Reddit beats film industry, won’t have to identify users who admitted torrenting::Court quashes subpoena for names of users who talked torrenting in 2011 thread.
I’ve never torrented anything, not even once. I always pay for things legitimately…no matter how hard it is to keep track of everything you’re paying for or how expensive it gets to pay the same movies again and again when the billion dollar corporations randomly decide I don’t own something I paid for all of a sudden. I never pirate anything.
You should only use good VPNs that are lying about their no-logs policies like Nord, Express, Private internet access and surfshark. Never TorGuard or Mullvad. TorGuard and Mullvad actually had to prove in court that they don’t record their users. So they’re bad and immoral for not being cucks for the establishment.
Definitely don’t get torguard’s proxy service to go with torguard. And definitely don’t use torguard’s proxy service inside of your torrenting client.
Like I said I’ve never pirated anything in my entire life and I never will.
That’s a great idea to have these comments for the posterity.
To my lawyer in the future :“Everything I could have wrote in reddit about pirating was a lie to get upvotes. Don’t take any of it seriously.”
Everything I ever wrote about me pirating anything was also a lie to get upvotes! A higher Karma score on reddit means a higher standing. Which is why I always lied about having pirated things.
Now here comes the truth. I’ve never pirated anything, that would be wrong and immoral!
Back in the day, our collective friend SWIM took the rap for everything. Nobody ever did anything illegal, SWIM did.
Someone
Who
Isnt
Me
Let the logs state that I declare I have never been a pirate a day in my life, I don’t own a boat nor do I know what torrenting is
Torrenting? Like a torrent of hellfire?! Which is where you’ll go if you pirate anything made by a multi-hundred-billion dollar corporation?
How are the executives at AT&T, Comcast, Disney and Viacom supposed to pay for their diamond-dusted lambos if we pirate things?!
Did you know that AT&T bought time warner? How is AT&T supposed to pay off that purchase if a tiny percentage of their products are pirated?!
I only ever claimed I pirated things to fit in…peer pressure! LOOK IT UP!
Everything that I’ve written on both Reddit in the past and on here is only done in Minecraft.
Wanna play some sarcastaball?
YES! I FUCKING LOVE SARCASTABALL!
I’m… confused.
Don’t forget not using ProtonVPN is another viable alternative to not using good VPNs.
I pirate shit every day.
Fuck copyright laws and anyone who wants to dare enforce them on me.
I definitely should never use Torguard or Mullvad. These horrible VPN’s will never protect me because I definitely don’t pirate.
Enjoyed the post. Though PIA has proven it in court twice.
Yes, but PIA has been bought out by a different company since then.
What’s your view on Hotspot Shield?
HOTSPOT SHIELD IS GREAT! THEY CUCK TO THE DMCA!
I don’t get the hate. I enjoy shitting on reddit as much as the next guy, but defending their user’s right to remain anonymous in court has been one thing they’ve got a pretty solid record on.
They are still better than meta and Twitter too.
That’s a subterranean bar!
all facebook owned services forbid you from being anonymous on their platforms.
Twitter still allows anonymous users and satire accounts…but paying for a checkmark reveals who and where you really are.
Not to mention this has far reaching effects past Reddit. Such as for lemmy instances.
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Yeah nobody is all bad, even Reddit.
Yeah nobody is all bad
I want to believe you, got anything positive from Nestlé?
N-E-S-T-L-E-S …Nestle makes the very best…CHOCOLATE!
Imagine how hard (impossible )it would be for them to actually moderate every interaction on their site? Standing up for users makes sense because they’re next in the firing line.
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Nothing on Reddit can be proved to have come from a “user”, and it’s been that way since the “Great Spezzing of 2016”, where ‘spez’ admitted to falsification and alteration of ‘user’ content.
I mean even IRL, people talk so much crap who knows what’s actually true. Imagine if we locked up everyone for what they say. The “film industry” is insulting for even trying to push people into guilt by nothing more than what they type on a website.
Film industry should do something about the sex pests in it
Also do sonething about all their writers and actors being on strike.
Some people in the UK have been locked up for making offensive jokes.
I’m in favor of free speech for everyone, even the shitty right-wingers I hate. The solution to bad speech is good speech, not censorship. Not corporate censorship, not government censorship, not corporate censorship on the order of government censorship.
