There’s a big 2nd hand market for people sharing Plex servers with people for money on eBay and stuff. Idk if Plex goes out of their way to hunt those down but they are violating tos. I’ve seen pictures of servers with 200+ active users before. It was a bigger problem when Drive had uncapped storage because you could duplicate a blob with a click and link a new Plex instance to it and leverage Google’s servers for just about everything.
So I doubt it’s just families snitching. It’s probably copyright holders hunting down these and other streaming websites and figuring out where the stream is coming from and reporting to Heztner. That’s standard mo. They don’t send you a copyright notice they send your ISP a notice and vaguely threaten them. And then your ISP tells you. That’s always how it worked.
Is this maybe about the USA? As Hetzner is mainly in Germany/Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetzner) and a private person sharing copyrighted data (e.g. torrent) over their internet access, commonly leads to an information request to the ISP and then a written warning letter to the account owner, including a few hundred Euro fee to pay - just for the warning. There is of course the option to not pay and dispute the matter at court, which makes everything more complex and expensive. The warning letter with fee is just the simple option for first offenders to avoid court.
If the copyright infringement is not just private but has a business model behind it, the account/server owner can even expect a police raid in the morning hours to impound IT and secure financial statements and income, which will later determine the scope of the penalty.
Hetzner would have to hand out the server owners details upon legal request, if someone has gotten knowledge of any copyright infringement e.g. via (semi-public?) PLEX. In a case with eBay & payments, there is no simple written warning letter with small fee.
There’s a big 2nd hand market for people sharing Plex servers with people for money on eBay and stuff. Idk if Plex goes out of their way to hunt those down but they are violating tos. I’ve seen pictures of servers with 200+ active users before. It was a bigger problem when Drive had uncapped storage because you could duplicate a blob with a click and link a new Plex instance to it and leverage Google’s servers for just about everything.
So I doubt it’s just families snitching. It’s probably copyright holders hunting down these and other streaming websites and figuring out where the stream is coming from and reporting to Heztner. That’s standard mo. They don’t send you a copyright notice they send your ISP a notice and vaguely threaten them. And then your ISP tells you. That’s always how it worked.
Is this maybe about the USA? As Hetzner is mainly in Germany/Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetzner) and a private person sharing copyrighted data (e.g. torrent) over their internet access, commonly leads to an information request to the ISP and then a written warning letter to the account owner, including a few hundred Euro fee to pay - just for the warning. There is of course the option to not pay and dispute the matter at court, which makes everything more complex and expensive. The warning letter with fee is just the simple option for first offenders to avoid court.
If the copyright infringement is not just private but has a business model behind it, the account/server owner can even expect a police raid in the morning hours to impound IT and secure financial statements and income, which will later determine the scope of the penalty.
Hetzner would have to hand out the server owners details upon legal request, if someone has gotten knowledge of any copyright infringement e.g. via (semi-public?) PLEX. In a case with eBay & payments, there is no simple written warning letter with small fee.