Reply All - #118 A Pirate In Search of a Judge

Episode Date: March 15, 2018

One day, Cayden received an email from their internet provider that said "stop pirating TV shows or we'll cut off your internet!" Cayden had no idea what they were talking about. So Alex decided to investigate. Further Reading Vulture's recap of "Old Loves" (Girls Season 5, Episode 4) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimlet, this is Reply All. I'm Alex Goldman. And I'm PJ Vote. And this week, PJ, we have super tech support. The segment on our show, where people write into us with tech support issues that are just sort of beyond the scope of what they can solve themselves. And then I, very humoristically, try to solve those problems. So what problem are you trying to solve this week? This one's from a listener whose name is Caden.

They use they-them pronouns. And they're the executive director of a nonprofit in Oakland. Okay. And a couple of weeks ago, Caden started getting these really confusing emails. The first email I got on February 1st at 8.18 p.m. local time. The email was from Comcast. Kaden is a Comcast subscriber. And it said that Caden had been illegally downloading a specific television show.

So it says the infringing work is Girls, the HBO program from Lena Dunham. There's actually a file name. And so it's Girls Season 5. episode four in 720 DPI HDTV. Which episode of Girls is that? So in that episode, Fran and Hannah fight, Desi and Marnie fight because Desi puts up a wall in the apartment. And then Jessa has sex with Adam. Okay.

None of that is in the notice. It gives the infringement date and it says the type and method is BitTorrent. It gives the IP address and a case number. So Caden is at this point totally baffled. Because Caden doesn't use BitTorrent, and they already have HBO. How do you feel about the show girls? I've seen some episodes of it, and actually a former roommate of mine had watched it, and so I'd watched a couple episodes with her, and like, I'm not impressed.

And so Caden is being accused by Comcast of using a program that they've never used to download a show that they don't even like. My first thought was to email my roommate, so I live with two roommates, and I just forwarded it to the next day with the comment, this is a really rude email, and what the fuck? And both of them were like, this is news to me. And one of them was like, look, I don't even, I've never even used BitTorrent in my life.

And this is like really accusatory and abrupt, like what's going on. And very quickly, it got even worse. Later that same day, Comcast sent more emails accusing Caden of downloading the same girls episode two more times. And the emails just kept coming. So I got three on the first day. It looks like four, five, six, seven. I got like eight in the first week, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

Ten in the second week. Do they all say exactly the same thing? Yeah, they say exactly the same thing. The only things that change are the infringement date and then the reporting party case. But they're of the same file on BitTorrent and the body of the case. and the body of the email is the same. So far, Caden has gotten a total of 24 of these emails, which are called DMCA notices.

24 letters from Comcast telling Caden that they've illegally downloaded this particular episode of girls. Wait, can I tell you something about DMCA notices? What? I got one a couple weeks ago. For what? What did you download? I will just say that I was accused of downloading high maintenance from HBO,

which is only weird because I have HBO. but I was going on a plane and I wanted it on a plane. But they got me and like literally I woke up on a Saturday morning and my internet was down and I thought I'd like kicked the plug or something and I called the provider and was like, hey, the internet's not working. They were like about that. And it was like a warning thing. Was this your first time?

First time. So they were like, you just have to call this other number and like apologize and then we'll turn your internet back on. But next time it'll be a day. And after that it'll be a week, which I was like, that's actually extremely annoying. How stress is this Kaden about this? Honestly, Kaden's pretty stressed out because according to the Comcast website, if you get enough of these notices, your internet can be disconnected for no less than six months. That's very severe.

Yeah, totally. So what have they tried so far to, like, solve the problem on their own? I mean, the first thing that Kaden tried was just to make sure that their Wi-Fi was secure. They changed the Wi-Fi password. Very basic security stuff. I then decided I was going to call the number that's listening. in the email for the Comcast Customer Security Assurance. Okay.

Center. And when I first called them, I got a person, but he was like, hey, can you call back in like an hour? What? Is it possible you found the wrong number? No, I definitely, it was the right number because I, like, clicked on it from my email on my phone. That's wild.

