Don't Try to Pirate Movies on SpaceX's Starlink | Hacker News Reader

Don't Try to Pirate Movies on SpaceX's Starlink

pcmag.com

15 pointsdsr1214 comments

Yes, ISPs tend to forward these. I think it's legally required in the USA? Though even here in Canada, you'll get any copyright-related complaints they receive regarding your account forwarded to you (including the endless automated DMCA notices which are legally meaningless here).

The ISP even wraps it in a disclaimer with the usual "behave or we'll cancel your service!" Though in practice, they never do. No idea with Starlink though. I wouldn't volunteer to test it. They definitely would want to drop bandwidth hogs for any excuse.

I've experienced someone on my home network torrenting enough times (and me receiving the take down notices) that my service was suspended and I had to call my ISP and promise that the situation had been rectified. Curiously, they don't actually suspect your service - they suspend DNS resolution (my VOIP phone still worked, and putting IP addresses to external websites that I knew directly into my hosts file worked just fine).

Did switching DNS server fix it?

Good question, but I didn't try (I should have). After some simple debugging to understand the nature of the problem (is it a problem with my home equipment or external problem?), I just straight up called the ISP.

DNS over HTTPS with DNS provider supporting it should've worked then.

> The ISP even wraps it in a disclaimer with the usual "behave or we'll cancel your service!" Though in practice, they never do.

I know firsthand Suddenlink is one ISP that will indeed shut off your Internet (and phone, since it's through the same modem) in response to copyright-related complaints. The worst part is I didn't get any sort of warning first; I ended up calling in thinking it was a standard network outage, with the phone tech and I troubleshooting for an hour before he realized "ohhhhh, did you try to torrent a video game yesterday?".

So thankfully it seems StarLink gives better warning here.

"the internet itself comes from ground stations on Earth connected to local fiber networks."

This is a funny line. I understand it, it just sounds ... odd.

Every ISP has to have this in order to qualify for safe harbour provisions under the DMCA.

Technically, yes. Though, AFAIU traditional ISPs are almost certainly safe from liability even without the DMCA carve out for Transitory Digital Network Communications (17 USC 512(a)). Liability was a dubious proposition in 1996, and even more dubious today.

Still, a company would be stupid to pass up a statutory safe harbor, at least so long as compliance costs (i.e. passing on notices) are minimal.

DMCA is about content hosts, I doubt it applies to ISPs.

The DMCA created distinct safe harbors for (a) Transitory Digital Network Communications, b) System Caching, c) Information Residing on Systems or Networks At Direction of Users, d) Information Location Tools, and e) Nonprofit Educational Institutions.

See https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

In practice (c) is the most important. The others are probably unnecessary (e.g. (a)) or rarely implicated (e.g. (e), which until the recent Archive.org COVID-19 fight I don't think had even seen any academic discussion, let alone been implicated in an actual lawsuit).

So... use a VPN or seedbox like any other isp?

"This just in: SpaceX behaves like every other ISP."

Uh, so standard ISP operating procedures.

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