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Comment by Rinzler89 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

>> 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.

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.

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

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 probably.

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

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!

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