2.6M Piracy Reports Against French Users Resulted in 234 Financial Penalties | Hacker News Reader

2.6M Piracy Reports Against French Users Resulted in 234 Financial Penalties

torrentfreak.com

78 pointsisaacfrond41 comments

Curious how many in Germany since there if you torrent a MP3/movie you get a letter from some Munich law firm who bought your logs from your ISP, acting on behalf of movie studios and record labels, asking you to pay them a fine(cough protection racket cough) otherwise they threaten to take you to court on behalf of the IP owners to fully extort you.

why would they buy logs from your ISP when they can see your IP address when you're seeding? they just have someone watching the seeders lists and pick out german IPs (or maybe it's even automatic!) and then they ask the ISP who owns the IP

Buying internet logs might also be highly illegal in the EU, but IANAL

>> why would they buy logs from your ISP when they can see your IP address when you're seeding?

Because an IP address is not a mailing address. And they don't buy your internet activity logs. They buy the ISP's log of which IP was associated with which account.

It's the other way around: they track peers and then submit a request for the data from your ISP based on the IP

Entrapment

No that’s not entrapment.

If it was the police uploading a new torrent and getting people to download it, it might be.

If it’s a private firm that joins the swarm and observes who is seeding, it’s different. They don’t even need to seed anything. Nor download anything. But even if they did it might be ok.

IANAL, TINLA.

I seem to remember there was a company uploading their own films to torrent sites just so that they could sue the people who downloaded them and that the courts weren't impressed with that scheme. I wouldn't be surprised if some companies were still doing that while being a little more careful about hiding that fact.

Not really, it's more like undercover policing. They join the swarm, observe who's doing what, and then send letters to their ISP.

You can either join private trackers where they're not allowed to hang out, use a VPN to make you "untraceable" (as far as these petty tyrants are concerned), or both.

IANAL and not easy to generalize, but it seems they do not like to cooperate. They have an IP and tell you they act on that info, but that info is not necessarily enough i.e. you're not the only user of that network. You can probably flip a coin what the court's opinion is on that, but I would not sign their documents anyway. And they do not necessarily go to court.

Well, they probably have an Unterlassungsanspruch if the file was shared from your network, so not signing the letter can make it worse. But my experience with Waldorf Frommer is from like 10 years ago, so best practices might have changed.

Back then, for those interested: the monitor file sharing networks, download a tiny bit of data from you (uploading is the expensive part in Germany) to prove you upload, go to a judge who will force you ISP to give them the contact, send you an Abmahnung, requesting an Unterlassungserklärung and cash (500 damages, 500 lawyer cost). We just sent a modified "we are not doing damages" letter and ignored any future communication from them. There was more to scare us, but they did not follow through with a lawsuit. Oh and ofc I made sure that no further upload could be detected. Yes there were rulings back then holding the connection-owner legally responsible

>Oh and ofc I made sure that no further upload could be detected.

Can I ask how you did that?

VPN and seedboxes are two options. Basically, use some 3rd party as the interface and hope they don't keep logs.

VPN probably.

watching the german law subreddit, they have started taking people to court now, as too many have caught on to the scheme. In court, like you said, the odds really are as good as tossing a coin.

do you have links to that, even if it is in german ? Would like to know more

How can you buy logs from your ISP? Isn't this private info?

German privacy works only when it can make your life difficult. Predators, trolls, and oligopolies have full access to personal data of all German residents.

Citation needed!

How does Schufa know everything about you?

I don't know, ask Schufa!

>> For the whole of 2023, a total of 3,844 subscribers were labeled 'grossly negligent' after receiving a third warning while 1,526 cases were sent to the public prosecutor. A relatively small number, just 234, received a financial penalty.

Forgive me for siding with the like of the IRAA/MPAA, but I agree that these people are grossly negligent. If you get two complaints, invest a few euros into VPN. Or switch to a different means of getting what you want, something other than torrents.

I remember the bad old days when they started to go after torrents. It was a great time. Those attacks forced filesharing to evolve. Torrents became encrypted. VPNs moved out of the shadows. Some would even say that Bitcoin really took off as people sought out a means to bypass limitations placed on credit card transactions. A dozen different censorship/blocking laws came and went (COICA, PROTECY IP). Remember internet blackout day? Or the Free Speech Flag? People were angry and demanded changes to protect their privacy. But in recent years the fight has stopped. Rightsholders have all but given up trying, and filesharing tech has stagnated. TPB remains online, as stable as ever. I cannot help but imagine what new tech we would have had the fighting continued.

Years and years ago, I got a warning because I downloaded some new series or other there was a lot of hoopla about.

It wasn't something I did regularly but it was definitely a wakeup call that if I was ever going to do something along those lines, I needed at least some minimum level of protections in place. Not 100% reliable I'm sure but almost certainly enough to protect against random torrent tracking.

perhaps we should start criminalising more things for the sake of tech innovation

Filesharing (for media anyway) has largely moved from torrents and direct downloads to streaming since it's easier to charge people money for accounts and/or push difficult to block ads at people that way. I'm not a big fan of filesharing for profit, but greed infects everything.

Whatever the next innovation in filesharing is, it'll probably involve money

Do we have an idea of how hard they're working to ID people? Did the people accused of pirating media do anything to hide themselves? Would a VPN have been enough to make it too difficult or annoying to track them down?

Edit, from TFA: "“This decrease results from a plurality of factors, such as the positive impact of the graduated response procedure, the transformation of practices regarding the consumption of cultural works on the internet, the acceleration of the dissemination of legal offers during the year, or even increasing use of workaround solutions (VPNs) by Internet users,” the regulator explains."

I have this feeling that they go after seeders that go above a certain threshold.

Looking into 2.6M individuals, determining that the offense is real, figure out the possible loss to the copyright holder, identifying the user, send all this paperwork to all the public prosecutors around the country and have them prosecute people for $100-$200 loss to some company doesn't seem feasible.

In Germany they also go after small fish. The process is highly automated, so there is very little cost to the copyright holder.

I would guess that if you can get payouts from some small chunk of users, you can then use those funds to 'reinvest' in tracking down and catching more.

As soon as the process is sufficiently automated to be margin positive, you might as well scale it up to the whole population.

I think it has to do with the fact the ISPs are responding to requests automatically and don't fight for user privacy.

what IP you get when you have starlink?

In The Netherlands they have a different tactic: they send letters to all registered companies demanding payment for "illegally" playing music.

It's a scam, they have no evidence they're simply buying the names of companies from data-brokers then trying to see which low-end admin staff fall for it.

That's how Stichting BREIN roll.

I wonder if they ever hit a company with a decent in house council / budget that decided to give them a hefty dose of FAFO (fuck around and find out).

...and that would be what? Public shaming and lawyer license permanently revoked? Or something violent and discreet?

ARCOM seems like an outlier to me. Independent Public Authority are typically commissioned to secure the welfare of all French citizens by overseeing French corporations (ex:AMF for markets). Arcom is the reverse of this.

Maistre was chosen to lead the ex-CSA, now ARCOM because he would absolutely accept to take CNIL's job of website blocking and pursuing 'pirates'. CNIL was too independent, refused too much to block specific websites, refused yo go further than sending a strongly worded letter to 'pirate'.

Once Maistre accepted the job, the number of letter exploded, as well as the number of case (basically only huge, huge seeders were pursued by the CNIL, so like 5 people over a bit less than 10 years). Not surprising, he worked for the 'ministère de la culture', closely with Universal and friends.

I'm guessing this is all public tracker use, which is pretty low-hanging fruit.

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