From bouncing around my favorite corners of the Internet, I get the impression that large numbers of people have "a guy" (of any gender), akin to a weed dealer in furtiveness and legality, who is hooking them up with an underground, probably Plex-based (but increasingly moving to Jellyfin), streaming service. I get the impression that there are hundreds to thousands of these little "Plex server" operations, each serving a couple dozen to a hundred or so users out of the goodness/vileness of each "guy"'s heart and the hobby budget of that "guy"'s homelab. This isn't all Plex gets used for or even necessarily the main use case, but I think they're out there.
Obviously no "guy" will admit to doing this, but my "Plex Server Guy Theory" neatly explains this post announcing that general discussions of piracy are allowed in the Lemmy.ml Plex community and this post by someone apparently serving enough new Plex user volume that a webhook would be convenient to have. I've also seen people discussing Plex refer to "my users", as if they have a user base of friends and trusted or semi-trustred acquaintances rather than just a household or family.
I personally neither have nor am a "Plex Server Guy", nor do I know anyone who has admitted to me that they do have or are one, so I can't be sure they really exist. But I have suspicions.
Are "Plex Server Guys" as I imagine them real and common and I am just too square to have ever been invited to do crimes with everyone else? Are they rare in real life but enriched in the dubious/cool corners of the Internet? Does it depend on your country? What's the deal?
Well for starters, those 100k would be spread all over legal jurisdictions, like even different countries. So you would need a representative certified to practice law in each of those jurisdictions. And of course the laws are different, so each case would be different. And the people you are suing have relatively little money to pay in compensation. The number of people needed to pull that off would be so high that the cost would be drastically larger than the potential financial gains. And since the board of directors have a fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, they would have to put a stop to it. The shareholders care little for the long term potential gains of such an enormous expense.
I think you massively underestimate how much money you can make with cease and desist cases. And how little it costs to send letters in bulk to people it could apply to.
You can trick people into paying... but if you are talking people who pirate media, your sucess rate will be pretty low. Legally, cease and desist letters do nothing on thier own other than prove you notified them. Any free defense lawyer would argue that thier client didn't believe the sender had any right to make the request, and the send provided no legal proof. But again, even ifnthey could get say 100k from each person running one of these. It wouldn't pay they law firm bills, not even close. It would be a major expense.
These are copy and paste letters, they take a few minutes per case top. You act as if once such letter costs more than a freaking murder case defense.
What do you think happens when you get such a letter and argue like that? They just drop the ball?
You don't have to respond to the letter at all. That's my point. It has virtually no meaning other then to allow them to say "I told you so" in court. And for that to have any meaning, they would have to show that you knew the letter came from the legit rights owner. Since the name is likely something none of us have actually heard of, you could argue you didn't think it was legit. But to even get to that point they have to file a suit and pay lawyers and all that. I can send you a cease and desist letter claiming the right to tell you to stop doing anything I want. It's just a scare tactic. Plenty of companies have been caught sending them when they had no legal right to make the demand. Most pirates know this, and will just ignore it.
You do not have to respond to any invoice you get. And of course that tends to end up in court. What makes you think you could win the case? Just that perhaps they did not actually have the rights in the first place and thus it does not go any further than some letters? How often does that happen? 1 % of all such cases? Do you have the number?
I'm not sure you are following my logic. For them to take every person who shares a plex server with people to court would cost an exorbitant amount of money. First they have to find them all, which is non-trivial. We are talking hundreds of thousands here. Then they have to get proof according to local laws. That already requires them to employ experts in each jurisdiction. Then they can send the letters, which have to be tailored based on the jurisdiction, which probably isn't much, but they have to be sure it is legal to even send it. Some places (though few) it will open them to being sued if not worded correctly. Then to take it to court they will need licensed lawyers in every jurisdiction. The cost would be crazy. And for the cases they win, they won't get much money because they aren't sueing companies, they are sueing people.
It's not that a person would necessarily win in court, they may or may not. But the scale of the expense is soo much higher than the revenue as to make it a very bad financial undertaking.
They just cooperate with whatever law firms there are locally and pay them in % of what they get, which also makes sure they are incentivized to get as much as possible to pay.
The vast majority of lawyers don't work that way. They get paid as they go. The ones who do... aren't going after your average private person because they don't have enough money to be worth it. Even 100% probably wouldn't be enough in these cases. How much do you think they could win from Joe public per case?