I think that’s different. You’re held accountable to what you say and yelling bomb on a plane should subject you to a lengthy trial. That’s not the world I’m talking about.
What I’m talking about is getting online and saying “man I just killed like 3 people lol” and being arrested for it. Without proof 3 people even were killed. Is it cool to say such things? No. Could someone be punished for it? Sure. But that’s not the same as being arrested for murder.
I want a world where facts are still king and despite it all, tangible evidence exists of your actions.
There’s a difference between causing a panic like that and sending mean tweets or telling an offensive joke
Everything can be proved if you’re using INTERNET. Normies/Regulars dont understand how internet work. Google/ Facebook/Reddit is not internet. Source: I am a computer science engineer
This is just objectively false.
It seems like YOU don’t know how the internet works.
Logging of information is an active task, it doesn’t just come with the internet as a concept. Your ISP doesn’t know what you posted on Reddit and reddit doesn’t know who you are behind your natted ip.
Reddit might have logs and your ISP might have other logs, and they may be able to work together with other organizations to deduce information, but that is not a given.
It is entirely possible for a website to not log ANY information about it’s users. I have an occasionally online website like this, I don’t even know the amount of bandwidth being used unless I actively monitor the connection. Additionally, a proper tls connection means your ISP doesn’t know what data you send to a website, so if the website doesn’t take logs and the ISP can’t sniff traffic, how can you prove what was done?
Fundamentally, the internet is just a connection between a bunch of computers, there are no intrinsic properties of the internet that leave a trail of evidence. The computer you are connecting to may choose to log your connection and activity, but it isn’t required for the internet to function.
Your statement is a conflation of what can happen and what does happen.
I could open sockets between two computers and send encrypted bytes directly between them with keys shared beforehand in person if I wanted, the only thing that can be proved is that the connection was established (and when). This method is still using the internet. Short of cracking the encryption (which would be world wide news) the contents of that communication would be not be able to be ascertained by an eavesdropping third party without express consent from a member of the conversation.
Tl:Dr, a website with tls, no logging, and no DNS, would have very limited information abailable to 3rd parties (effectively limited to ISPs only being able to deduce when and how often you access the site) and 3rd parties would not have the ability to prove any specific activity occured on the page. The internet, as a concept (interconnection, IP, tcp), is not even aware of the idea of ‘proving’ something, any effort done to contrary is performed on a layer of abstraction above these protocols.
People communicate in untraceable ways on the internet every single day.
Reddit might have logs and your ISP might have other logs, and they may be able to work together with other organizations to deduce information, but that is not a given.
Reddit might have logs ? Reddit has logs and they can see your public IP. With your public IP, they can contact your ISP and get all the details of people using their service in a household. Then its just matter of minutes and seconds to trace down who is the culprit. Just to add to this, your windows/apple machine also have logs.
Yes reddit might have logs, in fact it’s incredibly likely that they have detailed logs about their users. however, it isn’t an intrinsic aspect of a website to have logs.
I am not claiming that they don’t have logs, I am simply refuting what you said, which is that everything on internet can be proven, which is an objectively false statement.
A windows or apple computer are not prerequisites to use the internet and there are no logging requisites for computers at all.
Again, logging is an active task, something being ‘on the internet’ does not mean that logging is happening implicitly.
Dear diary,
Today I forgot about how the internet functions, and have decided to ignore how a router + infinite cpu & storage works, without websites that are not documenting who their visitors aren’t, so they can’t sell advertising, nor sell to groups who aren’t affiliated with state governments.
Sincerely, Not a computer scientist
Whatever makes you happy my dude.
It’s ok if you don’t understand. Since you are a computer scientist, it should be trivial for you to open up a socket connection between two computers and send some pgp encrypted bytes over the wire. It’s a pretty good way to see an example of what I mean. Though you probably learned about the osi model pretty early on in uni and are aware of how tcp/IP works.
🤦♂️
IP hasn’t been an admissible form of identification for over a decade now.
Now, suppose that someone hasn’t been piggybacking off of their neighbor’s wifi, and it leads to a household with multiple adults renting the place with internet included in the rent, how would you determine which specific person to take legal action against? Secondly, in order to actually file the suit without it being a waste of time, they would have to have independent data showing that this person did indeed do the action and aren’t just making it up, in which case getting the IPs from a third party would be completely moot.
