To get in trouble for piracy, you need to:

A) live in a country where surveillance is huge (America, UK). This simply wouldn't happen in a 3rd world country.

B) Own the actual content-distributing site (piratebay, etc). That's who litigators / law enforcement go after the most.

C) If you don't own the site, you need to download ungodly amounts of content illegally. I'm talking 1000s of Gigabytes worth of content every month.

D) Actually be worth the cost of a legal trial, meaning you have to respond to the email/notice, have the money to pay them, and be downloading so much they're somehow losing money.

If you don't tick 100% of these boxes you will almost never be caught. Piracy isn't a big deal on an individual basis because people who do it were never going to buy the content even if they got forced to. If anything, they're doing your product a favour by checking it out and probably buying it in the future. Or it's a warning sign that you need to get your shit off of HBO and onto a more accessible platform. So nah, this lawsuit will change nothing. All it does is take away point C of the above list.

Now, can you be kicked off the internet for this new law? I don't know the ins and outs but the reason i see that not happening is because ISPs would lose a huge amount of customers and would lobby against that hard, among reasons stated in the article. Anyway don't panic, the internet is still a wild west and nothing is going to change that anytime soon.

I liked the pragmatic response in NZ to robo lawsuits. Requesting an ISP lookup of someone’s details cost $20 (some years ago, not sure of current price).

In practice although rights holders might claim that damages were $lots, except in the most egregious cases no-one found it worth $20/user to initiate “legal action”.

That's interesting, thank you. If i torrent 1 movie from netflix, that's only worth about $12 (or whatever monthly subscription). Ignoring all other factors that would make it not worth it to litigate (not a legal court case but just send a letter to an ISP), this is still not worth $20.

I just looked it up as my memory of the process was from an ISP friend over beers several years ago.

It seems the enforcement fee is currently $200 from the rightsholder: https://www.justice.govt.nz/tribunals/copyright/forms-and-fe...

Damages are capped at $15k and awarded by the tribunal as per: https://www.iponz.govt.nz/about-ip/copyright/file-sharing-in...

>B) Own the actual content-distributing site (piratebay, etc). That's who litigators / law enforcement go after the most.

> C) If you don't own the site, you need to download ungodly amounts of content illegally. I'm talking 1000s of Gigabytes worth of content every month.

I suppose that depends on the current legal environment. Brenda made a pretty good living for a while. All it took was downloading one movie.

If this makes it easier for shady law firms to apply leverage, like Brenda, I could see this practice coming back.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law

Nonsense, if someone on your IP is in a single bittorrent swarm for some content these firms are tracking that's enough for them to complain to your ISP and demand your details.

TFA is warning that what they're pushing for now is for ISPs to be required to deny service to people based on these complaints. No trial involved.

And I'm saying ISPs would never let that happen. The amount of people who torrent is absurd, and the amount of people who are using the same net as someone who torrents is even greater. For this to be the least bit effective, they would have to dismantle VPNs, dynamic IP addresses, and somehow find a way to target specific people when they're using public internet. It's unpractical and salty record companies are picking their battles incorrectly. But they will be forced to learn this soon.

Just for clarity, I only mentioned the trial part of things because that's how it currently works. Sorry for confusion.

> The amount of people who torrent is absurd, and the amount of people who are using the same net as someone who torrents is even greater. For this to be the least bit effective, they would have to dismantle VPNs, dynamic IP addresses, and somehow find a way to target specific people when they're using public internet.

> But they will be forced to learn this soon.

The real issue is in fact with people: in order to "fix" the way people want to communicate and exchange data and informations, you really need to switch from a blacklist approach to a whitelist approach, effectively banning everything that's not pre-approved.

That's the technical lesson record companies are going to learn. And an escalation of this kind is extremely dangerous. Because with time this may lead to self-censorship, people turning each other in to the authorities, scenes associated with China, East Germany or the Soviet Union. Models I'd not be proud of.

I think you're vastly overestimating how many people use a VPN. Dynamic IP is zero problem, your ISP knows who's on what IP at what time (logs of this kept for x months required by law in many countries).

This case is for movies rather than music but ISPs are already ending up having to go to supreme court to fight , I hope more ISPs are prepared to do so https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180508/06040539799/danis...

> And I'm saying ISPs would never let that happen.

I think you underestimate how tightly knit telecom and digital media corporations are.

In the US, we are talking about less than a dozen companies controlling the majority of both markets.

Two of the biggest ISPs are Comcast and AT&T. Comcast owns NBCUniversal, and AT&T owns HBO, CNN, and many others.

Neither of those corporations will be against this sort of action. They will be for it.

Not true at all. I know many people hit with huge payment demands ($2000+) in non-Five Eyes countries just for torrenting a single movie without a VPN. Obviously you won't get into big trouble unless you're involved in distribution, but it's not like it's nothing.

>ungodly amounts of content...1000s of Gigabytes

You mean a Terabyte? Either you're still on dial-up and that number actually seems big to you or you're either purposefully making it sound bigger than it reall is.

This already exist since years in france: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law

In practice less than 20 peoples have been disconnected because of this law in 9 years

"So far, the music industry has yet to challenge bigger players with deeper pockets like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon, though these giants are likely watching the case with great interest for liability reasons."

In a better world those larger ISPs would pony up, band together and help out the little guys, in their own enlightened self-interest, a la Newegg.

But they probably see it in their thuggish self-interest to let the little guys be sued out of existence, and take over those customers. And then they may start fighting this.

I don't see why this method in particular would be a problem with regards to achieving the goal. Enforcing copyright laws through traditional lawsuits and criminal law enforcement has been, by and large, a failure. We do need a change in the enforcement methods, as it's very clear the laws will not be adjusted to match the reality of rampant piracy.

In the end, changing the method of enforcement it's just another method to make law and reality match up (as opposed to changing the laws to reflect reality).

What? Rightsholders aren't going to respond to reality, so in order to let them continue to ignore it we should ramp up enforcement methods, further isolating rightsholders from being forced to deal with it?

How does this make any sense?

There's no realistic way to combat the heavy lobbying that's going on around intellectual property questions, copyright in particular. Thus, to make reality and laws match, enforcement must be adjusted instead.

I'm not sure I see the reason reality and laws must be made to match. I don't see that as something that is inherently all that valuable (if at all), and certainly not to the degree that it's worth doing whatever is easiest regardless of costs to make it happen.

You say you "don't see the problem" because you see no way to fix things. The problem does not cease to be a problem because of that.

I've made a clarifying edit. Maybe this helps capture what I'm trying to say.

Then it is not we who need a change in the enforcement methods. We still need a change in copyright laws.