• That is supposedly the case in Australia as well but I haven’t got a letter from telstra since around 2004 and I have never used a VPN and watch all my shows and movies via torrents so either I’m extremely lucky or they stopped bothering.

    Though recently I started paying the $4 / month for Real Debrid for better streaming performance, which is just as good as a VPN for torrent anonymity. I used to be fundamentally against the idea of paying anything to pirate but honestly this is worth it, I’ve even been able to watch a few shows that had 0 seeders because they were previously cached.

      •  psud   ( @psud@aussie.zone ) 
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        82 months ago

        That says their error was trying American threats “we got you dead to rights, tell us your income and we’ll tell you how much to pay our we’ll sue for punitive damages”

        Which isn’t legal in Australia. They would have been ok if they had asked to send a letter saying “stop it or pay us a reasonable amount for one person viewing the film once” but of course actual damages aren’t enough for film companies

        They were too greedy.

        • Yeah basically. But part of why no one has tried again is because the judge made it very clear he wasn’t going to just roll over and let them pull their BS. Including setting a bond of $600k for them to even try litigating it. Another part of it is that ISPs used to hand out IP addresses and PII in response to requests from media companies. This was found to be in breach of privacy laws and now those companies would have to apply for court orders, proving malfeasance, to get that information.