Yes they will write stern, spooky letters to the tone of "give us money or get sued". Then they take the money they get, and sue no one because they have no evidence.
Or, perhaps it would be more cost effective to spend your money developing a way to access content that isn’t user-hostile. Then, suddenly, piracy wouldn’t be on the rise.
This must be the reason every piracy community I know has strict rules about not requesting specific titles. Even if they had the IPs, I'm not sure what they could prosecute, especially considering the number of users who use a VPN.
Honestly, it’s not worth their time to come after the people pirating, but rather, the people enabling the piracy to take place. In other words, users have nothing to worry about, it’s the websites hosting the torrents, that need to worry.
Or the ISPs in this case. They want the information about the pirates to use them as witnesses to show that the ISP didn't terminate copyright infringing users, even when notified dozens of times and to show that the ISPs benefitted from these practices by retaining them as paying customers.
Obviously there are reasons the film studios want that but actually getting information because you suspect someone crimes a bit too hard online is really tough. Your evidence must be waterproof to get a subpoena and until then you can run into a plathera of different issues thanks to airtight GDPR rules that still apply to US companies as well (they updated them to be even more strict with their newer compliance laws last year).
Actually there's a good chance that sharing data or IPs without a subpoena could be not only devastating to any potential legal case, but also to Reddit. They will never do this because they stand to gain nothing from it as is and if they wanna go IPO they can't pull such shakes moves rn.
Obligatory IANAL, if you need legal advice, ask a lawyer because they need all your context and they will know the ins and outs of their field.
"In compliance with your request, we've looked through our posts and IP logs and have determined that all commenters discussing piracy were coming from the same subnet: 0.0.0.0/0"
It’s not completely inconceivable that ISPs using CG-NAT could keep logs that would allow these users to be deanonymized, but it’s an extra step and they might not have enough information between the Reddit and ISP logs to do it. But… they’d have to be talking to the ISPs anyway, and the ISPs will probably cooperate?
Or from a country where an IP address does not equal a person in the eyes of the law, and therefore you cannot be charged for copyright infringement based on IP address alone.
Technically true, but I don’t need them to know what i’m doing on the internet, especially in the age where content is sometimes throttled, thanks to poor laws
For the third time in less than a year, film studios with copyright infringement complaints against a cable Internet provider are trying to force Reddit to share information about users who have discussed piracy on the site.
In the first instance, US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler ruled in the US District Court for the Northern District of California that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech meant Reddit didn’t have to disclose the names, email addresses, and other account registration information for nine Reddit users.
Film companies, including Bodyguard Productions and Millennium Media, had subpoenaed Reddit in relation to a copyright infringement lawsuit against Astound Broadband-owned RCN about subscribers allegedly pirating 34 movie titles, including Hellboy (2019), Rambo V: Last Blood, and Tesla.
In her ruling, Beeler noted that while the First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, the film producers had already received the names of 118 Grande subscribers.
She also said the film producers had failed to prove that “the identifying information is directly or materially relevant or unavailable from another source.”
This week, as reported by TorrentFreak, film companies Voltage Holdings, which are part of the previous two subpoenas, and Screen Media Ventures, another film studio with litigation against RCN, filed a motion to compel [PDF] Reddit to respond to the subpoena in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
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