Court quashes subpoena for names of users who talked torrenting in 2011 thread.
Film companies lost another attempt to force Reddit to identify anonymous users who discussed piracy. A federal court on Saturday quashed a subpoena demanding users' names and other identifying details, agreeing with Reddit's argument that the film companies' demands violate the First Amendment.
I mean, they discussed pirating...there wasn't any objective evidence they actually did pirate material (but for real they more than likely had). Regardless....statute of limitations apply; this was from 2011. That ship has sailed, Arr!
Apparently the statute of limitations is 3 years for copyright infringement (source), I'm surprised it wasn't thrown out on that alone (but I'm not a lawyer)
It's times like these I'm glad that in my country, while these companies CAN sue individuals for piracy, they can only sue for the amount it'd cost to purchase the product in its physical form from a store, so they just don't bother (this is assuming you don't seed, so ymmv depending on your torrenting etiquette.)
There's no way they can realistically police it, but I believe legally, they determine case-by-case if the seeding was for the purposes of distribution or not. Forgetting a download and letting it seed overnight is likely not to cause any issues.