Although the First Amendment of the US Constitution protects the privacy of users, movie studios are not interested…

The First Amendment allows for the establishment of religion, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances. Nevertheless, Ars Technica has reported that two movie studios, Voltage Holdings and Screen Media Ventures, have filed a motion to compel Reddit to turn over the IP addresses of six anonymous users of the social networking site for allegedly pirating media content on the platform. In the US, ISPs can be sued if they are unable or unwilling to prevent piracy on the connection they provide.

This is the third case. The first was dismissed by a US District Court on First Amendment grounds, so Reddit did not have to hand over names, email addresses and account details. At the time, the studios were suing another ISP for copyright infringement on its network, but Reddit again rejected the request for IP addresses and logs, citing First Amendment rights.

Now the two studios mentioned above are trying a third time, demanding data from another ISP (Frontier Communications) on Reddit because they believe the ISP is ineffective in preventing media piracy. One user wrote that he’s been using Frontier DSL for years because they don’t care what he downloads, even though he’s been using it for years, and another received 44 threatening letters saying they’d cut off his Internet access, but nothing happened. According to the two studios, in these and the other identified posts, Reddit users have no recognized privacy interest in their IP addresses, and the logging of IP addresses is clearly relevant and proportionate to the needs of the case.

The lesson is that it is not worth talking publicly about downloading something illegally. However, whether the downloading itself is free varies from country to country. In some countries it is not mentioned, in others it leads to a fine…

Source: PCGamer