End game then is VPN providers get sued for piracy. So people use VPN providers in uncooperative jurisdictions. Then VPNs eventually get coopted into sharing user information as IP owners invest more over time in copyright enforcement.
Yes, VPNs (or even Tor) can only work till a limit. Any technical solution can always be legislated as illegal and solved. So the real dispute is political and will be won or lost there. Right now though except in some places, ordinary masses are loath to be politically active or informed, and this suits the few in power very well.
> Yup. I use ProtonVPN on account of its Swiss jurisdiction and no-logs policy.
Can switzerland even be considered "non-cooperative"? I mean, most people probably think so because of their reputation as a an "offshore bank", but that's been eroded due to the passing of FATCA.
Switzerland is interesting from a copyright aspect in multiple ways:
- Downloading copyrighted material, even from obviously shady sources, is perfectly legal.
- Sharing said material with your friends, even if you obtained it from an obviously shady source, is perfectly legal.
- Sharing it with random strangers (as happens while torrenting) is not legal, but hard to prosecute, because:
- private companies collecting IP addresses to sue uploaders violate privacy laws, and thus commit a crime themselves (!) [1]
I didn't check, but I'd also assume:
- That ISPs and VPN providers aren't required (and quite likely even aren't allowed) to disclose the identity behind an IP address to a private entity
- That VPN providers (unlike ISPs) aren't required to maintain such logs, and thus typically don't.
For comparison, in Germany, downloading from "obviously illegal" sources is prohibited, further sharing a copy from such sources among friends is prohibited (and since breaking copy protection is prohibited too, having a DRM-free copy of the content is a pretty strong indicator that it comes from an illegal source - unless you got it from a Swiss friend...).
