The ISP would have the records to identify the repeat infringers. Or should at least. That was the problem the film industry is going after: the ISPs not doing even the bare minimum required by law to terminate infringers, even when they had been notified many times by rightsholders.
From a previous article about this case:
arstechnica.com/…/film-studios-demand-ip-addresse…
Last year, a Reddit user wrote that they received 44 emails from Frontier threatening to cut off their service due to torrent downloads, but “if they didn’t do it after 44 emails … they won’t."
Also, do IP addresses really change that often anymore, even if you aren’t paying for a static one?
QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes? But as the person you are responding to has mentioned, they’re not after the individuals, they’re after the “ISPs who did nothing in response to piracy complaints.”
Having the IP address of those users will reveal which ISP they are using.
Just run a traceroute or tracert command against any website and you can see for yourself how your connection initially goes through your ISP before branching out to the rest of the internet.