Reddit says First Amendment rights protect it from having to disclose users' info.

Reddit must share IP addresses of piracy-discussing users, film studios say::Reddit says First Amendment rights protect it from having to disclose users’ info.

  • tacosanonymous@lemm.eeEnglish
    17·
    10 months ago

    False. At most, they should bring specific evidence of an actual crime to have authorities obtain a warrant. They can fuck all the way off til then.

  • JCreazy@midwest.socialEnglish
    111·
    10 months ago

    If you read the article it states at the film studio wants the IP address is to prove that Frontier is not doing anything about people pirating on their ISP. They claim that they aren’t going after the individuals themselves. The headline is deceptively vague.

    • ShepherdPie@midwest.socialEnglish
      2·
      10 months ago

      But they are indirectly going after these individuals. They just want Frontier to handle the punishments rather than doing it themselves.

    • taanegl@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Oh sure, trust that they won’t abuse that data. That’s unheard of. It’s not like there’s a ton of ways to abuse that info, I swear!

    • doricub@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      And reddit still shouldn’t release the IP address of specific users without a warrant.

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      Well you probably couldn’t go after someone individually with that kind of information, realistically. Most consumer grade connections have dynamic IPs. So the IP of user posting to reddit isn’t actually uniquely identifying. Your ISP could match which customer had which IP at a specific point in time, but if point in time you’re tying the IP to is when a given user posted a discussion about pirating, that doesn’t actually correlate to actual pirate activity happening at that time.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    2·
    10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.

    In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users.

    Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a copyright infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.

    In her ruling, Beeler noted that while the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, the film producers had already received the names of 118 Grande subscribers.

    She also said the film producers had failed to prove that “the identifying information is directly or materially relevant or unavailable from another source.”

    This week, as reported by TorrentFreak, film companies Voltage Holdings, which are part of the previous two subpoenas, and Screen Media Ventures, another film studio with litigation against RCN, filed a motion to compel [PDF] Reddit to respond to the subpoena in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

    The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    10 months ago

    Here in Denmark, that would be actively illegal. I think the same is true for most of EU. It may be allowed in Cooperate America, but I doubt it’s required. But that would be for Americans to decide.