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Yes, it is absolutely correct. It happens so frequently that I actually know several friends of mine who had to pay for downloading a video or a music album. (a
by DominikR 10y ago
Yes, it is absolutely correct. It happens so frequently that I actually know several friends of mine who had to pay for downloading a video or a music album. (about $800 to $1000 - but there are limits now on how much you can be charged for an illegal download - I believe it is 150€ or something like that)
It's bad but on the other hand I also do understand copyright holders who see their product being used for free without receiving payment in return.
It's a grey area in most countries because so many people (me including) do this that laws become basically unenforceable. It's not surprising that Germany is one of those countries where this can be enforced.
One thing that these lawyers like to do is to target people downloading porn, because very few of them are going to fight back on that risking that it gets publicly known what kind of porn they are into.
- markdown 10y agoHow do they discover that your friends downloaded a particular file?
- DominikR 10y agoThey themselves seed an already existing torrent and then just log the IP's that connect to download. With these logs they approach the ISP's to give them names and addresses which the ISP's are forced to do. So it's easy to see how they automated the whole process, which is a precondition if you want to go after hundreds of thousands of file sharers.
- markdown 10y agoShared IP's would present a challenge though, right?
- atmosx 10y agoI don't think so. Usually you'll go after the owner, then the owner must prove that wasn't his deed. I am not sure what happens with universities and large organizations.
- tormeh 10y agoThey have enterprise networks where everyone has their own login.
- DominikR 10y agoI don't think so, it is surely within ISP's capabilities to log who had which dynamic IP at what time, and it is known that the government wants this data to be stored and available for it's own use. I've seen an article here linked yesterday where the EU will make it mandatory for WiFi networks to use password authentication. So when you say how about people that have dynamic IP's or how about people that only access public WiFi networks the government will always find a solution by passing a law that restricts access to those who have authenticated (and therefore made themselves trackable in some way) These restrictions are never implemented for your own safety but instead they claim it is for the safety of the businesses providing these services. How is it for the safety of these businesses? It's because the government implements a framework which makes ISP's and public WiFi network providers liable for damages caused by their users. So the government has a problem in its never ending quest for more power caused by people doing stuff they don't want them to do (and frankly, in the case of the Internet it is by nature very often exchange of some kind of information or knowledge) so they create liability issues for businesses that enable their users to do these things.
- jk4930 10y agoIt's in P2P networks (e.g. BitTorrent), where people share content. While you download, you offer what you already have downloaded and that's associated with your IP. And that's their attack vector: you're distributing copyrighted content without a license. After that file hosters (e.g. Rapidshare) became popular, where only one person is uploading and the downloaders are hard to identify and even harder to sue.