The companies scraping and tracking, including your ISP... There is no real use for the data right now (apart from a few countries with anti-download laws). In the not-so-far-away future I think this will change... Then they've got your (ip)number.
Jut saying: If torrents are your thing, you might want to invest in some VPN... http://torrentfreak.com/torrentprivacy-fast-and-anonymous-bi... (Now would MPAA executives link to that?)
Now you get a nice offer from some men in fancy suits who represent some company that has some link to the MPAA/RIAA/whoever. They offer to help subsidise your server costs and in return they get access to your log files. Now maybe this country does not have such privacy laws as other places, so you aren't compelled to tell your customers about this change.
The new subsidies however do allow you to lower your prices to a level where you start getting a huge chunk of the business.
Since we're talking about torrents, (almost) every downloader is also an uploader, so there's plenty of recorded evidence of copyright infringement, and the RIAA has already sent thousands of threatening letters. But it's still a drop in a bucket compared to the dozens of millions of file sharers in the US alone.
This isn't exactly simple stuff - there are lots of legal questions that have yet to be answered.
> Is a few pieces of a copyrighted file still copyrighted? How many chunks do you need to have before you are actually infringing anything?
Probably yes, by connecting to that particular swarm that is sharing "Piratesofthecarribean12.avi" you are showing intent to download that file. The onus would most likely be on you to persuade the court that you had some other reason for connecting.
What possible reason could you have for downloading a few kb of a 1GB file other than to get the whole thing?
Remember this is civil law , not criminal law so the burden of proof on the people suing you is somewhat lower.
> What if it's encrypted?
That the transfer was encrypted doesn't really mean much, the way these people would catch you is to join the swarm themselves and send pieces of the file to others. So essentially they are the ones doing the encrypting so will know what the data was before encryption.
> How do you prove what a torrent says in its title is actually what it contains?
I assume they will just connect to the swarm, download the file themselves to verify it's contents and then serve pieces of that out to others. So they will know exactly what is being transmitted.
> How do you prove that a download was willful?
Again, I imagine the onus would be on your to suggest another reason such as someone broke into your wifi etc. Whether you have absolute responsibility for what happens on your internet connection appears to be a grey area however.
> What if individual files in an overall torrent are non infringing?
I don't imagine it would matter, they would be more concerned with the parts that were infringing.
Of course the data is useful apart from hunting down unlicensed usage, for one thing it's an interesting way to measure a given product's popularity.
At the same time, privacy laws may requireISPs to delete the data; I don't think German ISPs are currently permitted to keep the logs longer than necessary for billing, and, if a minimum retention time is passed again, they probably won't be allowed to keep them after the time has passed.
The annoying thing is that its not the studio company that is suing you its the IT company that is scraping your IP address. They then according to my lawyer do a geo-location lookup and based on your location determine if your worthwhile suing.
If your in affluent area your a target because they are confident you will settle. They reason people settle is that its almost impossible to fight the case with out revealing your identity. And I will tell you do not want to do that because they then resell that information because most of these IT scraping companies are offshore.
I heard from one lawyer when its all said in done they have done the risk analysis (counter-suing, cases dropped, etc) and they on predict on average making about $50 or more a case.
Could you clarify more? An offshore IT company that does not own any copyright is suing bittorrenters? On what basis exactly? And they're scraping IPs and are allowed to bring that up in court?