Good question, once police knows the household they will check the background on all the occupants and neighbors. If still they can’t find anything and they dont feel like wasting time , they will get warrant and confiscate all laptops for forensics but most of the time they can tell just by checking the background who’s the culprit.
I would suggest to watch the documentary about the guy who was behind the darkweb site - the silk road.
That’s some impressive police work right there.
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🤦♂️
Your ISP doesn’t know what you posted on Reddit and reddit doesn’t know who you are behind your natted ip.
data brokers do and internet providers and law enforcement buys that data.
what does a computer science engineer even do lol
🤦♂️
See, even you don’t know and you are one.
insert navy seal copypasta
🤦♂️ I am just glad the world is coming to an end.
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One of my posts was suddenly labeled as having been posted by someone else.
In the article, not one comment mentioned “piracy”. They only mention “torrenting” which is not illegal and has absolutely nothing to do with these movie companies. They are grasping at straws here
While I do not think they were in the right to have the users “unmasked”, my understanding is that the users in question were talking about how the Austin internet provider, Grande, was good for torrenting, so the attempt to unmask the users wasn’t meant to get the users in trouble but to show that Grande benefitted financially from a lax policy towards pirating, so them not mentioning piracy in their comments wasn’t necessarily the end of the conversation, if they were willing to say now that it was in reference to piracy. I do think it sounds like grasping at straws, but I imagine the potential value they were hoping to get from Grande was worth that grasping to them
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The DMCA safe harbors have a requirement that in order for an online service provider (eg the ISP) to be protected from liability for copyright infringement that the ISPs have a repeat infringer policy to (eventually) stop the copyright infringement of their users by discontinuing service to them. Without the DMCA safe harbors the ISP would potentially be on the hook for copyright infringement. With high statutory damages for infringement, that’s a lot of potential money for the group suing the ISP, hence why they would want evidence showing the ISP didn’t have a repeat infringer policy or did have one but failed to enforce it. Testimony from a pirate saying how great the ISP was because they didn’t ban them even after multiple notices would help establish that.
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It’s actually more like walking into a gun shop, telling the owner you plan on committing murder with the gun they sell you, and he continues to sell it to you.
The key difference being that the provider knew that your intention was illegal, and they continued to allow it to happen.
The ethics of this are debatable of course, but in general, it seems that facilitating a crime is generally seen by most governments as ‘aiding and abbetting’ and is considered a crime itself.
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We need net neutrality. ISPs should have no say in what kinds of data passes through their system
God I hate rooting for Reddit.
Spez may still be a corporate sellout but at least in this instance he did the right thing, probably because he determined ratting out users who pirated wouldn’t make him money
I’ll acknowledge he did the right thing here, but I won’t be happy about it.
I’m sure that this was his legal team that reacted and fought back. He must have a top legal representation, they don’t sleep.
But the API stuff, that’s full him, that’s his idea - fuck “I’m pretty sure, I’m a great leader” spez
He didn’t do it for you, he didn’t do it for us. He did it for himself.
If news got out that Reddit violated anonymity, the site would be dead before the end of the week. This was a move to protect his shareholders, nothing more.
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Could you elaborate on your response, as well as what the link in the comment you’re replying to is referencing.
I know what ISOs are, I’m just wondering what the original comment is trying to tell us about and what you’re replying about. Thanks.
Rooting for as in cheering them on.
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That makes sense. I thought they thought I was talking about rooting like rooting a phone.
In Australia, rooting means fucking.
Spez will turn over the names if Fidelity tells him to.
Lol
Talking about torrenting… thats not even illegal. Lol.
And its certainly not proof of anyone then actually breaking the law.
Shows how much people understand of the law when they think using Bitorrent is illegal lol
Yeah I torrent a lot of files like Linux ISOs
It’s so much easier and faster than using some mirror
I can download from mirrors at the same speeds as torrents. The trick is to have a terrible internet subscription that’s easily saturated by either of them.
