I have league pass (ordered it for TV, in Dallas so no blackouts for Rockets) but the allure of the cheaper ballstream was definitely there. Now my question is around this lawsuit where UFC successfully sued an individual $12K for viewing (not hosting) two fights. http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2014/2/11/5402548/ufc-won-steaming-lawsuit-individual The curious thing was they didn't actually use copyright law but instead used Section 553 prohibits persons from intercepting or receiving "any communications service offered over a cable system, unless specifically authorized to do so..." Section 605 proscribes the unauthorized interception and publication of any "radio communication." Basically they go after people who view live events since it intercepts a "radio communication" which going back to ball stream, seems to be very much what it's doing. Now given where ball stream is based and how unlikely NBA is to go after the company to get user information, it might not mean a big deal for users of ballstream. But this makes it very likely that I avoid such streams in the future.
You have no way of knowing how or why they caught him. My guess is he did something really, really stupid like post it on social media. As said above, finding the streamers is next to impossible because even if they do sue and get access to the site's history - all they have are IP addresses (and I imagine the sites don't store those long-term anyway). It is pretty easy to get around reasonable doubt with just an IP address. Many did it successfully in file sharing cases, as long as they didn't have stolen content on their PC it was pretty much impossible to prove. With streaming, no stolen content is stored so that risk is inherently gone.
It might be hard to prove someone is guilty of illegally streaming. That is unless they post on a public forum, a basicly signed confession of how awesome it is, and those posts are also traceable back to the same IP address.
I posted in said thread saying it wasn't worth the risk, do I now get NBA League Pass for free for a year? I wish it worked that way...
They'd have to correlate the usernames to actual known users of Ball Stream. Again, next to impossible. Some people (like myself) have distinguishable information on their profiles or signatures, but for the most part everyone is anonymous. Either way, it would take quite a bit of investigation to prove that someone is using BallStream, but it would still require the usage data of BallStream to corroborate the findings. With file sharing it was easier, because programs like Napster, Kazaa and even BitTorrent list the IP addresses of those actively sharing. They can subpoena the ISPs for the records, and then they have an address. When you have a third party in between, in this case BallStream, it is much tougher. BallStream's entire business success relies on their user's anonymity.
Which is why I think it's unlikely that NBA goes after them unless they see a significant enough of revenue loss to pursue international legal action. I think the case here was that UFC shuts down greenfeedz.com (where this guy watched), subpoena the court records and then got user idefinable information. That said, given that BallStream actually charges for it's content (and thus it's users gave up anonymity) to them, if they do get a court case against them, it's probably much easier for them to track the users of the service. At the end of the day, it was just not worth it for me.
