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Comment by dewey | Hacker News Reader

The business model of these lawyers is to join a few swarms of big popular titles, then send automated letters to the ISP, then send automated letters to the address they got from the ISP and collect money (At least here in Germany).

They are only going after the low hanging fruits, it's not about catching everyone or doing deals with VPN providers located in some hard to reach country.

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That’s an extremely definitive point of view. What if the lawyers agree to give the VPN provider 10% of the proceeds?

That VPN provider would likely be out of business extremely fast. If you offer a service that's supposed to increase privacy, and it doesn't... who's gonna pay for that service? Of course exceptions apply with law enforcement, but then again your threat model is very different there (and the VPN provider in question will not be able to say no).

That being said, there are VPN providers who guarantee that no logs are kept (I believe ProtonVPN does this) and are extremely privacy-oriented. I am inclined to believe these companies, if all I'm doing is pirating a few movies.

VPN\seedbox providers probably don’t make the wisest business choices. They may not care bout the longevity of their business even if they do.

Hosting providers that sell bandwidth to VPN services could easily log traffic.

There have been numerous cases where ‘No logs’ VPN providers have been caught logging details. See the recently exposed logstash breach.

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