Bizarre ruling that’s for sure.

In my head, either they are liable and need to pay up (not in my opinion but that would make much more sense) or they are not and need to pay nothing.

This shit is weird. It’s like accusing someone of helping steal your smartphone and then wanting them buy a pack of Oreos to make it even.

I assume so. A lot of this is guesswork because obviously they won’t straight up tell us.

I should also note that that was in Germany, and unfortunately I can’t tell you which enemy fleet burnt down my sails but let’s say it was one of the big ones.

They appear as torrent peers I think and log when they get a connection to share parts of the file to their system. I assume then they look up the IP and they try to find out if they got an IP from a known VPN provider or a private one. And then they send out the papers.

Note: In the paper it only says that they have evidence that my PC shared parts of that file 3 times in quick succession and that’s it, the rest is my deduction / educated guess.

Side note: I have had a bad situation where the enemy fleet caught me, and I stopped doing torrents and started using DDL with a VPN. I have a hunch because some attorneys are laying out traps in torrents, DDL might be safer rn. I have read on a few sites that this might be the case, and I have been sailing a lot smoother since then as well.

So take that for what you will, and also if anybody can confirm if DDL with VPN is as safe as it’s been for me, please do, because I’m curious.

Yeah

Also genuinely thank you for making me look into this. It’s nice to know how it works:D

Ok you wound me up now so I had a little scouring of the internet.

Yes, I can not find case law of extradition of US based companies through US entities.

What I can find is a couple of cases against bigger companies that also act in the realm of the EU. Google has been fined in the Netherlands for global violations if I understand correctly. Meta has been fined even a few times for global violations, enforced in Ireland.

So yes, technically enforcement in the US is not guaranteed, but they basically can’t build up their company in the EU anymore unless they deal with it. It’s not perfect, but violations can still suck for business expansion, and that is good. and then I do have to look into the new EU data privacy laws if they changed enforcement or anything else important.

Well I can not give you a specific case for that, but it widely accepted that online actions against users from the EU that violate laws in the EU can get persued.

Do you remember seeing some US websites saying “we don’t service EU users at the moment”? That’s because they didn’t want to get a lawyer so they can comply with the EU GDPR back then. I assume this is because they knew there was some precedent.

If you are keen on it I can go digging for case law though.

EDIT: Nevermind I literally only had to do one Google search and here’s an official link: https://gdpr.eu/compliance-checklist-us-companies/

Note that one of the headings literally says “Why US companies must comply with the GDPR” and the answer is “because it is extra-territorial in scope”.

Ok yes sorry I should have specified, what you’re saying might apply to the US.

What I said applies to the EU.

Thing is, companies need to know beforehand if they are dealing with a user from US or EU because they don’t wanna break laws when they have to deal with the court system anyway on stuff like this. So technically they could transmit information about US citizens, but in practice this is super tricky and risky.

Let’s say you got an IP. Alright you can pinpoint The location. Problem: you don’t know whether you just grabbed the target IP or an IP from a VPN or a proxy. There’s ways to obscure this so you might not even be able to find out. Now if you turn this over, there’s a small risk you just did a crime because they are spoofing their location. And if you just captured a VPN or proxy, you are now pursuing the wrong person and in EU law this won’t go over well.

So in practice there’s basically no way to do this and be sure you didn’t make a mistake, and mistakes in law are risky and costly. No company would ever take such a risk.

Now I could go into detail about all the technical details on why things work like that but it would make this twice as long.

TL;DR in theory you are right for US users, in practice there’s no way to tell and it gets risky pretty fast.

Also obligatory IANAL and always check in with a lawyer if you need specific legal advice.

Not unless you talk about how you will commit or have committed a specific instance of piracy. E.g. “I downloaded back to the future last night from (insert website)”. Then they have reasonable suspicion and can start to subpoena.

Obligatory IANAL. Always do research and ask in lawyer if you wanna talk specifics.

Well in theory you are right. And if you have evidence like in the case of the 2pac murder (he literally wrote about handing the gun over so they could kill him with it), then sure. But to get a subpoena, and let’s use me as an example, you would need to prove that I talked about specifics on how I would or will pirate a stream, and then you would need to find writing of me saying something to the effect of “I did this yesterday” or “I will do this next week” or something very specific like that.

And this is only to get the information. Then they still need to tie you to it and get enough evidence to start suing, otherwise they might not be able to prove their prima facia case.

I know it’s scary, but the truth is we have laws to protect us from government overreach and at the same time those keep companies in check as well. Let’s not make it more dramatic than it is.

Let’s also acknowledge that conspiracy is easy to say in theory and hard to prove in practice, specifically because you need to make sure you can inextricably link 2 defendant together and they are linked in the context of the same instance of a crime. And at that point no one would waste the resources for such a charge. They would rather chase the piracy websites to shut down a whole network for a bit, that’s more efficient. It’s easier to just serve the server providers a cease and desist and have be over with.

Obligatory IANAL.

they don’t care

Yes they do. They are boxed in neatly in the current laws and unless you are discussing specifics about doing a crime in the past or future, they will not get that subpoena and thus they are in a catch 22.

Now if you are actively torrenting, chances are you could run into one of those fake peers that will grab your IP and they can start suing you. But other than that they would need real good evidence to subpoena.

I could give you a full breakdown of how it works in EU, but basically there needs to be indisputable evidence that a crime occured for any party to subpoena any ISP or service provider company. Otherwise those companies will be in huge trouble. The one doing the subpoena because they wouldn’t have an order for that and if they fuck around right before suing, courts will not take kindly to that. And the other receiving the subpoena for disclosing personal information (although they’d maybe win a defense to that, because if they did their due diligence they are not supposed to tank the damages).

What I’m saying is, considering currently laws in the EU, I think we’re good. Of course IANAL so ask one if you need specific advice.

Literally illegal. Discussing crimes doesn’t equal crime, so there’s no reason for them to requeust IPs. And at least in the EU you aren’t even allowed to disclose information related to your person.

Ah that actually makes a lot of sense.

You don’t pay for the porn, you pay for the interaction, seeing a different side of a public person or for the feeling of knowing a secret.

Btw just to make sure, I am not being ironic here I actually never thought of it that way.

If ppl like it enough to pirate it, ppl will also like it enough to buy it. That’s the rule of thumb imo.

Tab groups have become so important…

Yeah I would love to know which ones…

This is literally the bottleneck of all of fediverse imo.

With ease of use integrated into the fediverse, half of social media could become irrelevant.

I saw a lot of software and in my stubbornness I thought “that’s awfully designed, I can do better than this.”