ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy
ISPs tell Supreme Court they don’t want to disconnect users accused of piracy
ISPs say Sony's win over Cox would force them to do "mass Internet evictions."
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/19955612
Four more large Internet service providers told the US Supreme Court this week that ISPs shouldn't be forced to aggressively police copyright infringement on broadband networks.
While the ISPs worry about financial liability from lawsuits filed by major record labels and other copyright holders, they also argue that mass terminations of Internet users accused of piracy "would harm innocent people by depriving households, schools, hospitals, and businesses of Internet access." The legal question presented by the case "is exceptionally important to the future of the Internet," they wrote in a brief filed with the Supreme Court on Monday.
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Given this is a lawsuit from the conservative telecom industry in a conservative justice system against policies that protect a largely ultra-liberal group (hollywood) I can see this going well for the telecoms.
What we want as individuals is for the policing to go away but that's not how the US works. Instead there will be some other kind of system devised to try and lock down media even further while keeping fines and enforcement responsibility away from the telecoms.
Maybe the IP holders will be granted unprecedented access as middlemen to monitor traffic and police it themselves, or maybe electronics will be required to be sold with special DRM mechanisms that require an authorized source of media, like they've been trying to inject everywhere for ages unsuccessfully.
Either way this lawsuit has no effect on me, or most people. Piracy that would lead to ISP action is avoided by proxies or VPN anyway, right? I can't imagine anyone allegedly acquiring illicit material not using one of those services.