And then I did call back, like, a day later and got a human who had the time to talk to me. But the person on the phone just did, like, super. elementary stuff that Caden had already done, just, you know, like, are you sure your Wi-Fi is secure? Stuff like that. And it honestly kind of pissed Caden off. I was like, A, as part of my job, like I teach people about Internet security and be like, I would think that I would know if somebody in my household were doing this. Well, I'm going to, you know, turn over some stones and see what I can figure out. Cool. Sounds good. All right. Thanks a lot, Caden.

All right. Thank you. I'll talk to you. you soon. Bye. Bye. Okay, Alex. It's been a week. Yes. What have you learned? I've learned that this is a hard problem to solve. Okay. And the problem is that Caden came to me because they were convinced that this was a mistake. They were innocent and they wanted me to prove their innocence. In Internet court. Right. But the problem is I don't know where Internet court is. Like, I didn't know who I was supposed to appeal their innocence to. My first step was to call Comcast because Comcast sent them the letter in the first place.

Yeah, my name's Alex Goldman. I'm a journalist. But when I called Comcast and was like, hey, there's been a mistake here. Comcast was sort of like, we don't think there's been a mistake. Most likely there's not mistakes on that because it's not something done manually. It's a system that detects whenever the copyright content is being downloaded. Okay, but what if it made a mistake? There's nothing else to do.

I leave no on the concuss company. She told me that if there is a mistake, it's not something that their agents can determine. We just, you know, give you the information, as I said before, to make yourself more secure. Basically, you're just the messenger. Yes, that's a really good way to say it. But they're not just the messenger. Like, they're turning people's Internet off. Right.

They will turn it off. But they say they're not the ones who decide if you're guilty or not. And I spoke to Anne-Marie Bridie, who is a professor at the University of Idaho and an expert in copyright law, and she says that what Comcast told me is actually right. It is not Comcast who finds me infringers. So the movie studios and recording labels will often hire these digital forensics companies. So I'd never heard of these companies before, but they help places like HBO and Sony and Def Jam by searching the Internet for pirated media. material. There's a company that is famous we're working in this space called Rice Corp.

And they just send thousands and thousands of notices. These robots generate thousands of notices and they are sent on to the ISP. And the thing that didn't occur to me before is that it's not like Comcast wants

to send these DMCA notices because when they have to shut off someone's internet, they're just losing a customer. So then why do they do it? Well, the reason these are called DMCA notices is because there's a thing called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I'm glad that you know about this. So the DMCA lays out this rule that's super foundational to the internet, which is basically if people use your platform for copyright infringement, you are not legally responsible for it as long as you try to act on it.

If people upload movies to YouTube, YouTube isn't responsible as long as they try to take them down. Got it. Comcast is not responsible. unless they're letting it happen. Right. But who decides how agro they have to be? It's very poorly laid out. The law simply says that the platform owners need to take what's called appropriate action.

Uh-huh. And no one has ever really defined what appropriate action is for an ISP. And only recently did they define what appropriate action isn't. So there's this internet service provider called Cox. They have 6 million customers or something like that. And Anne-Marie told me that a couple of years. years ago, this music publisher, BMG, was trying to get Cox to tell customers that they'd been caught downloading illegally and that the customers had to pay money to get out of trouble.

Cox didn't like that the notices had settlement demands in them. And so at a certain point, Cox just stopped processing notices that they were receiving from Rights Court. This, of course, really pissed BMG off. So they sued Cox, basically for not disconnecting enough people. And the court sided with the record company. And the reason they cited with the record company is because they got all these internal communication, all these internal emails from Cox being like, I know we have to disconnect a couple people, but let's not really disconnect that many people. Also, let's just leave them disconnected for like a month and then we'll just get them back. Got it. And the court found that because Cox wasn't doing enough about people pirating stuff on their platform,

Cox is now responsible for the pirated works. Okay, so the point with Comcast is they have to take these notices seriously because otherwise, like they don't want to end up in the same situation as Cox. Right. So that also means that I'm not going to be able to convince Comcast not to enforce this. So I figured if I wanted to plead Caden's innocence to anybody, I would try contacting the digital enforcement company that accused them of downloading this episode in the first place.

