Seeing a lot of talk about pirated material breaking the TOS. I don’t believe that’s what Plex is responding to here.
There are individuals who are setting up servers, and then advertising for others to pay for access. They’re using Hetzner’s infrastructure to facilitate all of this, essentially starting their own paid streaming service.
That’s the issue at hand here. Plex doesn’t know what is on your server, and has no incentive to find out. That whole pathway opens them up to liability that no company would want. They provide a way for private individuals to share their personal, legally collected media within their own circles.
Admin wise, it’s easier to block the entire IP block than to play wack a mole. On the Plex forums, one of the employees made it clear they recommend hosting on your own IP and hardware for this reason. You may be collateral damage here, but they do not technically support hosting on 3rd party hosting.
Basically, this is Plex showing they do due diligence when someone is crossing the line into profiting from media, which is highly illegal.
Because they’ve stated that on many, many occasions. The only time they /might/ have any idea is on metadata retrieval, which is highly anonymized. Their relationship to you is highly a “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” one.
You could, and others have, spent time sniffing Network traffic to see what data goes out and when to confirm for yourself.
If they did know, they would place themselves in the spot of policing what is on your media server (and how it got there), rather than being the platform and leaving it up to each individual to collect, rip, and store their mass collection of blu rays.
Seeing a lot of talk about pirated material breaking the TOS. I don’t believe that’s what Plex is responding to here.
There are individuals who are setting up servers, and then advertising for others to pay for access. They’re using Hetzner’s infrastructure to facilitate all of this, essentially starting their own paid streaming service.
That’s the issue at hand here. Plex doesn’t know what is on your server, and has no incentive to find out. That whole pathway opens them up to liability that no company would want. They provide a way for private individuals to share their personal, legally collected media within their own circles.
Admin wise, it’s easier to block the entire IP block than to play wack a mole. On the Plex forums, one of the employees made it clear they recommend hosting on your own IP and hardware for this reason. You may be collateral damage here, but they do not technically support hosting on 3rd party hosting.
Basically, this is Plex showing they do due diligence when someone is crossing the line into profiting from media, which is highly illegal.
How in the world can you say this with any kind of authority?
Because they’ve stated that on many, many occasions. The only time they /might/ have any idea is on metadata retrieval, which is highly anonymized. Their relationship to you is highly a “Don’t ask, Don’t tell” one.
You could, and others have, spent time sniffing Network traffic to see what data goes out and when to confirm for yourself.
If they did know, they would place themselves in the spot of policing what is on your media server (and how it got there), rather than being the platform and leaving it up to each individual to collect, rip, and store their mass collection of blu rays.