Cable company Altice agreed to give Warner and other record labels the names and contact information of 100 broadband subscribers who were accused of pirating songs.
The subscribers “were the subject of RIAA or third party copyright notices,” said a court order that approved the agreement between Altice and the plaintiff record companies. Altice is notifying each subscriber “of Altice’s intent to disclose their name and contact information to Plaintiffs pursuant to this Order,” and telling the notified subscribers that they have 30 days to seek relief from the court.
Note that we do not endorse piracy or other illegal activities on this forum. Regardless, I urge you to practice basic OpSec practices and avoid sharing confidential information about yourself on public forums. Even if VPNs can prevent identification most of the time, you could still be identified from your online activity.
For example:
This is one of numerous copyright lawsuits filed against broadband providers, and it’s not the first time an ISP handed names of subscribers to the plaintiffs. We have previously written articles about film studios trying to force Reddit to identify users who admitted torrenting in discussion forums. Reddit was able to avoid providing information in one case in part because the film studios already obtained identifying details for 118 subscribers directly from Grande, the ISP they had sued.
Copyright owners can issue subpoenas to subscribers whose names are provided by ISPs, though they have sought easier ways to get the information they want. In the 2023 case involving film studios and Reddit, a magistrate judge wrote that the studios “resist serving those [Grande] subscribers with subpoenas as burdensome and inconsistent with their August expert-disclosure deadline.”