And fortunately, in the email that Caden got that said that they'd done, downloaded this episode of girls, there is a line that says reporting party or something like that. And next to that, it says Vobel. Vobel. Like mobile with a V. Okay. So Vobel, as I now know, is the company that HBO hired to look for stolen episodes of girls. So Vowble could actually be the like entity that made a mistake and misidentified Kaden, right? Well, here is what I know. I talked to the CEO of Vobel. His name is Yank, Ben Wang. And when I told him about the letter that Kaden got, he was like, really? Caden got a letter from us? I'm surprised, you know, because we're not typically, we're not in that service business. We're not. You know, we do have a content identification technology we develop

and we use for many other purposes, but we are not in the, you know, consumer DMCA notification business. This was really confusing to me because what he's saying, is that they wouldn't go after someone like Kaden. They were interested in getting the big dogs, people and websites that are sharing tons of pirated stuff rather than just the people who are downloading it. So then why did Vowel target Kaden? I asked Yang Bin that, and he was like,

I'm not really sure we did target Kaden. There might be someone else licensed our technology to do something that I'm not aware. So do you think that it's possible in this case? that someone might have licensed your software and used it to identify someone who is using a torrent? Could be. So maybe someone else was using Vobel software to go after Kaden?

Yang Bin wasn't sure. But either way, he said, look, our software works. So someone is stealing this episode of girls. And I think you should be looking at Kaden's home internet setup. The likelihood would be Wi-Fi. You know, it could be used by neighbors. It could be, you know, I mean, a lot of this, I use Comcast at home. It came with a, you know, Wi-Fi router and all those time stuff.

You know, it could be used by friends who come into your home. It could be used to other people. So, Vobel says we don't make mistakes and we can't help you anyway. Comcast says, we don't think this is a mistake and we can't help you anyway. I contacted HBO and they told me they don't discuss their piracy measures with journalists. So at this point, I was just super frustrated. Like, I tried and tried and I could not find a person who is willing to hear Caden's case. So then what?

So finally, I find this website that is called the Center for Copyright Information. And what's that? It is a website that is run by both the entertainment industry and the ISPs. They're working together. And the deal is, if you feel like that. that you have wrongly received a DMCA notice, you can go to this website, pay $35, and you can appeal it. And if you're successful, they'll let the ISP know they were wrong, they'll retract it, and you shouldn't have any strikes on your account. You found internet court. Yeah, I found

internet court. So are you taking the case to internet court? I sent them an email and said, hey, this person, Caden was wrongfully accused. And what did they say? They didn't say anything. They never got back to me. Got it. So basically what I found, was like a completely unaccountable system that was frustratingly opaque. It was maddening. So, I decided to try something else. After the break, I take justice into my own hands.

Welcome back to the show. Before the break, Caden had been accused of pirating an episode of girls, and they were worried that their internet was going to get shut off. And I was just trying to find the right person to tell that this was all a big mistake. I tried their ISP, Comcast. I tried Vobel, the company that built the software that caught them. I tried HBO,

the owner of the show that they allegedly downloaded, and I tried an internet copyright court that I'd never heard of before. And no one could help. In fact, pretty much everyone who did get back to me told me the same thing. This is probably Caden's fault. You should check their home network, check their router. So I got an expert to help me do that. Nate. Alex? Yes, you sound amazing. This is Nate Prodromo. Nate works for a company that's called AwesomeJar in San Francisco, and they specialize in doing security for, like, hedge funds and venture capital firms.

So just to outline what the issue is, I caught him up on what was going on in this case. And I wanted to know if he could, like, check out Cadence router if there was any way to see if someone had broken into it and downloaded an episode of girls. And he told me that actually there is a way that someone could be using Caden's internet without being anywhere near Caden's house.

Okay. So have you ever been in like a train station and seen an Xfinity Wi-Fi wireless access point? Yeah, but then it doesn't work. Right. But Nate said that if you have a username and password that is provided to you by Comcast, you can log into those and use Internet. It's actually that they reuse all the cable modems at everybody's houses that they provide service and they give out Wi-Fi access as part of the service.

