They will skip the notice via proxy (your ISP passing a notice to you without identifying you to the claimant) and go straight to court to have the ISP forced to provide the ID of the subscriber for a specific IP observed to be active torrenting copyrighted materials.
Then they’ll attempt to recover those court costs from that subscriber as well as sue them for the original copyright infringement.
I think they’ll have quite an uphill battle with that approach, particularly when trying to prove the subscriber to an internet connection is also responsible for, let alone aware of, the alleged infringement. If it was that easy, they wouldn’t have bothered with notices to begin with.
Yeah this happened during the Napster era and it was so incredibly unpopular and unsympathetic with the general public that it didn’t continue after a while. Suing a single mom on food stamps for thousands of dollars because her teenage son downloaded a game one time is a truly abominable look for a company.
Even if they do make it to court; how do they plan on translating an IP address into the ID of the actual infringer? (not the ISP subscriber, they can’t be assumed to be the same, particularly in court)
Just because I pay for my families internet connection doesn’t make me responsible, culpable, or even aware of their activities. Even less so now that I’m not going to receive any notice of potentially illicit activity.
If they could haul people into court based on just an IP and get somewhere useful, they’d have done it hundreds of thousands of times over already.
I’m probably not the best person to ask because we have limited options for speed in Hawaii with how we get our internet. I think the only company with an access point in this state is Private Internet Access, and I use a different one that others probably wouldn’t recommend because it doesn’t have an unblemished history, but I’ve been hoovering up everything for 8+ years with them and haven’t gotten a notice yet.
But, when my current subscription is almost up, I’m probably going to try Mullvad because I’ve read nothing but unanimous good feedback about them. I think ProtonVPN is another popular one.
Aside from that, I’m pretty sure if you search lemmy for VPN in the title, a few threads will come back full of recommendations from everyone.
There’s also this comparison sheet someone on Reddit made and was last updated in October:
come on now be nice. warner brothers entire business is hurting when you download that tv season instead of paying for it they might have to shelf another finished movie and claim the multi million dollar tax break again. /s
I suspect this is not going to go well when they find poor people who torrent for the community and try to squeeze them for blood in the courts, or find that an academic server is used to seed in it’s idle time.
This figured into the cruel, heartless reputations of the MPA and RIAA that persist to this day.
They’ve turned away from suing pirates directly for alleged costs, because telling a little girl she owes you thousands for downloading a song is really not a good look.
So they’ve been trying to convince the ISPs to deny service to people, but the ISPs don’t want to piss off their own customers (any more than they already do with hidden fees and crappy service).
It shouldn’t be. I’m noticing that some songs just don’t exist anymore on streaming services. Don Henley’s Boys of Summer for instance, and Play With Me by Thompson Twins (the Cool World version)
Once again, it’s up to pirates to make sure that all versions of songs are archived.
Yeah, it says that they’re all “well we would have rather do it the other way for your sakes” but the fact is that if they thought they could reliably obtain money this way they’d be doing it already. A ton of legal fees are going to be wasted pursuing people they can’t catch for one reason or another, meaning that their desire to make the pirates pay their costs isn’t going to work as reliably as they’d want.
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