177
Authors Guild Asks Supreme Court to Hold Internet Providers Accountable for Copyright Theft
(authorsguild.org)
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
177 points (94.5% liked)
Technology
76670 readers
2330 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
ISPs route data packets between IP addresses; they don’t get to see the content of what I send/receive (it’s encrypted), and they don’t get domain info without deep packet inspection, because I don’t use their DNS servers.
It’s more like sometimes the city will put up speed cameras and ALPRs — but does that make them responsible for speeders?
You have a point about the DMCA though; I’ve had videos monetized by a third party because of music I wrote and performed myself — turned out, the company was stealing MY music and I got dinged for it.
To be clear, I'm not saying it's a good argument. OP just grossly mischaracterized it.
The main issue with this is that it would either A. Be massively open to abuse in the same way that YouTube is now, but would come with greater penalties in that you can lose Internet access. Or B. Force your ISP to do a copyright analysis every time they receive a report.
This is straight out of 2007. What an awful position to take.
And that's fucking wild about someone fighting you over your own music. The DMCA is a fucking joke.
Then how do they know what movie I’m torrenting if my VPN is not on?
The rights holder is seeding and records your IP address, then sends a C&D to your ISP, who then notify you about it.
I'm guessing it wouldn't be a valid legal argument, but I liked the thought experiment of claiming that it can't be piracy if the rights holder is intentionally publicly sharing the content. Like trying to charge trick-or-treaters for theft when they took candy out of the bowl you left out with a "Free!" sign attached.
usually, they don't actively seed, they are just part of the swarm, and request content from you. And if that content is part of e.g.their movie, they get you for distributing the movie.
There's no such thing as entrapment in the world of copyright, unfortunately.
That said, something kinda similar did happen in the Viacom v. YouTube case. It's been over a decade since I read it so forgive me, but I think YouTube discovered that Viacom themselves had been uploading bits of The Simpsons, and I believe sometimes processing them to look like amateur clips because they believed that the exposure helped them in the long run.
So, the one with the right to share the thing, is sharing it themselves.
I'd say that makes it the correct source to download. Even better than the DRM'd sources that says you only have limited access.
You can’t get more legal than obtaining content directly from the rights holder. It’s more likely that the rights holder is leeching and recording the IP of the seeders.
The above post only applies for HTTPS traffic using a third party secure DNS - traditional P2P torrenting will leak what you are downloading to your peers. There are anonymous P2P networks like I2P that (allegedly) solve this issue, but it is not widely adopted.