EFF to court: The Supreme Court must rein in secondary copyright liability

Germany had this principle in place for a while for internet. It's called "Störerhaftung". Just google it and see the craziness that ensued. Led to exactly the kind of court cases you'd expect to see: grandmas paying to settle lawsuits for people abusing their misconfigured WiFi, AirBnB hosts paying for their tenants' torrenting. This gave rise to movements like Freifunk which allowed people to share an open WiFi that in many cases just tunnelled back the internet traffic to central exit points using IPs assigned to registered charities that were, for all intents and purposes, classified as ISPs and therefor exempt from this secondary liability. Another nice twist was that German privacy law only requires (and sometimes only allows) ISPs to store information about their customers needed for billing purposes. But because the service is free there is no billing and thus no information about the customer is known and nothing can be provided to courts or law enforcement as a result.

I've been running one of these Freifunk networks in my hometown since 2013. In all these years I only really had law enforcement reach out 4 or 5 times. One from Austria, the rest from Germany. One for CSAM, one for bomb threats, the rest were about fraud. After explaining the situation to them I never heard back.

> Households—especially in low-income and communities of color, which disproportionately share broadband connections with other people—would face collective punishment for the alleged actions of a single user.

Organizations really need to re-calibrate their messaging for the current government. I'm sure this statement is correct on the merits and I do think equity is important, but if you want to actually get stuff accomplished you've got to read the room!

The premise of intermediary liability is such a scourge. You have a dispute between two parties but the plaintiffs don't want to be bothered to actually prove their case, so instead they want to a) deputize some conglomerate as the judge and then b) be able to sue the conglomerate if it sides with the accused; but not allow the accused the same privilege.

And then the conglomerate never had the capacity to actually do any judging, but under that set of incentives it will default to siding with the accuser so that the accuser never has to prove their case. But what do you think happens when anyone can make an accusation and you abolish due process?

I mean forget about all the peasants who are going to get steamrolled; does Hollywood not realize that they themselves require internet access? That's not even going to require false accusations -- they're hosting millions of hours of content with complex licensing and are nowhere near infallible enough to have made less than three mistakes.

It's pretty much necessary to have Internet access to function in US society.

So we shouldn't even have to talk about whether someone can be cut off from that.

A complicating factor is that we're looking at decades of rampant media piracy in the US. This gives awful media companies and lawmakers both reason and pretext to introduce otherwise ridiculously inappropriate legal and technological measures. Our entire society suffers because a bunch of people want to freeload on media, in a way that doesn't jibe with the US laws and social contract. Rather than work to change the laws/contract, which could be brilliantly positive and even utopian, they instead simply disregard and take. And so society heads further towards dystopian.