this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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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.

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[–] EmperorHenry 248 points 11 months ago (9 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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."

[–] EmperorHenry 15 points 11 months ago

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!

[–] Agent641 11 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Back in the day, our collective friend SWIM took the rap for everything. Nobody ever did anything illegal, SWIM did.

Someone

Who

Isnt

Me

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Wanna play some sarcastaball?

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[–] [email protected] 217 points 11 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They are still better than meta and Twitter too.

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[–] ryno364 33 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not to mention this has far reaching effects past Reddit. Such as for lemmy instances.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Yeah nobody is all bad, even Reddit.

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[–] macrocephalic 13 points 11 months ago

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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[–] RFBurns 100 points 11 months ago (24 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] TheBat 16 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Film industry should do something about the sex pests in it

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

Also do sonething about all their writers and actors being on strike.

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[–] AlphaOmega 94 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] JollyTheRancher 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (5 children)

How the FUCK is piracy supposed to be the ISP's problem? That's like going after a florist because someone bought their flowers and then illegally planted them around the neighborhood.

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[–] FlyingSquid 80 points 11 months ago (6 children)

God I hate rooting for Reddit.

[–] chris2112 34 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] FlyingSquid 13 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'll acknowledge he did the right thing here, but I won't be happy about it.

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[–] ZombieZookeeper 69 points 11 months ago

Spez will turn over the names if Fidelity tells him to.

[–] [email protected] 68 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (7 children)

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).

[–] PHLAK 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

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.

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[–] Nioxic 67 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Lol

Talking about torrenting... thats not even illegal. Lol.

And its certainly not proof of anyone then actually breaking the law.

[–] dunestorm 36 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Shows how much people understand of the law when they think using Bitorrent is illegal lol

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Yeah I torrent a lot of files like Linux ISOs

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (4 children)

It's so much easier and faster than using some mirror

[–] herrvogel 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (6 children)

Now the question is could lemmy instances resist such subpoenas in courts, especially those falling under US or EU jurisdiction ?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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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[–] HR_Pufnstuf 14 points 11 months ago

Don't retain logs longer than you must for preventing attacks. They can't get what no longer exists.

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[–] Blamemeta 31 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They don't have names, so Im not sure what they expect.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 11 months ago (7 children)

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.

[–] TORFdot0 23 points 11 months ago

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

[–] inspxtr 15 points 11 months ago

has anyone made a data request, especially GDPR, to confirm this?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] gsa32 21 points 11 months ago

Rare Reddit W

[–] AlmightySnoo 16 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] FartsWithAnAccent 11 points 11 months ago

They were stupid fucking subpoenas to begin with, I'm not surprised.

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