Small talk & Chit chat

Are you in the UK? Over 60% of British people pirating content, and no one has ever been convicted, charged, arrested or summoned on piracy laws for viewing content, ever

There was a period of time when ISPs would send out bully letters and threaten actions, but this has officially ended. All anti-piracy action and funding is now for voluntary education (govt. has accepted piracy now often more about region locking and ease of access(Sky channels or whatever than many can't get) than money, over 80% of pirates in the UK attempt to access legal alternatives first).
 
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tgrech said:
Are you in the UK? No one has ever been convicted, charged, arrested or summoned on piracy laws for viewing content, ever.

There was a period of time when ISPs would send out bully letters and threaten actions, but this has officially ended. All anti-piracy action and funding is now for voluntary education.
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Yep, Just north of London at the moment, Was just worried due to someone else's actions of watching a film on the aforementioned site I'd get a brown letter in the post from some lawyer demanding money.
 
tgrech said:
Yep you'll have no worries, the Voluntary Copyright Alert Programme only collected IPs of super-prolific pirates, but the policies ended in their entirety this summer(Too expensive and utterly ineffective) https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/07/20/creative_content_piracy/
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Appreciate the reply, Not to sound too OCD but aren't there people who sit on these streaming sites monitoring which IP accesses what and then somehow send them brown letters that way or am I looking way too much into it ?
 
I'm pretty sure it's not illegal to watch streaming sites, it's actually the people making them and the content on them available who are breaking the law.

I've used 123 movies or similar sites, as well as totalsportek for sport for years and never had any issues.
 
I have heard of some illegal schemes along those lines(sending bully letters to OAPs) in the past but I think that's part of the reason the legitimate schemes were mostly stopped the first time round, if you do get a letter from someone you can either ignore it or report it to the police if you want because it'll just be a scammer(Not sure that scam would still work/be worth the time anymore though).
 
trawetSluaP said:
I'm pretty sure it's not illegal to watch streaming sites, it's actually the people making them and the content on them available who are breaking the law.

I've used 123 movies or similar sites, as well as totalsportek for sport for years and never had any issues.
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Did you use these things without a VPN though ? See if I had a VPN I wouldn't be worried, It's the fact that he accessed these without me knowing and I have no VPN.

tgrech said:
I have heard of some illegal schemes along those lines(sending bully letters to OAPs) in the past but I think that's part of the reason the legitimate schemes were mostly stopped the first time round, if you do get a letter from someone you can either ignore it or report it to the police if you want because it'll just be a scammer(Not sure that scam would still work/be worth the time anymore though).
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Well at least that's reassuring ^_^
 
Strangely UK is one of the few places in the world where it's not a legal grey area, viewing/acquiring pirated content is 100% illegal. However, the idea of enforcement of this law is such a mess that no one wants to touch it with a 10ft pole. IP's can't be used to identify someone or an address here as admissible evidence in court and all that for a start, and the cost of such a case (Especially one in new territory legally speaking as there's no previous cases for precedent) would always outweigh the gains of enforcement [And everyone knows there's probably a million cases across the country every time a football match isn't shown on freeview channels].
 
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tgrech said:
Strangely UK is one of the few places in the world where it's not a legal grey area, viewing/acquiring pirated content is 100% illegal. However, the idea of enforcement of this law is such a mess that no one wants to touch it with a 10ft pole. IP's can't be used to identify someone or an address here as admissible evidence in court and all that for a start, and the cost of such a case (Especially one in new territory legally speaking as there's no previous cases for precedent) would always outweigh the gains of enforcement.
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Well court stuff doesn't worry me as I know someone would have to be a MEGA pirate to get the attention of the law, It's the shyster lawyers that send out letters threatening people that worries me, But as you said above it wouldn't exactly be legal for them to do that anymore.


Anyway thanks for the replies everyone, Really put my mind at ease :)
 
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Dicehunter said:
Well court stuff doesn't worry me as I know someone would have to be a MEGA pirate to get the attention of the law, It's the shyster lawyers that send out letters threatening people that worries me, But as you said above it wouldn't exactly be legal for them to do that anymore.


Anyway thanks for the replies everyone, Really put my mind at ease :)
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It's not how much you steal but specifically what you steal.

A few years ago a couple of my friends got stung £500 fines for downloading DS games. One of them literally downloaded one.

Nintendo as you know are s**t hot when it comes to protecting their stuff.

Since then I've not heard any stories at all. That was about 10 years ago. However, what I do know is that you are 100% responsible for what happens on your connection. That is why ISPs now put a mandatory WIFI password on your router, because then they can just say "well you gave out the password".

The old "it was my son/young relative" etc carries no weight now.

So stop your cousin as it's your neck he's putting on the chopping block.
 
AlienALX said:
It's not how much you steal but specifically what you steal.

A few years ago a couple of my friends got stung £500 fines for downloading DS games. One of them literally downloaded one.

Nintendo as you know are s**t hot when it comes to protecting their stuff.

Since then I've not heard any stories at all. That was about 10 years ago. However, what I do know is that you are 100% responsible for what happens on your connection. That is why ISPs now put a mandatory WIFI password on your router, because then they can just say "well you gave out the password".

The old "it was my son/young relative" etc carries no weight now.

So stop your cousin as it's your neck he's putting on the chopping block.
Click to expand...


I disabled my Wifi the day I got plugged in, He used my rig which is hardwired to do all that stuff and it now has a password lock on it, But as others have said I have nothing to worry about, Moving on :)
 
That doesn't apply for the UK at the moment Alien, the relevant Act (With regards to responsibility of and identification of the culprit for online crimes) now is the "Investigatory Powers Act 2016", with Part 3 "Authorisations for obtaining communications data" detailing the quite rigorous process an investigatory body has to go through for "IP resolution" (IE determining who was actually behind an IP address(And accompanying digital data) when a crime was committed, something which has to be done obviously before any charge could be pressed). Some examples of the process is provided in the act while discussing the request filter[Obviously realistically these kinds of online crimes are only investigated if they're quite serious like terrorist or grooming related inquiries]:
47d50306089fad30216e132365863f47.png

Found here: http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2016/25/notes/division/6/index.htm

Part of the reason piracy enforcement here is non-existent is because the courts don't consider IP addresses and such on their own as admissible identifiable evidence, hence why these extra processes are required for admissible charges to be brought against someone who may have committed any crime online.
 
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