Nah. The ISP is the actual medium whose network was used to copy the alleged infringing content. So that's not analogous to all the utilities in use by the infringer.
I think the key differentiator is that Cox [somehow] knew that the customer was using their network to copy the alleged infringing content. The electric company doesn't know this, and (to use another example) the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know that their customer is storing the content on the drives the make.
If I were Cox, I suppose I would be incentivized to operate kind of like a VPN and just not store logs and not do any kind of traffic inspection or analysis. That way they might be able to argue that the plaintiff couldn't prove contributory infringement.
How they "know": The copyright holders join a torrent swarm and log all IPs that give them pieces of their copyrighted content. They then send infringement complaints to the IPs' ISPs alleging that someone with that IP was infringing on their copyright at the given date and time.
There are a number of reasons an ISP might not know who had a given IP at a given date and time. DHCP and CGNAT are two big ones. And the rare individuals who choose to fight do sometimes use that as a defense.
However, those technologies have a purpose other than anonymizing activity. A residential ISP who took active measures to obscure their customers activity would have a harder time defending against a complaint of negligence.
DHCP can be set up to make things harder, but most people's IPs don't change very often. ISPs don't want to make it impossible to tell who had an IP address at a given date/time because they need that information to fight other forms of internet abuse (spammers, phishers, hackers, malware, child porn, etc) as well as other legal requests they see from police and certain three letter agencies who file the proper paperwork with the ISPs legal department. This is generally a good thing and makes the internet a safer/better place.
Any ISPs who made it impossible for themselves to tell which customer had an IP address is going to act as a safe haven for bad actors and they'll get blacklisted from many other networks pretty quickly. Only the largest ISPs can ignore abuse issues on their network without fear of being blacklisted and their IP space null routed.
You're by no means incorrect but the strategy you're speaking of here to determine where warez is going is .. about 25+ years behind and even then network engineers used it as kind of a "look, they're not netengs, they're not going to understand how we encap/decap packets and uniquely identify their chain of custody, so just say something simple so they get the idea."
It also fell flat on its head when it hit the "is an IP a person?" argument.
Every file crossing the line is fingerprinted and various ISPs give various copyright-track software vendors or licensors direct access to track those pre-determined fingerprints and report problem to ISP for customer to mitigate or help prepare for subpoena. There's a lot of other ways this stuff is tracked I won't get into and the environments even more direct now with all of the ML tools. Webhosts and social media apps do the same thing so they can have smaller abuse departments digging for CSAM content. Data exfiltration is a huge space.
As soon as a new lady gaga video is uploaded to Vevo, the fingerprint was already determined, and the copyright bots have alread been scanning the internet for that file for days/weeks. Watch a new music video release on youtube, you'll see attempts to copy it get hammered immediately.
DPI and MITM-TLS which a lot of people blindlyaccept by accepting various free ISP features basically takes most of the end users privacy away in the end anyway. They're all reselling your data, ISPs and most VPNs are scum.
These are scenarious that someone with experience at a major CDN would be very familiar with. We do the same thing tracking every unique object on the entire platform.
I suspect willful blindness to infringement wouldn't help. Willful blindness is such a problem in law that most laws are phrased using the words "known or should have known". Someone who should have known is said to have constructive knowledge.
There's also business and legal reasons why ISPs need to log and inspect traffic. "No logging" means "no abuse desk" - i.e. if someone's using your ISP to send out spam or hack people, and you aren't logging or inspecting traffic, then you can't investigate that spam or that hacking. At a minimum it means every other online service is going to distrust your users - i.e send them through reCAPTCHA hell; up to an outright ban. Think like what it's like to use clearweb services through a Tor exit node, and now imagine that for a bunch of nontechnical users. They're going to switch to the ISP that doesn't result in them getting group punishment. But actual criminal actors are going to flock to the service, because they need someone in the middle to launder their packets for them, which makes them have a worse reputation, and so on.
VPN providers, especially non-logging ones, keep their abuse handling practices secret. They all claim to have "ways" to catch abuse on their network - I suspect it just comes down to a combination of flagging accounts/logging events following certain types of behavior along with data collected from abuse complaints.
