Court blocks $1 billion copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users’ piracy::“Cox did not profit from its subscribers’ acts of infringement,” judges rule.
Court blocks $1 billion copyright ruling that punished ISP for its users’ piracy::“Cox did not profit from its subscribers’ acts of infringement,” judges rule.
Wouldn’t this be equal to suing Ford for making the get away car?
Yes, but also no - and be careful, you’re asking this around people who absolutely do hold manufacturers morally responsible for what people do with products bought from them. See e.g. any discussion of gun control on here.
If you want to draw an analogy between traffic and the internet, the ISP is your provider of roads; your PC+router+modem is your car. So this is much, much closer to suing the state for building and maintaining the road the getaway car used.
Also, there’s no cleanly analogous crime - “getaway car” sounds like a comparison to robbery, but no-one here was robbed. Sony’s argument for damages would have been based on theoretical sales it didn’t make, arguing that its government-issued monopoly on its IP automatically implies anyone pirating content would have paid them for it.
So here’s an even closer analogy: you sell marijuana in a state with a fixed number of dispensary licenses, and you are the only person in your neighborhood with a license. You set up shop. Someone else shows up in a van and gives away pot for free; your sales go down. You sue the state for providing the road the van used to do this.
None of those analogies really work as there are certain protections which could be required by law by ISPs, for example. In some countries porn is blocked. In others, drugs. If you allow drugs to be dealt in a school as the principal, you are going down.
Comparing it to guns (which have few intended consequences)… Yeah nah mate.
No analogy is ever going to be perfect when you try to look into the details too much… that’s why it’s an analogy.
Right, but that one was pretty poor.
Maybe closer to cars not having limiters to prevent speeding.
They could. The tech exists. Even to lock it to specific speed limits (not just an upwards cap) using GPS.
But most would say that’s overreaching. Until an insurance company sues/lobbies for it because it would improve their bottom line to force drivers to drive more responsibly by legally pushing the manufacturers to add limiters.