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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[–] [email protected] 247 points 1 year 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 1 year 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."

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year 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!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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 1 year ago (2 children)

Wanna play some sarcastaball?

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[–] [email protected] 217 points 1 year 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 1 year ago (2 children)

They are still better than meta and Twitter too.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year 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 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah nobody is all bad, even Reddit.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year 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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[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 year 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 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Film industry should do something about the sex pests in it

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 97 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year 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] 78 points 1 year ago (6 children)

God I hate rooting for Reddit.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

He didn't do it for you, he didn't do it for us. He did it for himself.

If news got out that Reddit violated anonymity, the site would be dead before the end of the week. This was a move to protect his shareholders, nothing more.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago

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

[–] Buttons 68 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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).

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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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[–] [email protected] 67 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lol

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

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

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Yeah I torrent a lot of files like Linux ISOs

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year 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] 46 points 1 year 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 1 year 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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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 40 points 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year 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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year 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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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 year 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] 21 points 1 year ago

Rare Reddit W

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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

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