There is a very important consideration here that this opinion doesn't really touch on, but I think is invited down the road for future cases and legislation: Can you compel the speech of a third party to aid in exploratory evidence gathering (aka fishing expeditions) without a clear, well defined, and particular, cause of action at court to issue a subpoena?
replyIn most classic U.S. jurisdiction, no, you cannot. Compelled activity or speech is generally frowned upon. The most important part of this case, IMO, was the Supreme Court constraining the Fourth Circuit's interpretation of contributory liability and attempting to turn the DMCA system into one for enabling those fishing expeditions.
> They aren't suing some broke 23 year old. What they can collect is less than their lawyer fees.
replyYou may not be old enough to remember this, but that's exactly what they did in the 2000's
There's a lot more 23 year olds to this time around. I don't think you can intimidate them down this time.
replyThey didn't exactly intimidate them down last time either. Piracy decisively won the war on piracy.
replyNo, they won. Piracy stayed at a microscopic level rather than becoming the usual way people got things. It stagnated, and maybe shrank. That's why they don't want to go into the piracy stopping business, it's a waste of time and money for them when they could be going after and negotiating with AI.
replyI think they still sometimes go for it even when they know they aren't recouping their losses, to deter/scare potential users. Obviously that doesn't scale and it's mostly for publicity stunts but it did happen here in Canada. They more or less just scanned a few trackers and went after every Canadian IP address they found for the given torrents.
replyhttps://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/movie-studios-bit...