Dial up modem ftw
Depends on the mirror though some mirrors are really slow
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The special thing is breaking things up, but I don’t think its primary attraction is the ability to resume faster. I would say the prime attraction is that you can resume at all. If, for whatever reason, your connection gets interrupted while downloading something off of, say, gofile or whatever, you’re probably gonna have to restart that download, which is clearly not the case with bittorrent. Or if the content is removed from gofile (or whatever), you’re shit out of luck. Taking something out of a bittorent network is significantly more difficult.
Establishing connection to one big provider is usually faster than negotiating with a bunch of peers, though. At least in my experience, torrents take quite a bit more to start than “regular” downloads because there’s more work to be done before the work can begin. And unless it’s a very popular file that’s being served by many different peers at once, a single big provider can also be more available. With torrents you’re often dealing with regular people, who don’t have their computers on 24/7 and very often have piss poor upload speeds. If it’s a file that isn’t being served by many people, it might be very slow and difficult to get.
you are not wrong, every torrent is like that. Torrents are also cool because you spread the (up)load from one to many, efficiency!
You’re apt get some attention from the authorities.
They’ve got you now!
hey kid! interested in some Asset Pack V2 - The Unofficial Homestuck Collection dot zip?
use qbittorrent instead
Serious question: Is admitting that you did something illegal in a conversation enough to be convicted of a crime? For example, if I say “I bought a small amount of weed from another kid at school and smoked it last year”, is my statement alone enough to convict me of a crime? To clarify, they don’t know a date, they don’t know a place, they don’t know who I bought it from, they don’t know how much I bought, or how much I smoked. They really don’t even know if it actually happened (sometimes people say things happened that didn’t actually happen, gasp).
No. You could claim to have murdered someone, and they may detain you for this for some time, but without evidence of a crime I don’t think they can charge you and definitely can’t convict you.
Jesus, your reply reminds me of an old Reddit/4chan post (can’t remember which, probably 4Chan) I read about on Reddit years ago about a guy who admitted to killing his wife. He posted images and described how he did it and where. I believe he ended up getting arrested the next day. There were people who were in the hometown it happened at, posting news articles and links to videos where they had seen it on the news.
And you just reminded me of the Netflix show “don’t @#$& with cats”
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This is most likely civil law, not criminal. Criminal copyright infringement is harder to prove and generally has to be on a larger scale and for profit, depending on laws in your country.
Is admitting to breaking a license agreement enough for a conviction if you say exactly which license, then probably, depending on circumstances and specific local laws. Is it enough if you just say you did it, no. The licenser needs to at least prove they were the ones you “harmed” or they have no standing to sue. But if they already have logs from your ISP, then it might still be useful evidence.
You always need corroborating evidence to convict based solely on a confession. Does not have to be much, but uiu need some extra fact tying the person to the crime.
No but depending on the crime and the context it can be enough to get a search warrant but for your weed hypothetical no by the time they acted on it any other evidence would be gone so there’s no point in investigating unless you admitted to something bigger like growing or dealing
Convicted? No, but it might be enough to open an investigation or get a warrant.
Though even then, depending on the crime and circumstances (severity/time passed/likeliness of the crime having ocurred) they might not even bother.
If a confession of crime was all it took to convict then any crazy person could walk into a police station and confess to any number of things, but it obviously wouldnt be right to just take them on their word and lock them up.
Well they can get your IP and spy on you so they can probably grab the where. Even the house hold you live in. Although they don’t even need your IP these days.all these capitalists are selling your information to everyone on a silver platter. So they already know exactly who you are. That part wasn’t the hard part.
Maybe if they have a list of buyer suspects they can guess who is the seller in that region . As far as how much you bought, or how much you smoked, it really doesn’t matter. If it’s illegal, any amount is considered illegal.
If you do lie it’s a really dumb lie that got you watched now. it’s also common that if someone guilty does something stupid like admit to something, they quickly say they were lying.
So no, you’re not in the clear.
Now the question is could lemmy instances resist such subpoenas in courts, especially those falling under US or EU jurisdiction ?
Doubt it. Most Lemmy instances are run by one guy on a spare PC. They’re not set up to deal with legal requests, versus the police just barging in and taking the PC, while all the neighbours look on and assume you’re a paedo.
While there doesn’t seem to be an IP address field in the Lemmy schema, they could always get it out of the logs. There is an email address field, but I think that’s only used for initial signup, verification and resetting your password, so if you used a temporary one they’d have nothing to give.
