| r505Matt said: 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. |
Thanks for the response. Good stuff.
Well, I don't have a clue about how many copyright lawsuits there have been in total, but what I initially said was due to a personal experience while in undergrad a few years back here in the USA. A record company had targeted our school for a copyright lawsuit sting of sorts. I do believe the school's ISP worked with the record label. (our dean contacted us all and said the school would comply with them) They sent out letters to students who had apparently infringed enough (I forget if there was a cutoff $ amount) threatening a lawsuit but offering a potential settlement. The letter included a code and the student would then log onto the website and type in the code to see the dollar amount and the amount that the company was willing to settle for. I saw a jpeg sample of a letter with blacked out info and at full res could make out the code under the blacking, so I plugged it in to see the numbers. If I remember correctly they were claiming a $6k damage from that particular individual and wanted a $3k settlement. I had heard [unverifiably] that they were doing this from college to college that had popped on on their radar.
To me, that seems like a plan that could work. It isn't profitable to target individuals who haven't done much. And it may be hard to target sites (particularly torrent sites). But if you nail a bunch of the worst offending college students all in one fell swoop while alerting the rest that this is going on and of the potential fallout of such actions, then you can have a form of behavior modification take place on at least a 4 year wide age group of consumers. It may not be the best financial decision for any company in the short term, but it seems like for all the recent buzz about piracy and some companies blaming their woes on it etc, that these companies would actually do something. It isn't free to track this sort of stuff, so if you aren't using this information then it's at least costing someone something.
