said by gatorkram:I have always had the feeling, these people have no clue what they are doing.
They know what they are doing. They are putting minimal effort into a complex problem. They know that their detection methods are going to have a lot of false positives. But they don't care.
I asked a question a long time ago, in another post, about how these companies go about figuring out what you are doing, is even infringement.
If they are working on the behalf of the copyright owner and are authorized to "distribute" it (which their service agreement most likely stipulates) then it's not infringement on their behalf. They may be authorized to give up the content but the infringer isn't authorized to accept it.
Do they host the files themselves like a honeypot, and wait for people to connect, download and share, or do they just randomly look for files with particular names, and then join those swarms, and start collecting IPs, etc.
Both.
I wonder, how much you even have to share, before it becomes a violation, or how much of a download you have to complete.
Technically, anything not covered by fair use and is unauthorized is infringement, so 1 bit. But then you have the practicality of differentiating what's infringing content and what's just coincidence. While it doesn't make a legal precedence here, I believe a judge in the UK stated that it had to be the entire piece of work and that just a fraction of it was not sufficient. For torrent related cases, if there are multiple people in the swarm (most likely) then it would be near impossible to prove that an entire work was downloaded from a single source. And if an infringer advertised that he had 100% completion to accept requests, just saying you are offering the file I don't think is sufficient to argue infringement, the actual infringement has to happen.
All these uncertainties are why so very few copyright infringement cases go to actual trial. It's expensive, and the copyright holders also don't want to go through all the costs with legally dubious cases and little precedence to go upon.