Saving you a click: This seems to be about a court ruling in the Netherlands, and the "something worse" is that pirates' personal details can be revealed if the BREIN anti-piracy group makes a valid legal claim.
> The plan was to monitor BitTorrent swarms, identify IP addresses sharing content most frequently or long-term, and then match them to local ISPs.<p>Wouldn't the most prolific seeders also be the ones most likely to have a VPN or a seedbox, making this pointless?<p>As far as I know, the entertainment industry almost entirely stopped going after individuals after their attempts in the early 00s ended up as a PR disaster as they mostly ended up suing clueless grandmothers and preteen girls[0]. Then Netflix came along and made piracy mostly irrelevant, as it was a lot easier for the average consumer to pay $10/month for Netflix than deal with torrenting.<p>Now that piracy is on the rise again due to the fracturing of streaming platforms, I wonder if we'll see these individually targeted lawsuits resurface.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/riaa-settles-with-12-year-old-girl/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/riaa-settles-wi...</a>
I really try to understand what is new about that?
Isn't this the status quo for years now?.<p>They wanted to implement at scale warning system that identify alleged pirates through ISPs but failed. Then they now have to sue ISP for refusing to share information about individuals and will have to do this case by case so no large scale automated system. And this is very expensive. If I understand correctly then in such situations the ISPs will not send individual warnings. This means that my ISP can be sued to reveal my identify if I torrented Linux distribution iso files!! [1]<p>We live in a strange world!<p>[1] <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/nkztyv/copyright_notice_from_isp_for_pirating_linux_is/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/nkztyv/copyright_not...</a>
I do not pirate content, but I hold a special dislike in my heart for the BREIN Foundation. Somehow, we've decided we're okay with them being the judge, jury and executioner regarding piracy in the Netherlands.
“If intermediaries wrongly refuse to voluntarily provide name and address data, BREIN must incur costs in order to obtain a court order. If these are not reimbursed by the intermediary, BREIN may choose to recover them from the infringer,” the anti-piracy group explains.<p>In a just world, if an ISP provides PII without a court order, it they would incur massive fines paid to the aggrieved party.
If a copyright holder/advocacy group decided to DDoS IPs engaged in seeding/leeching of copyrighted material, or to to intentionally seed ransomware posing as the copyrighted work... do you think they would get away with it in the eyes of the law?