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?

Don't forget not using ProtonVPN is another viable alternative to not using good VPNs.

I definitely should never use Torguard or Mullvad. These horrible VPN's will never protect me because I definitely don't pirate.

I pirate shit every day.

Fuck copyright laws and anyone who wants to dare enforce them on me.

Enjoyed the post. Though PIA has proven it in court twice.

What's your view on Hotspot Shield?

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.

One of my posts was suddenly labeled as having been posted by someone else.

Everything can be proved if you're using INTERNET. Normies/Regulars dont understand how internet work. Google/ Facebook/Reddit is not internet. Source: I am a computer science engineer

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

Could you elaborate on your response, as well as what the link in the comment you're replying to is referencing.

I know what ISOs are, I'm just wondering what the original comment is trying to tell us about and what you're replying about. Thanks.

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.

This is most likely civil law, not criminal. Criminal copyright infringement is harder to prove and generally has to be on a larger scale and for profit, depending on laws in your country.

Is admitting to breaking a license agreement enough for a conviction if you say exactly which license, then probably, depending on circumstances and specific local laws. Is it enough if you just say you did it, no. The licenser needs to at least prove they were the ones you "harmed" or they have no standing to sue. But if they already have logs from your ISP, then it might still be useful evidence.

No but depending on the crime and the context it can be enough to get a search warrant but for your weed hypothetical no by the time they acted on it any other evidence would be gone so there's no point in investigating unless you admitted to something bigger like growing or dealing

You always need corroborating evidence to convict based solely on a confession. Does not have to be much, but uiu need some extra fact tying the person to the crime.

Well they can get your IP and spy on you so they can probably grab the where. Even the house hold you live in. Although they don’t even need your IP these days.all these capitalists are selling your information to everyone on a silver platter. So they already know exactly who you are. That part wasn’t the hard part.

Maybe if they have a list of buyer suspects they can guess who is the seller in that region . As far as how much you bought, or how much you smoked, it really doesn’t matter. If it’s illegal, any amount is considered illegal.

If you do lie it’s a really dumb lie that got you watched now. it’s also common that if someone guilty does something stupid like admit to something, they quickly say they were lying.

So no, you’re not in the clear.

Convicted? No, but it might be enough to open an investigation or get a warrant.

Though even then, depending on the crime and circumstances (severity/time passed/likeliness of the crime having ocurred) they might not even bother.

If a confession of crime was all it took to convict then any crazy person could walk into a police station and confess to any number of things, but it obviously wouldnt be right to just take them on their word and lock them up.

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.

Does your local small to medium instance user have enough money to not get hamstrung by a big film industry's legal team?

Edit... not that I agree with the result but I think the question I am answering with rhetorically answers the original question, unfortunately.

Edit 2: If all this crypto stuff worked as well as it was described, it would be cool if there was a DAO or basically a mutually voted funds account that could store and send crypto funds to a lemmy instance owner to fund lawyers, should a legal case against a major lemmy instance come under legal fire.

EU?

in my (EU) country it's not illegal to download torrents, it's illegal to upload but not to download.

I mean, if your not corporates it would count as being your personal data would it not?

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.

It's possible to have an email address associated with your Reddit account which might provide names.

Hello yes this is Comcast, ahh let’s say about three fifty per IP? We have a deal!

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.