I can buy a knife and charge people for using to to stab people. I can buy a gun, and charge people for using it to shoot people. I can buy a computer, and charge people for using it to hack people’s bank accounts or dox people. I can buy ammonia and bleach and charge people for mixing them in a public building, killing or severely injuring them. I can subscribe to Plex, and charge people for… watching ad-supported movies?
Plex alone doesn’t enable anyone to charge for pirated content - someone actually needs to pirate that content, put it on a Plex server, and then charge people for it. THAT’S a crime.
Saying that Plex could face legal trouble because someone is making money abusing their software to give access to pirated material is like saying a rental car agency could face legal trouble for someone loading one of their rentals full of explosives and charging someone to let them drive it into a federal building.
Plex is a tool. Tools can be used to do many things, including illegal things, and charging people for doing illegal things with them. You don’t charge the toolmaker for that.
That’s why Plex (and Emby, Jellyfin, Kodi, etc) still exists, despite many, many media companies with enough money and lawyers to fill the Grand Canyon being very willing to throw all that money and all those lawyers into ending it. They might not like it, but Plex is not at fault for people abusing it against its ToS to distribute illegal materials for money.
And, those people are in the incredibly overwhelming minority, and will easily find another way to do their illegal business, because it gets them the money they need to do so. People have a lot of reasons for having their server hosted externally, and I’d be shocked if the number using it for crime would amount to more than a rounding error.
That does not justify violating every users’ privacy by looking up exactly how they are hosting their server, any more than police would be justified searching every house in a state because there are definitely criminals in some of them. And it definitely doesn’t justify blocking an entire hosting provider over the actions of a handful of people - that would be like cutting off every physical connection between Florida and the rest of the country just because Trump lives there. And guess what? Just like Trump would in that situation, those people are simply going to move elsewhere, because they can afford to.
If Plex actually wanted to do something about this sort of thing, they should simply software-limit the maximum number of users and library shares per server. Anyone with over 100 users on their server, or that many library shares, is naturally looking a little shady, so make a higher subscription tier a requirement for that, then look up THOSE PEOPLE, not everyone. Anyone with over 500 users/shares needs to get an organizational license, and anyone over 1,500 should probably just be forwarded to the copyright police.
THAT would be a reasonable response. It might make some people angry, but there would be legitimate logic behind that. It wouldn’t make me angry. But that would require actual effort on their part. Volume-blocking a hosting provider’s IP range is as simple as a few clicks. Much easier. Like nuking a city because crime exists there - much less effort, guaranteed success, and who cares about all those other people who lived there anyway?
And, just FYI, Plex’s official line was about ToS violations, shorthand for “People who charge others to access their server”. I could put nothing but self-taken family videos on my server and charge people for access, and violate those same ToS provisions. Is it time to block Verizon FiOS service now?
Besides, IP owners are currently far more interested in hunting IPTV providers, who frequently serve hundreds of thousands of customers, or more, their entire media catalog, and often have relations to organized crime. A Plex server instance would be hard pressed to get anywhere near those numbers, and, like I mentioned earlier, a relatively simple solution would put a stop to that. Even for those, the developers of the software used are generally only in legal trouble when it is purpose-built or customized by them for that particular provider and purpose.
