Movie Company Sues Pirates Who Used an Anonymous VPN (PIA)

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

20 hours ago, Jumballi said:

My question was why waste $5 million on a lawsuit when the return is gonna be $500k at most on top of when only a fraction of the pirates can be held accountable

their objective is probably to scare away people from pirating. fines for that in the USA are insanely high so it will probably work. 

[2FA]

Mullvad is pretty good, no personal information unless you use a payment method tied to you but you can straight up mail them money without a return address and of course cryptocurrencies.

[TheCoverUp]

thus I use proton and not pia

Spoiler

(but not for pirating)

 

[Kisai]

21 hours ago, comander said:

They've been subpoenaed before. 

The issue that people will likely run into is this - 

Ok, your IP is masked, so what? VPNs don't block against most forms of tracking. 

Logged into a basically any account that has multi-site tracking? If so like 20 different companies could profile you. Or not logged in but have any sort of tracking info...

 

https://panopticlick.eff.org/  

 

The problem, and this applies to all know-it-all’s who pirate out of spite, is that they don’t really know what they are doing and trust marketing rather than the technical application.

 

DNS leaks
VPN’s leak

Tracking cookies and JavaScript’s leak

 

Those torrent sites are absolutely filthy with tracking cookies. All it takes is searching for something on one of those sites to incriminate you for piracy, never mind downloading a torrent file.

[Guest willies leg]

What's a movie? Is that like a youtube, tiktok or snapchat except I have to pay for it? And they track me too? Why would anyone do that?

[Orange1]

23 hours ago, Jumballi said:

Pretty sad that they feel that because of their ailing movie franchise that they need to sue to get money from people who probably won't end up paying anyway.
Waste of time, money, and resources.

 

PR will do its job on some people who scare easily.

[DrMacintosh]

On 10/26/2020 at 1:47 PM, BuckGup said:

PIA is owned and operated in the United States. There isn't anything else I need to say beyond that

What does that mean? Is there a magic country that should own all the VPNs? 

[DrMacintosh]

22 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

Fantastic movie, but whoever thought it would be a good idea to lock it down to Apple, is a freaking moron.

The alternative in that case would have been to never release the film. The original studio deal fell through and the film needed someone to swoop in and publish it. Apple volunteered for that role. Hence the platform restriction. 

[Trik'Stari]

21 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

The alternative in that case would have been to never release the film. The original studio deal fell through and the film needed someone to swoop in and publish it. Apple volunteered for that role. Hence the platform restriction. 

That's a fucking shame. Such a good damn movie. 

 

My paternal grandfather was a signalman on a destroyer guarding the merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic.

[BuckGup]

10 hours ago, DrMacintosh said:

What does that mean? Is there a magic country that should own all the VPNs? 

No, it means there are 14 countries in agreement with one another to share all their data with each other. If I have a VPN in the Italy or the UK for example and the US sees me pirating or doing something illegal they can get a warrantless search and you are screwed. I suggest reading up on the 14 eyes, warrantless searches, and canary watches.

https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/

 

You'll realize 90% of VPNs on the market are dogshit and don't do anything besides mask your traffic to your local ISP

[Commodus]

10 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

That's a fucking shame. Such a good damn movie. 

 

My paternal grandfather was a signalman on a destroyer guarding the merchant ships in the Battle of the Atlantic.

Look at it this way: Apple rescued the movie, and it was at least on a service that costs $5 per month and is effectively free for many people. If it were on Netflix or Prime Video... well, more people would have the service, but it'd be more expensive if you weren't subscribed.

 

[Mark Kaine]

How do you even proof that "some" ip address watched or downloaded your movie? 

 

Serious question because I doubt that is actually possible, especially not bullet proof... 

[dalekphalm]

39 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

How do you even proof that "some" ip address watched or downloaded your movie? 

 

Serious question because I doubt that is actually possible, especially not bullet proof... 

For downloading that's not exactly overly difficult - you would have a log that says "IP Address X requested Data Y - transmission took this long", etc. Depending on the log itself , you can pretty much without a doubt know whether a particular IP has copied specific data.

 

That doesn't tell you if the user actually watched it on their device mind you - but at the same time, legally speaking, you don't need to actually watch the movie in order to violate copyright.

[dalekphalm]

36 minutes ago, Caroline said:

imagine pirating that movie.

If I were one to pirate, that's exactly the kind I would - the first two: Olympus and London, were damn entertaining - sure the writing wasn't perfect and there were some questionable plot holes, but as a mindless action movie, they're really good.

 

I haven't seen the latest entry mind you, but I'm sure it's just as entertaining.

[Orange1]

The smart ones would do it differently, free wifi, pc cafe, easily hacked wifi from a house. But the thing is, people dont think they are doing anything wrong or if they do think they are doing something wrong that its not a big deal, and that no one will be bothered.

[dalekphalm]

3 minutes ago, Orange1 said:

The smart ones would do it differently, free wifi, pc cafe, easily hacked wifi from a house. But the thing is, people dont think they are doing anything wrong or if they do think they are doing something wrong that its not a big deal, and that no one will be bothered.

One of the reasons why people pirate things is because it's easy - often easier than legally buying or downloading the film.

 

If they have to jump through all these hoops, only the diehard "my privacy" types will do it. Even the typical "my privacy" types will think a VPN is sufficient.

