Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

I think Cloudflare has been successful somewhat at making AWS improve transfer pricing.

Cheap data transfer attracts trouble, however. 10 cents a gigabyte is much cheaper than buying a CD or DVD, but pirates like to pirate 10x or 100x more than they could ever buy so I think it slows people down.

Circa 2000 when Napster and Limewire were big, Cornell University dealt with it by putting a usage cap on undergraduate IPs and charging for data over the cap. There are some kids who will have their parents pay a few $1000 of parking tickets and data transfer a semester on their bursar bill but it sure slowed the others down.

View on HN

Cloudflare's R2 (S3 Competitor) has no egress fees.

Why is it the universities job to prevent piracy?

As the ASN operator don't they have a legal duty to shut down illegal operations from their network? Technically they probably only need to respond to filed complaints, but this strategy likely reduces their workload while not impacting the large majority of non-pirating students.

>As the ASN operator don't they have a legal duty to shut down illegal operations from their network?

Noooooooooooo

I mean I'm not a lawyer, I'm not even American, but I think that if they demonstrate that have the capability to police that sort of thing they become responsible for policing it. Where as responding to (or even forwarding) cease and desist letters opens them up to much less culpability.

In modern times I'd worry that actively trying to prevent piracy, taking concrete steps like blocking torrent protocols, could mean that you're no longer protected by safe harbour provisions in the DMCA. You start acting like you have the capability to be responsible for your users actions and then lose all kinds of safe harbour and common carrier provisions. It's part of the reason why ISPs don't use more aggressive traffic shaping, start blocking pirate sites and you start being responsible for all the pirate sites you missed.

That is why a network operator might try discouraging this activity through their pricing structure. The self-interest of a network operator is to be not getting complaints and demands about the activities of the customer and many network operators would rather a person who generates complaints go be a customer of some other operator and if that can be done with no customer contact all the better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com