| kingofbubba said: Ok, so I'm with mai, how did they track the total count of downloads? If they are able to track the actual downloads--as opposed to search engine hits for "free/hacked [enter game name] download"--then shouldn't they then have enough information to shutdown sites or press lawsuits on sites or individual downloaders? |
Well, for one it's not so simple, but yes, they do have all that information. Actually doing things with that information is not so easy though. For one, they have to go through ISPs to get names to attach to the IP addresses that they surely have. If the ISPs are not compliant, there really aren't any direct laws that can be used to get the names from the ISPs. There are kind of 'rules' for ISPs to follow, but they really don't have to. Still, most ISPs just don't want to deal with it, so they pass the names along.
But now there's another issue, the name attached to an IP isn't necessarily the person who illegally downloaded the content. This was the claim in a recent case that a woman was claiming her children were downloading music, so they shouldn't be dealing with her.
However, lately there's a firm that has been pursuing downloads of specific movies, namely "The Hurt Locker" and "Far Cry" where the firm would say "Pay a fine of $1500, or go to court". They did this for something like 17,000 downloads of those 2 movies and a few others (with permission from the owners of the of works of course).
17,000 alone was completely unprecedented, that alone accounts for some 500% increase or so in copyright lawsuits (the $1500 fine is essentially a settlement, and there's some way that they bypass some stuff to make it go smoothly and quickly).
Now imagine this on the 1 million people scale, or 20 millions. It's just unfeasible. It would be doable with about 100 firms pursuing it, and maybe that's the direction the world will take towards piracy eventually, but it's just not possible right now. This is all not even to mention the moral and ethical complications behind everything, but I don't want to go there.
