[zenexer]

Well, they probably would cut you off—but it would be with a court order. And that’s how it should work.

There’s no due process here, and that’s a problem. Sony is saying that they should be entitled to tell your ISP to cut you off without a court order. That should be scary.

It’s no different from Sony arguing that they should be entitled to tell your power company to shut off your power because they believe you’ve watched a Blu-ray Disc more than the number of times permitted by the license printed on the box.

If Sony doesn’t like what they think I’m doing, they’re free to take me to court over it. None of this extrajudicial nonsense.

[add-sub-mul-div]

I though eliminating courts was the point of it. People who download pirated stuff no longer have to fear being sued and forced into an expensive settlement. This was the compromise over the old way of doing it. There has to be accountability somewhere, you can't get something for nothing. (Well you can, you just have to be careful about it.)

[zenexer]

> People who download pirated stuff no longer have to fear being sued and forced into an expensive settlement.

That's certainly not true. Nothing prevents Sony from suing these people. They could go to court, present evidence, get a court order, and go after these people the same way they always have. They don't seem to want to do that, probably for a variety of reasons. It's awfully convenient if you can scare service providers into enforcing your will without all that pesky "evidence" nonsense.

If you're referring to laws like DMCA and CDA, those provide safe harbor to the likes of websites and hosting providers that serve user-generated content. They don't provide safe harbor to the individuals responsible for posting that user-generated content. You're still on the hook for what you post online, and Sony could sue you. Nothing stops them from doing so.

[hakfoo]

Going extrajudicial also turns it into an immovable object "policy says no" rather than a deliberative process to achieve balanced justice.

I'm sure there would be plenty of cases where, even if the argument didn't end at "an IP address is not a person", a judge would recognize that cutting off service would injure third parties (for example, the children of the household enrolled in online schooling), or just acknowledge that in a 21st-century economy, blocking someone from Internet access may as well be sending them to a relocation camp in Amish country.

[aleph_minus_one]

> There has to be accountability somewhere

Simple: make the person who falsely signed such an order as a representative of the company personally responsible for their wrongdoing, i.e. jail such a person.

[db48x]

That still requires you to prove your innocence after getting cut off from the internet. Make them go through the courts for every single case. Make them accuse you first, before the punishment, so that you can defend yourself. That’s the whole point of due process.

[aleph_minus_one]

> That still requires you to prove your innocence after getting cut off from the internet.

Indeed. But it at least destroys the life of any person who attempts to destroy yours via the process.

[dessimus]

"It would be real disappointing if someone used the guest wifi at Sony HQ to do something illicit."