I don’t know what the film industry would even do with the info if Reddit gave it to them. Likely just more bluster to deter casual pirates into thinking there are consequences to downloading the odd movie.
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“I was just lying for Internet points.”
“I wanted them to think I was one of them so that they would admit their piracy to me and I could turn them in.”
“Yes, I admit it, I pirated (name of public domain movie)!”
Or just don’t take the stand and let your lawyer figure it out. Unless they have another file filled with evidence that an IP you owned was used for piracy and they were just looking for some kind of evidence it was you using it, I don’t think they have much of a case.
Edit: apparently Lemmy removes rather than escapes angled brackets, so replaced them with regular brackets.
So if I used a temporary email I cannot change my password anymore? I mean changing password needs email verification after logging into the account?
I meant the password reset, as in you forget your password and they send you a link to set a new one. I assume Lemmy has that.
I’ve not changed my password manually yet. I assume from the “new, verify, old password” boxes that it doesn’t need to email you about that.
If I change my existing email to another, would the previous email still be retained in the servers?
Don’t retain logs longer than you must for preventing attacks. They can’t get what no longer exists.
Does your local small to medium instance user have enough money to not get hamstrung by a big film industry’s legal team?
Edit… not that I agree with the result but I think the question I am answering with rhetorically answers the original question, unfortunately.
Edit 2: If all this crypto stuff worked as well as it was described, it would be cool if there was a DAO or basically a mutually voted funds account that could store and send crypto funds to a lemmy instance owner to fund lawyers, should a legal case against a major lemmy instance come under legal fire.
EU?
in my (EU) country it’s not illegal to download torrents, it’s illegal to upload but not to download.
I know that in France Both from HADOPI era to now ARCOM, you can be trialed for downloading copyrighted material, if your IP gets captured by Record Labels. the lightest punishement would be the suspension of your internet subscription, but could also result in ahefty fine (thousands of people were forced to pay such a fine) still no one went to prison for this.
I mean, if your not corporates it would count as being your personal data would it not?
They don’t have names, so Im not sure what they expect.
Actually, if one uses the official Reddit app, they do have real names. It’s part of the data that the app reads out of your phone’s settings.
The official app didn’t exist in 2011 so they likely don’t have that information unless the user kept their account and used the official app at one point
has anyone made a data request, especially GDPR, to confirm this?
The only place I have my name, is in “emergency information”. Are you saying apps can access that?
That’s scary af.
I would not want my reddit or lemmy name be hard tied to my real name.
And now people are just starting to realize what real issue with the official reddit app is.
Test message
All these inputs apps have free-reign over need to become part of the explicit privacy settings.
It’s possible to have an email address associated with your Reddit account which might provide names.
I don’t understand why they would even try to get this data. It’s not like a Reddit post would stand up in court as admissable evidence of piracy.
They don’t want to prosecute the Reddit user, they want to make them to testify as a witness in a case against an ISP. If they repeat what they said in their comment in court it would count as evidence that said ISP was lax on piracy or something. The reason they’re doing this is because you’re right, they can’t use it as evidence without getting ahold of the actual person.
I imagine them getting the actual person and that person, whose best interest is the continuity of pirate-friendly ISP service, just goes and testifies literally against them for wasting their time.
“The community in which I made those comments is a joke community where you mostly state the exact opposite of your mind, no different from how /r/trees is actually about joking about drug use.” “I have no further comment”
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Hello yes this is Comcast, ahh let’s say about three fifty per IP? We have a deal!
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I said, “Dammit monster! Get off my lawn! I ain’t giving you no tree-fitty!” It said, “how about just two-fitty?” I said, “Oh, now it’s only two-fitty!! What?! Is there a sale on Loch Ness munchies or something?!”
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To anyone who ever says they don’t care when a political party they don’t care about goes after people they don’t care about, remember: this one particular court could have gone the other way, and people going after you can try as many times as they (or you) can afford to fight.
Rare Reddit W
At least they have doxxed themselves:
The film companies seeking Reddit users’ identities include After II Movie LLC, Bodyguard Productions, Hitman 2 Productions, Millennium Funding, Nikola Productions, Rambo V Productions, and Dallas Buyers Club LLC.