Seems possible enough to keep logs of possible abuse for an account without keeping IP logs around. I'd also guess they have a lower standard for evidence needed to suspend/close an account for abuse than an ISP would. It's just not worth the trouble to keep a suspicious account open when it risks getting their IPs blacklisted.
VPN companies already do sketchy shit to get around Netflix's georestrictions[0]. I've heard rumors like they route traffic through residential IP blocks somehow. If they're able to do this, then IP reputation doesn't matter as much. They're already burning IP addresses to connect to Netflix with anyway...
[0] BTW, how is this not a massive industry-wide DMCA 1201 lawsuit? Advertising a service as being capable of getting around georestrictions sounds like it should be as illegal as advertising a DVD decryptor.
IP reputation matters, but users only care when it stops them from doing what they want. Residential connections often have certain ports blocked and some uses restricted by the ISP which makes resi connections less ideal for some types of abuse, but great for things like using streaming services. An IP that doesn't work for some services may still work great for others. It seems like a lot of people using VPNs know to try a few different servers/connections until they get the kind of access they want.
> how is this not a massive industry-wide DMCA 1201 lawsuit?
Is it illegal to bypass geoblocking in the US? I'd think that in the US using a VPN to get around geoblocking could count as 'circumventing a technological measure that controls access to a work' or whatever and could be considered illegal under the DMCA, but perhaps there's also a difference between using a VPN to access content offered outside of your own country you were never authorized to view vs using it to access the same content you'd normally have access to if you weren't just on vacation? I don't think I've heard about any lawsuits against VPNs for that.
Either way, I'd agree that advertising a service as a means to bypass geoblocking is probably a bad idea. As long as they don't outright tell people they should use the service to do that though I think an argument could be made that a VPN just provides internet access, and the VPN's ToS/AUP requires users to not to do anything illegal with the connection, and so the user is responsible for what they do with it.
how would it be a lawsuit? its farcical that there even are georestrictions in the first place. Netflix doesnt care about them either. The only reason they exist is to please rights holders with weird demands. It's not either netflix or the customer's responsibility to care about upholding them (other than netflix's own contractual requirements)
In other news; netflix themselves allow the usage of VPNs[0] provided you dont use the free (ad-supported) plan. Presumably to prevent the sort of thing I used to do with spotify years ago (be from a region where no advertisers paid them, so the space where adverts would usually be was just blank)
They didn't just know about it, they actually said they didn't want to perm disconnect accounts they were told have been repeatedly infringing because they didn't want to lose the money those accounts would bring in. They screwed themselves by talking about it over email (including saying outright "Fuck the DMCA").
No ISP is happy about the fact that they're forced to spend significant amounts of time and money working as "copyright police" for the media industry for free, and they aren't happy that (so far) courts have insisted that they need to permanently disconnect people from the internet over nothing but unproved accusations from questionable sources, but it was a bad idea to talk openly about that in email because all of that was later used against them in court.
> The electric company doesn't know this, and (to use another example) the hard drive manufacturer doesn't know that their customer is storing the content on the drives the make.
This is a sufficient argument in many situations. To shore it up for cases where the electric company gets informed (by a court, for example, with or without the court actually ordering the electric company to do something about it) that subscriber Jackie Doe has been sued and penalized for copyright infringement, there has to be a complementary argument about whether placing mandatory enforcement on multiple providers in the service stack (website -> internet service provider -> electricity) is a reasonable legal framework. How many turtles on the way down should be forced to restrict known copyright infringers? Before internet access became nearly as necessary as it is today, former Senator Orrin Hatch proposed a law authorizing destruction of copyright infringers' computers by copyright holders. (In the service stack I mentioned previously, "computer" would be a link between internet service provider and electricity.) Meanwhile, my takeaway of the featured article is that bans of internet service are not a fringe idea, at least among big copyright publishers.
This thread reminded me of an EFF article "Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack" [2] about the content moderation tech stack (social media site -> site hosting provider -> internet service provider). The article focused on voluntary moderation actions by site hosting providers and ISPs but is a useful prototype for examining tech stacks which involve third-party liability laws, including in copyright contexts.
This is completely true, and yet many many countries place a fee on any writable media (drives, cards, disks) and funnel that bribe directly to the RIAA and MPAA by law.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
