Users who are hoping to openly download pirated content using the SpaceX’s Starlink broadband internet service should be prepared to receive a warning from the company itself.
One Starlink subscriber wanted to check if SpaceX was sticking to its anti-piracy policy or not, and that subscriber ultimately found out that it does.
No piracy with Starlink broadband
A subscriber using the alias substrate-97 posted on Reddit a warning that he received from the company, SpaceX:-
“We must insist that you and/or others using your Starlink service refrain from illegally downloading copyrighted content. Downloading copyrighted material without a license may result in the suspension or termination of your service and put you at risk of being sued by the content owner.”
According to the subscriber, substrate-97, he intentionally tried to torrent the CBS series to see how SpaceX responds.
The user has been downloading torrent files since he got Starlink, that is, for two months, but there were no notifications.
Here the interesting thing is that the warning notice only appeared when he tried to download the content owned by a Fortune 500 company. From this, Substrate-97 inferred that the warning only appeared when trying to download content owned by large organizations.
Presumably, Elon Musk’s Starlink uses the same anti-piracy mechanisms as the terrestrial ISPs. Upon detecting a user’s attempt to download a pirated movie, they send an automatic warning.
This can arise if the copyright holder tracks the torrent download of the movie file. The copyright owner may provide the ISP with a list of IP addresses associated with the pirated movie file, requiring them to take action.
However, apart from this, masking the real IP address is not that difficult, and to do so anyone can use a VPN.
In short, if you are a Starlink user then you can probably download the pirated contents, but here the difference will be that you will be able to do so privately, not openly.