To get in trouble for piracy, you need to:<p>A) live in a country where surveillance is huge (America, UK). This simply wouldn't happen in a 3rd world country.<p>B) Own the actual content-distributing site (piratebay, etc). That's who litigators / law enforcement go after the most.<p>C) If you don't own the site, you need to download ungodly amounts of content illegally. I'm talking 1000s of Gigabytes worth of content every month.<p>D) Actually be worth the cost of a legal trial, meaning you have to respond to the email/notice, have the money to pay them, and be downloading so much they're somehow losing money.<p>If you don't tick 100% of these boxes you will almost never be caught. Piracy isn't a big deal on an individual basis because people who do it were never going to buy the content even if they got forced to. If anything, they're doing your product a favour by checking it out and probably buying it in the future. Or it's a warning sign that you need to get your shit off of HBO and onto a more accessible platform. So nah, this lawsuit will change nothing. All it does is take away point C of the above list.<p>Now, can you be kicked off the internet for this new law? I don't know the ins and outs but the reason i see that not happening is because ISPs would lose a huge amount of customers and would lobby against that hard, among reasons stated in the article. Anyway don't panic, the internet is still a wild west and nothing is going to change that anytime soon.
This already exist since years in france: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HADOPI_law</a><p>In practice less than 20 peoples have been disconnected because of this law in 9 years
"So far, the music industry has yet to challenge bigger players with deeper pockets like AT&T, Comcast or Verizon, though these giants are likely watching the case with great interest for liability reasons."<p>In a better world those larger ISPs would pony up, band together and help out the little guys, in their own enlightened self-interest, a la Newegg.<p>But they probably see it in their thuggish self-interest to let the little guys be sued out of existence, and take over those customers. And then they may start fighting this.
I don't see why this method in particular would be a problem with regards to achieving the goal. Enforcing copyright laws through traditional lawsuits and criminal law enforcement has been, by and large, a failure. We do need a change in the enforcement methods, as it's very clear the laws will not be adjusted to match the reality of rampant piracy.<p>In the end, changing the method of enforcement it's just another method to make law and reality match up (as opposed to changing the laws to reflect reality).