And a hundred years ago, you'd have said 'I live in rural America, and a gasoline pumping infrastructure is largely-nonexistent.'

Actually, you'd have said 'a paved road infrastructure is largely non-existent.'

You'd also have argued the merits of horses versus cars for most of the same arguments you make here.

Which is what many people at the time actually did.

If Cox is liable for user's copyright infringement then Tesla is liable for drivers speeding.

Not if there's a federal law that explicitly declares that middlemen are liable if they don't comply with the DMCA process, while there isn't a federal law saying car manufacturers are liable for speeding.

You might be looking at the underlying principles and making common sense value judgements, instead of reading what the law says.

This is ultimately why politics exists: to influence what the law is, in an attempt to make it more like your common sense value judgements. And it's really hard because these are issues that your congressional candidates probably aren't talking about at all, because they're talking about someone else's "important" [eyeroll] issues instead. We needed to stop DMCA in 1997/1998 and we failed.

The jury seemed to decide that accusations qualify as infringement

However regrettable, it's easy to understand how that can happen.

The jury could have just been told testimony that "we saw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was seeding our movie" (with screenshots of MPAA's torrent client showing a seeder at that address and the packets they got from that address correctly matching the torrent's checksum). Meanwhile, Cox wouldn't have any evidence refuting it (even though the assertion isn't proven; the "screenshots" could have been made in GIMP for all we know). And then the jury might have ruled based on "preponderance" of evidence.

Kind of like 3 cops saying "the perp resisted arrest" and the perp saying "no I didn't" and a criminal jury (where the bar is much higher) still deciding that the perp resisted arrest. Sigh. You know that happens.

Had Cox ratted their customer out (or gotten a DMCA counternotice from them), then the customer could have been sued instead, and raised doubts by saying "I have an open wifi" or something like that. But Cox didn't, and they certainly aren't going to say "we have an open wifi" since they're in the network business so of course they don't offer free networking to strangers. It sounds like a difficult situation for Cox.

The story is light on details so I ass/u/me some things. The copyright infringement was likely due to torrents, i.e. from the internet's point of view, addresses owned by Cox were publishing/hosting content (under the hood: really Cox's customers seeding torrents).

So if I were an MPAA/RIAA -member company, I'd send Cox a DMCA notice ("Cox, stop sharing my copyrighted work") which really means "Cut that customer off or otherwise make them stop, or else get a DMCA counternotice from them, so I can go after them instead of you." And if that's what happened, then it sounds like Cox said no (didn't make it stop and also didn't pass the buck to their customers. So they sued Cox instead of Cox's customers.

But that's based on assumptions and speculation, hence my question. But yes, I know what a DMCA notice is and I think that mechanism was likely in involved at some point in the story.

It's unclear from the articles whether or not this happened: did the record labels send DMCA notices to Cox, which Cox blew off (thereby becoming liable in place of the original suspected infringer)? Or did the record labels just sue 'em first?

Prior to 1998 they wouldn't have been liable (just like Western Digital and Seagate aren't liable for whatever I may be suspected of doing) but DMCA makes hosting services (and networks? hmm...) a special case, unlike power utilities, computer equipment manufacturers, etc.

And since bribery is assured under the guise of "campaign contributions", that system is always going to be flawed.

Liberty is the common problem.

https://www.mudbots.com/

Looks like you can get into this business pretty cheap. A 15x15x15 foot printer is only $39k

How about the 'natural experiment' of people having 40 year old CDs and 27 year old DVDs that work just fine?

Given that the page referenced claims that DVD-R will last 50-100 years, but factory pressed DVDs will last 10-20, I think there's a typo for the factory pressed ones.

So far in my life, I've had exactly one optical disc go bad that wasn't explained by severe scuffing or physically breaking it, and that was Kentucky Fried Movie. And that was a manufacturing issue.

I have CDs from the 80s that still play fine, and DVDs from the late 90s.

If your local copy is the same bitrate and sound codecs as the 4k UHD blu ray, great.

But if it's a streaming 4k webrip, the blu ray is still going to be way higher quality.

I was at a security presentation, oh, about five, maybe seven years back, by a company trying to sell, basically, SS7 firewalls, and advocating for basic security ideas that the Internet went through thirty years ago. "Hey, maybe do the equivalent of filtering your routes so people can't use phone numbers not actually registered to your network" and things like that.

The response you point out was exactly the ones that all of the big boys had; 'we don't need security, we just need to get back to closing SS7 to everybody that isn't one of the big boys.'

And the point the presenters were trying to make was 'that ship has sailed, you can get access to the network and start spamming SMS about as easily as you can get a gym membership these days, so stop living in the past.'

This is the point that I keep coming back to; imagine if the anorexia craze back in the 80s and 90s had been treated with 'affirmative care.'

"Oh, sweetie, yes you ARE fat! HUGE! Lets get you some ozempic right away, and schedule your middle surgery. No, we don't have to tell your parents, sweetie, but if they find out and object, we'll just tell them that you'll kill yourself without this treatment to affirm your belief that you're disgustingly fat."

What an odd take to say that the first Matrix movie wasn't 'woke' when it was clearly and explicitly a metaphor for gender transition.

There's a reason that both Neo and Trinity are androgynous. There's a reason they're being chased down by literal personifications of conformity.

The only way they could have made it more explicit was the original plan to have Switch be one gender in the real world, and a different gender in the Matrix, instead of just also androgynous.