But either way... So does my cable modem, I have Xfinity? Does my cable modem have like a guest access that people are just piggybacking on my wireless? Oh, yeah. If you go and... I am so mad right now. Go home and look for available wireless networks

and you'll see a network called Xfinity Wi-Fi. So Nate told me, when I get a Comcast modem and I install it in my house, I can set up a wireless access point for myself, But in addition to that, by default, my modem also broadcasts a public wireless network completely separate from mine that anyone with a Comcast account can connect to. Really? Yeah. It's not like they can connect to my network, but they get a little bit of the bandwidth that my modem gives off.

That is scandalous. And not only that, apparently some people in California sued Comcast because they were like, the electricity that powers my modem, some of it's used to your benefit. I don't want you to use that, which is incredibly petty, but so awesome. So that's why you see those Wi-Fi access points in airports and train stations. It just gives Comcast users, like Kaden, the chance to use the internet when they're not at home. Yeah, but that doesn't explain the whole girl thing because it's not like Kaden was going to airports and train stations and, like, putting their Wi-Fi username and password up. and inviting people to download girls

and then forgetting that they'd done it. Yeah, but then Nate raised an idea to me that kind of blew the whole thing open. It blew the whole thing open? Hmm. I just want to know what the think open is. That's actually how my dad and my grandparents talk.

It doesn't mean that's right. Are you done? Think open. If you cut it out for a second, I could actually tell you the solution to all this, which is that Nate told me there's a chance that Caden has what's called a sub-account.

What's a sub-account? A sub-account would just be like a second username and password, like you might make one for your roommate or for a friend or someone, and that person could also use it when they're not at home. Every time they get on somewhere,

they're going to get an IP address that's associated with Caden's account. So every time that person finds a modem that offers this access to Xfinity, and they log in. They are then given an IP address that is associated, with Caden's account.

Yeah, and it would make sense that if that IP address were sharing files, you know, doing something wrong from DMCA's standpoint, that Caden would get the notification about that account. So if Caden had even had a roommate like eight months before and the roommate had been like, oh, I'm going to, can you set this up for me? I'm always at Grand Central Station and I want to use the Comcast thing. They could be going around the world and illegally downloading, girls 24 times a month from all these other locations, it wouldn't have to be at the house.

Right. Got it. So, Kaden called a friend that they know who works at Comcast, who connected them with an engineer at Comcast. And that engineer was like, yeah, you have a sub-account. And so, uh, Kaden was like, okay, great. Whose sub-account is this? And who left that whole thing open?

Oh, God. Sorry, that's how my grandfather says it. Wait, so could they look at Cadence thing and be like the sub-account was created? The sub-account belonged to Caden's ex-r roommate. Dun-dun-dun. That ex-roomate's name is Elle. Hello? Hi, is this Elle?

Yes, it is. Hey, this is Alex Goldman. How you doing? Hey, I'm good. How are you? Elle lives in Berkeley now. She is studying to become a midwife. And the first thing I asked her was just like, are you at all familiar with

this girl's episode? The episode in question, it's called Old Loves. And in this episode, Hannah and Fran get into a fight because Hannah, she's not rigorous enough about the way she grades papers. Desi and Marnie get into a fight because Marnie says she needs some space and then Desi builds a wall in the apartment and Marnie gets resentful. And then Jessa and Adam have sex. Does this episode ring a bell to you? The only part that rings a bell is the part of building the separation in the room. I do remember that.

So it's not something that you watch 24 times? Oh, no. There's not a single episode that I watched more than once. I can assure you of that. Elle told me that she is not computer savvy, that she doesn't know how to use BitTorrent, has never used BitTorrent. And I asked her, like,

do you remember anything weird about the internet when you were living with Kaden? Anything at all? And she said no. But then she was like, okay, maybe this is information you could use. A couple years ago, I was seeing this guy. It was like not serious at all. We would mostly just like hang out in my bed and watch movies. And at one point, something we wanted to watch, we couldn't find it through any legal means.

and he ended up downloading, like, I think it was called U-Torrent or something like that. Like, I know very little about the Internet. She said he downloaded this program that was called U-Torrent. Which is just another Torrent client. Right. And downloaded the show. She told me she didn't think it was a girl's episode, but she'd look into it. And the next day, she reported back to me.

