Comment by jeffw@lemmy.world on Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses

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.

Food for thought: Lemmy instance admins probably can’t afford $800 an hour corporate attorneys to fight off subpoenas.

Food for though: In the US judges have ruled on multiple occasions that an IP address doesn’t actually prove what individual engaged in the act.

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.

Police can arrest you, but they don’t run the courts.

Ie you get brought in on bogus charges and if the only evidence is a number that isn’t admissable as evidence you would likely see a mistrial.

Doesn’t matter, these are unpaid volunteers standing up instances. Most, if not all, have no desire to fight that battle on their own dime.

That’s why it does matter.

Even if they get the IP addrsss from an instance, they can’t use it for anything.

It doesn’t just stop there.

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.

The average person getting sued also can’t afford an attorney

They sure as hell will find money for an attorney if they are being sued for 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars.

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.

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.

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.

they can. your telco provider knows exactly which ip was assigned to whom at any given time

Sure, but that’s assuming the logs contain your ip in the first place.

Assume they do until proven otherwise

You can just look at the source code… no need to assume anything. You can’t prove a negative lol

And this is why you VPN.

MFW I went to upvote but couldn’t because “error: VPN blocked” 😑

Huh, I exclusively browse Lemmy through a VPN and I’ve never seen that one.

He’s probably talking about reddit They no longer allow vpn’s or any user obfuscators to browse the site

No they don’t. I use the site with a VPN often and it generally works

Are you logged in? I can’t access Reddit with a VPN if I’m not logged in

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.

instagram definitely does this, reddit seems fine for me so far

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.

The block is intermittent on Reddit, but it does occur.

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.

That doesn’t help instance admins at all, though.

It helps admins help you stay anonymous by relieving them from having to cover for you.

I am not going to thank the unpaid volunteers who make the fediverse possible by getting them C&D letters/legal threats.

Well I appreciate that. But simply discussing piracy should be okay.

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.

Oops, I accidentally fired the sd card containing my instance running on my raspberry pie.

If that is really how you do it, you won’t need to fry it, it will happen soon enough by itself.

Seriously. Lemmy is a house made of patchwork quilt, with a bit of pine sap here and there to steady the few boards.

“Held together with bubble gum and duct tape” is the phrase I usually use

Would be a real shame if my instance’s logrotate was set to, say, only keep a few days of webserver logs. Real shame.

Good luck establishing precedent with that!

Oh. They sued an instance? 😱
Anyway… here’s another 5 hosted in Russia, or a country where piracy is legal, or just don’t give a fuck.

ok but what if in losing the suit, they must give up the logs and IPs?

Before they go under?

like the instance and the people that discussed piracy will be hurt

and it will put fear in others

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.

And, to be fair, a gofundme for stuff like this often gets full very fast

If the community is big enough to get sued it’s also big enough to spread a link for funding, easy

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Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses(arstechnica.com)

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