 

I've always leaned towards the "A Commercial VPN is fine for unlocking geoblocks, but it's very overrated as a privacy and security tool" camp.

[Orange1]

If "they" want to find you and make an example out of you, "they" will find you!

Even with a VPN

[Mark Kaine]

7 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

For downloading that's not exactly overly difficult - you would have a log that says "IP Address X requested Data Y - transmission took this long", etc. Depending on the log itself , you can pretty much without a doubt know whether a particular IP has copied specific data.

True. But A. this really shouldn't proof anything, logs can be faked. And B. How did they even get that info? the movie wasn't stolen (pirated) directly from their site but rather some torrent site if I understood this correctly.

[dalekphalm]

39 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

True. But A. this really shouldn't proof anything, logs can be faked.

Sure but is your ISP or the VPN going to fake those logs?

39 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

And B. How did they even get that info? the movie wasn't stolen (pirated) directly from their site but rather some torrent site if I understood this correctly.

For Torrents, how they generally "prove" it's you is that they will join the swarm, and just start logging which IP's are connected to the piece of the movie they have (they usually just download a piece of it and then act as seeds - normally they're not providing the full movie lol).

 

But even with an IP Address - that does not, and cannot prove a specific person. Due to NAT, all they'll ever get is your WAN IP at best - and that could have been you, your brother/sister/wife/parent, it could have been a friend that came over, it could have been someone that guessed your WIFI password, etc.

 

And that defense has been used successfully before.

[whm1974]

8 hours ago, BuckGup said:

No, it means there are 14 countries in agreement with one another to share all their data with each other. If I have a VPN in the Italy or the UK for example and the US sees me pirating or doing something illegal they can get a warrantless search and you are screwed. I suggest reading up on the 14 eyes, warrantless searches, and canary watches.

https://restoreprivacy.com/5-eyes-9-eyes-14-eyes/

 

You'll realize 90% of VPNs on the market are dogshit and don't do anything besides mask your traffic to your local ISP

Actually in the US they still have to get warrant first.

[IkeaGnome]

1 minute ago, whm1974 said:

Actually in the US they still have to get warrant first.

Not in all cases. And if they use the seeding thing @dalekphalm was talking about it could fall under plain view. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

On 10/27/2020 at 1:31 PM, gloop said:

The UK actively, even massively participated with America during the mass surveillance which Snowden exposed. 

So? He didn't say a VPN based in the UK was the solution. In fact, in his next post he explicitly extended the argument to the "5 eyes" countries, so you are substantiating his point.

[Kisai]

19 minutes ago, Voluspa said:

Not in all cases. And if they use the seeding thing @dalekphalm was talking about it could fall under plain view. 

Splitting hairs, but both the owner and the pirates have to download the entire file.

 

If the owner is the one who made the torrent then that is their own damn fault. However the usual case is someone ripped a digital stream (see YouTube-dL) with no effort, and dump the unencrypted file on a torrent site, sometimes they also recompress it if they are scene kids. 
 

Pirates, be it VPN or sitting in a McDonald’s, leak info to the search, both by DNS and by intermediate routing nodes. But generally someone isn’t assumed to be so stupid as to pirate 0-day material from some an IP address that can be traced back to you.

 

For example. The McDonalds I am sitting in right now, the food I bought, the CCTV, and my accessing of the Wi-Fi are all easy meta data, and it would require only a request to see who was doing something. The restaurant for that time period can correlate with the Wi-Fi access logs and the customers in the store. If I was using a VPN, the ISP on the inbound side could be monitoring access to the VPN. 
 

Lots of small mistakes lead up to “hmm, maybe that person sitting in the restaurant for hours is doing more than checking Twitter.

[dalekphalm]

46 minutes ago, Voluspa said:

Not in all cases. And if they use the seeding thing @dalekphalm was talking about it could fall under plain view. 

To be clear, they would only have your IP in that case - they would still need to sue for the rest of the details (which generally would require a warrant to your ISP at least).

14 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Splitting hairs, but both the owner and the pirates have to download the entire file.

 

If the owner is the one who made the torrent then that is their own damn fault. However the usual case is someone ripped a digital stream (see YouTube-dL) with no effort, and dump the unencrypted file on a torrent site, sometimes they also recompress it if they are scene kids. 
 

Pirates, be it VPN or sitting in a McDonald’s, leak info to the search, both by DNS and by intermediate routing nodes. But generally someone isn’t assumed to be so stupid as to pirate 0-day material from some an IP address that can be traced back to you.

 

For example. The McDonalds I am sitting in right now, the food I bought, the CCTV, and my accessing of the Wi-Fi are all easy meta data, and it would require only a request to see who was doing something. The restaurant for that time period can correlate with the Wi-Fi access logs and the customers in the store. If I was using a VPN, the ISP on the inbound side could be monitoring access to the VPN. 
 

Lots of small mistakes lead up to “hmm, maybe that person sitting in the restaurant for hours is doing more than checking Twitter.

Yep, if you did the pirating in a public space, they could definitely figure out literally exactly which person did it by cross referencing the network logs w/ a security camera.

 

But realistically not many companies will go through that kind of effort and expense, unless it was a criminal (as opposed to civil) investigation.

[Orange1]

2 hours ago, Mark Kaine said:

logs can be faked

Yeah I know, I think North Korea and China know this well, with Russia being in the news all the time. But hey spin is spin, most people dont know it and believe the news channel anyways. I hope that was vague enough to stay posted.