https://torrentfreak.com/film-companies-seek-torrenting-history-related-to-redditor-240220/
A recent subpoena request shows that film companies are trying to obtain information on a Redditor's piracy habits.
This is where they’re spending their money. Not on writers, but on this. No wonder movies are in the state they’re in.
I gotta say, it's working. I pirate a lot less than a few years ago. Not because I'm afraid of getting sued, but because it's all shite not worth pirating nowadays.
I dunno about the way Lemmy stores data but I'm willing to bet a similar request could be made to a Lemmy hoster and as a regular person, most likely not a company, they'd be far less likely to push back. Wondering if a future evolution of the platform needs to be a little more anonymous (e.g. no IP retention, no email retention, optional ability to post anonymously while logged in).
Afaik lemmy doesn't associate your account with your ip address. The webserver itself has ip log, but only associates it with user agent and url visited so correlating it with a particular user may not be trivial, or even possible in a busy server. Also, instance owners are usually pretty keen on reducing operational cost and probably probably won't retain those log files for too long, or even not retaining them at all.
LLCs are fairly cheap to form (if you file the paperwork yourself) it might be advisable for instance owners of any decent size to place instance stuff under the control of an LLC. There shouldn't be too much tax stuff to worry about if there's no profit (Not a CPA, consult a CPA for a final word) but it definitely would help protect an owners personal liability from any sort of lawsuit shenanigans
Why couldn’t they just subpoena RCN’s logs for this data? Picking a single user and trying to get all their information for an unrelated case is a violation of their rights, unless they’re suing that user individually.
I’m not a lawyer but I hope the judge comes to the same conclusion.
Otherwise, I might sue Walmart and to do so I might need to info of their customers.
Didn't they already try this and lost?
E. Ahh I see it's still ongoing. Pretty interesting details.