What a garbage take. A tiny percentage of towns are college towns and even then many won’t have law programs. I lived in a college town for 12 years and didn’t meet lawyers in training
I think Hetzner wants you to tell them you’ve removed it. They did as requested and took down the VPS and disabled it. It’s now in your hands.
I myself wouldn’t ignore such a letter. It’s now just asking you politely. If you continue they need to make the choice if it’s worth pursuing you. I don’t have any good insight if and under what circumstances they do. I would comply, remove said content and probably not reply to them. It’s unlikely to make it better for you if you talk to people targeting you. And I wouldn’t keep the logs around as they requested. Accidents happen, files get deleted, nobody is perfect.
Yeah. Hetzner is the hosting company. They are the owner of the IP range and thus get the letters. They forward it to their customers, in this case OP. And the letter seems to be from one of those shady companies that scan the torrent swarms for Intellectual Property of their customers and then write letters to the abuse contacts of the IP addresses of the offenders. I don’t know where OP lives, but Hetzner is big in Germany, so it’s probably german law we’re talking about. And we’re not very liberal with copyright infringement, should that escalate to that point.
That’s just how legalese is written. It’s like variables in programming they tell you what the thing is and then they tell you what they’re going to call it for the rest of the document.
I guess it originally saved them hand writing “B&H Film, Video and Television Media Production LLC” every time. Of course these days you could just do a fine and a replace, so I’m not sure why they don’t, but it’s just become standard lawyer at this point.
You quietly comply. Then take tougher security measures to protect yourself before continuing. Do not respond under any circumstances. If you’re served with actual legal papers, retain an attorney.
Any lawyer would tell you to not reply. Replying shows you personally got and read their letter, which they could use in court against you potentially.
It may shock you to learn that countries exist outside of the US, and they have different laws. Notably, Germany (the place in question) has copyright enforcement with actual teeth.
If you still want to seed that exact torrent, at least wipe the trackers. They are 100% connected to the trackers in that torrent to pull IP addresses so they can do this shit.
Next time, use an IP filter list to pre-block these people.
Not yet, but their could be in the future. Best to ignore it and move on. Even if it is extremely unlikely to be prosecuted for this stuff, it has happened, so why risk it.
Say nothing. Stop sharing or seeding. But, above all, say nothing. You’re getting phished. Just comply and stop seeding the shit. Keep quiet. If you reply you’ll just have problems that cost money.
They did say don’t delete anything and my lack of legal knowledge prevents me from saying confidently to what extent they really can do that, but I strongly suspect that if push came to shove you couldn’t really get in to trouble for deleting things given you could well never have received the email or had some kind of a problem with the system causing you to lose data, however you can bet that your plausible deniability would be greatly constrained if you respond, therefore acknowledging that you have seen their request that you not delete things.
Your reading skills are horrible. The law firm needs to keep all records regarding their evidence in this matter. OP isn’t being compelled to keep anything.
Given that it’s Hetzner, there’s not much you can do besides telling them “oops sorry didn’t know this was illegal” and proceed using a VPN on your seedbox, go private tracker or just use a different hoster. Hetzner isn’t a big fan of torrenting since they have the (german) feds in their neck.
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