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?
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?