Reddit beats film industry again, won’t have to reveal pirates’ IP addresses
arstechnica.com
While we can be pretty confident that Reddit has its own motivations (i.e. self-interest) for fighting these lawsuits, this is still a good news story for pirates.
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Food for though: In the US judges have ruled on multiple occasions that an IP address doesn't actually prove what individual engaged in the act.
Might I direct you to the huge flaming catastrophe of bullshit known as "the police don't give a fuck lol". All they need to do is make it difficult, costly and time consuming to win and fuck you once you get hit with charges. And would you look at that, the US legal system specializes in all 3 of those! How convenient.
Police can arrest you, but they don't run the courts.
Ie you get brought in on bogus charges and if the only evidence is a number that isn't admissable as evidence you would likely see a mistrial.
Doesn’t matter, these are unpaid volunteers standing up instances. Most, if not all, have no desire to fight that battle on their own dime.
That’s why it does matter.
Even if they get the IP addrsss from an instance, they can’t use it for anything.
It doesn’t just stop there.
It kinda does if a judge has decided that an IP address does not identify who the offender was and thus is not enough evidence to bring a case against someone.
I feel like I don’t need to explain to folks around here that companies will lawyer up and basically use the legal system to harass and intimidate regardless if they have standing or not if they think you are small enough to be bullied into stopping a behavior. Which I assure you your average instance admin is.
The average person getting sued also can't afford an attorney
They sure as hell will find money for an attorney if they are being sued for 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars.
They'll need one but that doesn't mean they will be able to afford one. The point of these lawsuits is to intimidate, even if they don't win, if people see lives ruined because of the cost to defend, they'll be scared into not pirating. This is a fear campaign.
The sad reality is no matter how winnable your case is, companies can still bury you for years and consume every free moment of your life and then some. For many people, these court battles become their entire life for several years. It can cost them everything.
And yet they still want them, so there must be more to the story. I also don't understand why since I have dynamic IP address in EU, unless they can match the ownership to a person at any given time in the past its not useful info.
they can. your telco provider knows exactly which ip was assigned to whom at any given time