Technology

That's a great idea to have these comments for the posterity.
To my lawyer in the future :

"Everything I could have wrote in reddit about pirating was a lie to get upvotes. Don't take any of it seriously."

Wanna play some sarcastaball?

They are still better than meta and Twitter too.

Not to mention this has far reaching effects past Reddit. Such as for lemmy instances.

Yeah nobody is all bad, even Reddit.

Imagine how hard (impossible )it would be for them to actually moderate every interaction on their site? Standing up for users makes sense because they're next in the firing line.

I mean even IRL, people talk so much crap who knows what’s actually true. Imagine if we locked up everyone for what they say. The “film industry” is insulting for even trying to push people into guilt by nothing more than what they type on a website.

While I do not think they were in the right to have the users “unmasked”, my understanding is that the users in question were talking about how the Austin internet provider, Grande, was good for torrenting, so the attempt to unmask the users wasn’t meant to get the users in trouble but to show that Grande benefitted financially from a lax policy towards pirating, so them not mentioning piracy in their comments wasn’t necessarily the end of the conversation, if they were willing to say now that it was in reference to piracy. I do think it sounds like grasping at straws, but I imagine the potential value they were hoping to get from Grande was worth that grasping to them

Spez may still be a corporate sellout but at least in this instance he did the right thing, probably because he determined ratting out users who pirated wouldn't make him money

No. You could claim to have murdered someone, and they may detain you for this for some time, but without evidence of a crime I don't think they can charge you and definitely can't convict you.

Shows how much people understand of the law when they think using Bitorrent is illegal lol

Doubt it. Most Lemmy instances are run by one guy on a spare PC. They're not set up to deal with legal requests, versus the police just barging in and taking the PC, while all the neighbours look on and assume you're a paedo.

While there doesn't seem to be an IP address field in the Lemmy schema, they could always get it out of the logs. There is an email address field, but I think that's only used for initial signup, verification and resetting your password, so if you used a temporary one they'd have nothing to give.

I don't know what the film industry would even do with the info if Reddit gave it to them. Likely just more bluster to deter casual pirates into thinking there are consequences to downloading the odd movie.

Don't retain logs longer than you must for preventing attacks. They can't get what no longer exists.

Actually, if one uses the official Reddit app, they do have real names. It’s part of the data that the app reads out of your phone’s settings.

They don't want to prosecute the Reddit user, they want to make them to testify as a witness in a case against an ISP. If they repeat what they said in their comment in court it would count as evidence that said ISP was lax on piracy or something. The reason they're doing this is because you're right, they can't use it as evidence without getting ahold of the actual person.