I see.


In Germany, thousands of subscribers of RedTube received settlement letters by a law firm which appeared to have had convinced a court to compel someone to provide the IP addresses of those subscribers who streamed very specific clips, copyrighted material which changed owners recently.

It's being speculated that some technically savvy people cooperated with the copyright owners or the law firm to divert traffic to a mirror site which only appears to be RedTube, as it has a different URL ending with ".net" and not ".com."

This not only reeks of copyright trolling, but computer fraud or so is the word in Onlinia - or Heise.de, I think.

The court which at first allowed the copyright owners represented by the law firm to take legal action against those who streamed the clips revoked its ruling and the law firm seems to be in legal shit now.

Those who paid the settlement can basically try to get it back in a long, tiresome legal process or forget about it, suffering damages of about 250.- Euros each, which amounts to 345 US Dollars.

That exact same law firm did another type of porn-related copyright trolling in the past where it tried to blackmail affected people into paying a settlement or out them on their website, as far as I recall.


A German visualisation of what seemingly happened, taken from the Heise.de article:




The Heise.de article in Google Translate

There's more stuff to be found about it on Heise.de, Techdirt.com and ArsTechnica.com for the researching types.