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A comment on Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targets 23,000 Defendants. Parent comment

Re:Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targe... by pyre on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @11:37AM (#2532825)
The Usenet server is centralized though. They could sue the provider to get the names of everyone that downloaded a set of posts. This is made much easier by the fact that most popular Usenet servers are paid for nowadays (especially ones that carry alt.binaries.*).
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Re:Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targe... by modernerd on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @11:57AM (#2532922)
They would first have to pass laws to force Usenet providers to log their customers' viewing and download history.

Many Usenet providers make a 'will not track' promise to their customers. This is from Giganews' homepage, for example: "We will never sell your information to third parties or track what you download." http://www.giganews.com/

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Re:Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targe... by cma on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @05:48PM (#2534226)
Has anyone ever been prosecuted for downloading something? Every case I have seen is about uploading, otherwise you can't even safely browse youtube--someone might have used a copyrighted song in their cat fart video.
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Re:Biggest BitTorrent Downloading Case in U.S. History Targe... by jrockway on Tuesday May 10, 2011 @09:22PM (#2534743)
They could. The answer they'd get is, "it's too expensive to store everything people downloaded, and our paying customers don't want us storing that information anyway."

A law could be passed requiring Usenet providers in country X to log downloads, but then you could just use a server hosted in some other country.

Preventing people from copying information is like preventing water from being wet. You fail.

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