...I mean as business models go it's not terrible. 1) If you're still torrenting at this point you're a lifer. 2) If you're still torrenting on public trackers you're a moron. 3) The illegality of what you're doing is common knowledge, beyond dispute, and fundamentally ignored by everyone. It's probably the only crime you commit. 4) You've always heard this happens to people and the best way forward is to settle lest you end up like Jammie Thomas. 5) So you pay your breaking point and offer up more incriminating info to a law firm that you can't determine if they even have the right to negotiate. Which you'd probably worry about if it weren't for point (2). 6) So now there's a law firm with the signed confessions of morons with disposable income and a database of who did what. Best bet is to have a few of them form another firm, hit the first firm with a discovery motion and milk the cow all over again. YTS is most likely practicing entrapment but no one is going to sanction them for it. You could maybe get a class together to come after their lawyers but they don't have enough money to bother with either. If you could somehow indicate that the studios were behind this it'd be worth your time but that's a paycheck you'll never see so instead you've got penny-ante lawyers shaking down morons over the Internet. Dollars to donuts a large percentage of these letters are going to minors and an equally large percentage of these fines are being paid by their parents.
oops... but then I'm in canada and i've literally never heard of anyone getting even the most measly fine for it. Because "downloading" is not illegal here, only seeding is. We can all be mooches and ignore infringement notices because they hold no real legal power (or so do the rumours say, I'm no lawyer). Germany is a terrible place to torrent tho - I've had people I was couchsurfing at warn us not to torrent because we're on their wifi and they would be responsible for the fines. And everyone has a story about a friend of a friend getting a slap on the wrist for watching game of thrones illegally or some shit.2) If you're still torrenting on public trackers you're a moron.
I knew a guy high enough up at Warner Brothers to have a 1-letter email address. He relayed to me once how he had personally taken down Akamai for a day by using a low-cost alternative to host Moesha. He relayed to me that the safest place in the world to torrent was Time Warner Cable in Los Angeles because they never responded to a single IP request. Not because they were big on digital freedom but because they were so hopelessly disorganized that they had no actual way to determine who was on what IP address at any point other than "now."