As soon as I got home, I went on my laptop, and I just searched girls. and I found a file for girls using five, episode four. And it was like, hmm, interesting. So Elle was in no way being malicious. She did not mean to cause Caden to get these notices. But when she moved into her new apartment, she was trying to connect to the internet and saw someone's Xfinity Wi-Fi wireless.

and she already had the sub-account username and password that she got when she was leaving with Kaden, so she just used those to get on the Internet. Okay, but then why did she download that episode of Girls 24 times? I have a theory about that. Okay. So the DMCA notices weren't just for downloading girls that one time. I think Elle was inadvertently uploading girls. Oh.

She was accidentally opening U-Torrent. And every time she opens it, the Torrent program is like, hey, I'm going to share this with whomever. Well, because the way Torrance work is, like, you don't have the option of just downloading files. You have to, I mean, maybe there's a workaround, but it's setups that you're always uploading stuff unless you turn it off. I imagine that it was probably somehow set to start on startup. Right.

That also explained why she's getting in trouble now, because if you think about it, like two years ago when she first started uploading this episode, there were probably tons of other people uploading it. But in the past two years, there's fewer people that are still sharing an old episode of girls. So she's like possibly one of the last uploaders, which makes her a big target. That's possible. But I mean, you just got busted for a relatively recent show that's also on HBO. Maybe their detection just got better. Right. But in any case, now that she's no longer uploading it, Kaden should be out of hot water. Right. So I called Kaden and told them what I'd

learned. So L, to her credit, has deleted U.Torrent, has deleted the episode from her computer. You should never experience this problem again. Brilliant. Well, I'm glad we figured this out, and I'm satisfied by our discovery here. This is not how I wanted this to end. Like, I do not like the idea that Vobel and Comcast and HBO, like, they were all right. Like, it's like when you try to contest a speeding ticket and then they show you the picture of you, like, speeding through the camera. Sorry, bud, but the enforcers in this situation seem to be on point.

The system's working. You're so mad about the system working. Well, yeah, I just like, it felt like you could get away with stuff a few years ago, and now it's like you can't even jaywalk. I mean, if you don't want your internet to get disconnected, you could just not pirate. Do you pirate? Um, do I pirate? Yes.

The answer's not no, it's yes. The answer is no, but I benefit from other people's piracy. Do you watch pirated material? Oh, yeah. Then you pirate. Um, someone else does the pirating. I just watched the stuff off his computer. Yeah, you pirate.

Cool. I really didn't expect to be able to figure that one out. Man, you blew the whole thing open. You are truly insufferable. Reply All is hosted by PJ Vote, and me, Alex Goldman. Our show's produced by Shruthy Pinnameney, Fia Benin, Damiano Marquetti, and Caitlin Roberts. More production help this week from Krista Ripple and Elizabeth Kules. Our editors are Tim Howard and Sarah Saracen.

Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our intern is Devin Gwyn. We were mixed by Rick Kwan, and our theme song is by The Mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Additional music this week from Bobby Lord. The ending Super TechSport theme is Simplicity by Macleform. Special thanks this week to Javier Nunez Pes Pesnes, James Grimmelman, and John McCarran. Matt Lieber is that week where it finally gets warm enough that the last of the snow melts. You can visit our website at replyall.limo, and you can find more episodes of the show on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen.

Thanks for listening. We'll see you in a couple weeks. Dang time. It didn't work. We're never getting that box to crack open. Oh, what's in the box? What's in the box? I never saw that movie. What, I have to watch the first six to understand it? Oh. Ew. Hey, look, I found some beats up in that tree, though.

Who's this one? Yeah, we'll bring them back to those nice podcasters. If we can even get back. What about inside the piano? Have you found anything else weird? Whoa, check it out. The strings on the bottom octave pull out a couple of feet. They're actually acoustic bass strings. I guess we really never use those notes.

Hey, you play bass. Shall we? Now that was good. More things on the piano we missed.