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Plex to block all servers hosted at Hetzner
(links.plex.tv)
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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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I have no idea, but it sounds like Plex was contacted by Hetzner.
It's a very good question as to either party would give a shit.
Maybe some people host huge Plex servers there and they have gotten DMCA notices and Hetzner doesn't like that.
Copyright/DMCA notices for Hetzner have been mentioned already but that seems unlikely.
Nobody knows what's on a PLEX server, they are not public. No rights agency can run checks for any info about hosted media. Family & friends reporting their own family member for copyrighted material? Hetzner illegally snooping in customer data?
A copyright notice would go to the customer who owns/rents the server, not to the data centre owner (Hetzner).
It just doesn't fit together with copyright, so I assume another reason.
There's a big 2nd hand market for people sharing Plex servers with people for money on eBay and stuff. Idk if Plex goes out of their way to hunt those down but they are violating tos. I've seen pictures of servers with 200+ active users before. It was a bigger problem when Drive had uncapped storage because you could duplicate a blob with a click and link a new Plex instance to it and leverage Google's servers for just about everything.
So I doubt it's just families snitching. It's probably copyright holders hunting down these and other streaming websites and figuring out where the stream is coming from and reporting to Heztner. That's standard mo. They don't send you a copyright notice they send your ISP a notice and vaguely threaten them. And then your ISP tells you. That's always how it worked.
Is this maybe about the USA? As Hetzner is mainly in Germany/Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetzner) and a private person sharing copyrighted data (e.g. torrent) over their internet access, commonly leads to an information request to the ISP and then a written warning letter to the account owner, including a few hundred Euro fee to pay - just for the warning. There is of course the option to not pay and dispute the matter at court, which makes everything more complex and expensive. The warning letter with fee is just the simple option for first offenders to avoid court.
If the copyright infringement is not just private but has a business model behind it, the account/server owner can even expect a police raid in the morning hours to impound IT and secure financial statements and income, which will later determine the scope of the penalty.
Hetzner would have to hand out the server owners details upon legal request, if someone has gotten knowledge of any copyright infringement e.g. via (semi-public?) PLEX. In a case with eBay & payments, there is no simple written warning letter with small fee.
I assume copyright holders search around for those paid plex servers and then send a notice to them.
I have heard that Hetzner forward notices to customers and then they force them off the platform in x amount of days. Maybe it's a hassle to deal with or they want to keep the service reputable. Not sure why they would complain to Plex though. It might be something entirely different.