ISPs say Sony's win over Cox would force them to do "mass Internet evictions."

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.

  • john89English
    33·
    5 hours ago

    Only because it would hurt their bottom line.

    Funny how we can only win when it’s corporations fighting each other.

    • Prethoryn Overmind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      22·
      2 hours ago

      Bottom line or not there are ways that ISP’s could mitigate the loss that would benefit their bottom like while hurting the consumer.

      Example: 1000 users are now nor able to pay or use the internet because of Piracy. ISP says: oh we had 2000 users now we have 1000 easy we will just double the cost of internet on those 1000 users.

      ISP’s are like any other company. Pointing it out doesn’t mean it is negative. They are a business ruin their business model and it impacts everyone. I am not saying you are wrong. I just think your comment tries to view this stance in a negative light in the context and something being a business with a bottom line doest not instantly make something negative or make something negative not worth fighting for.

      • MystikIncarnateEnglish
        2·
        25 minutes ago

        Mitigating the loss isn’t the point.

        Pirates account for some of the most significant internet users. Pirates generally buy higher tier plans, and actually use them. These are high value clients to the ISP.

        Most households have maybe a handful of people, let’s say, 4 on average, where each can be doing around one thing on the internet at any given time. Some of the highest bandwidth activities that they can legally engage in, aside from bulk downloads (games, files, etc), is video streaming. Most 4K video services are streaming at around 25-40Mbps, across four people, that’s 100-160mbps. Accounting for overhead, most households don’t require more than 200mbps.

        These are small fry users for the ISP, since presently 200mbps is very middle-of-the-road for available speeds in most places.

        Pirates are usually in the 500+ Mbps plans whenever they’re made available, usually at a significant premium for the speed, and for the unlimited bandwidth that they need for their consumption. They’re the prosumers that see the value in the extra speed and cost… And there’s a LOT of them. Whether it’s casual piracy, like watching licensed content for free on some ad-riddled shady site from overseas, to full on data warehouse pirates who download terabytes of data every month… There’s a large number of users that pirate content of all sorts.

        ISPs know this, they see the copyright claim notices, and they know how much of their userbase is going to vaporize if something like this passes.

        You think it’s maybe half? That they should just increase pricing to make up for it? Yeah, they did the math, if that was the problem, they wouldn’t care, nor spend the money to fight it.

        The fact that they’re fighting against this should be extremely telling that this kind of legislation would significantly impact the business. They would lose a huge portion of their clients. They would need to overhaul the business to stay afloat, if they can survive it at all.

        You’re comment is reductive and short sighted. You don’t seem to realize what their actions actually mean, or at least, what they imply. ISPs are not fighting for us out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re not charities. They’re profit mongering business people who only care about the bottom line. So if they’re going to bat against the MPAA/RIAA for something that will benefit their clients who are doing things that are clearly illegal, what does that say about how this will affect their bottom line.

        IMO, if this goes through, then we’re going to see more than a few ISPs go chapter 11.

      • Disgracefulone@discuss.onlineEnglish
        4·
        1 hour ago

        You were too busy talking you missed the point when it knocked you on your ass.

        Your entire comment can be summarized with one word: irrelevant.