked that they broke the speed limit on several roads a few times each year, then getting a demand to find out who that driver is. That’s essentially what the filmmakers are demanding, and it’s equally dumb.
I don't even know if statute of limitations would block this
10 years after a reddit post is very strange to file a lawsuit using that information.
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What is the statute of limitations? I go by what the industry says- the awkward comparison to car theft- and say 3-5 years depending on the severity of the crime, misdemeanor or felony.
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“Copyright infringement is theft.”
“So a monetary penalty would be roughly ten times the cost of the file downloaded, instead of up to $150,000 per infringement?”
“No, not like that.”
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They want it to be literal theft, we can help with that.
And the other thing is that if it is theft, then only one person is guilty of spreading the information but everybody else can benefit without fear of being arrested. That’s why I don’t lose sleep over any of my potential violations, because it’s not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things.
Because nothing says ‘this is a serious problem that’s causing us verifiable harm and needs to be stopped immediately’ like filing laughably bad lawsuits years if not a decade-plus after the fact.
I still can’t wrap my head around what the supposed basis of the lawsuit is meant to be. RCN are liable because people said something on Reddit – a site not owned or operated by RCN? Are they meant to be failing in their duties because they’re not monitoring everything their users say across the entire internet or something?
I mean, these people are probably stupid enough to both believe that and be for banning VPNs and other security measure, but I’m not sure how this is feasible. I could see their twisted (if incorrect) logic in going after Reddit for hosting what appears to be a pro-piracy forum, but the ISP used by a tiny subset of users?
well, that’s another mystery, as well. They’re asking for 7 years of logs, which is both way too much (who keeps access logs for that long, unless there’s a specific legal requirement?), but it opens up lots of other questions..
Why are they asking for logs for a period that doesn’t cover a number of the comments in question, but 5 years of logs before the most recent ones? If they’re suing the ISP for comments made while using that ISP, why does the registration info matter and not the info on the day? If they already have enough information on the users to know that these specific users made the piracy comments, why would Reddit have any more information on their identity and activity than the ISP already have?
Then, from the Ars article:
Ah… here we get to the meat of the issue. Looking down the list of movies, it’s mainly a list of badly reviewed movies that didn’t make a lot of money. There’s some exceptions, but a lot of them underperformed, so they want to pretend it’s because some random Reddit user told people how to download it and not the other factors involved.
Especially hilarious seeing Hellboy on the list which, assuming they mean the most recent attempt, is notable for 3 things: massive studio interference causing huge problems with production both on set and in post, a final movie that was reviewed poorly both by mainstream critics and fans and was disowned by its director, and flopping at the box office.
Sounds to me like some ego-tripping producers discovered the hard way that they should have left the creative decisions to the people hired to make them, and not blame anyone else for their failures.
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Uwe Bolle says HI!
they think it is their right to ‘copyright everything’ to claim copyright on even more, including stuff that is absolutely nothing to do with them, but can do so because there is no punishment for them, only the satisfaction knowing they have fucked some up when they had no right to do so. and they wont stop unless completely corrupt congress members stop it! more chance of finding a chicken with teeth!!
Too illegal and too late
Didn’t Reddit just announce it was purging ALL comments from earlier than 2022?
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They only purged direct/private messages sent prior to January 1st, 2023 not public comments.
When
the Ideal of Movie/music, is that the creation of said products INCLUDES the sales to EVERY PERSON on the planet, and profits FROM all Such creatures.
They REALLY want to Prove they can get That Much for Every movie and song. Even if they have to goto every nation and create the SAME laws and regs.
Ask Bollywood about Why they changed how they deal with the problem. They never HAD a problem before a few years back. NOW they are going around the world searching for those watching their movies and music.
But in the end, WHO gets the money? GENERALLY not the creators.
Anything that interferes with raking in cash is anathema and must be crushed.