What about the security camera footage of you buying the card at walmart?
Exactly. As I said it was an experiment, and the results of the experiment was that the whole thing worked except for that part. So, one must weigh what they are doing online that will provoke law enforcement to try to "track back" a online account to the actual person that purchased the VPN service, so they could, I suppose find "me" if they REALLY wanted to, and if the Wal-Mart kept their video surveillance and records of where & when the gift card was purchased.
Otherwise, Starbucks is liable for every single illegal act of copyright infringement that is done on their free wi-fi, and every other company and entity that offers free wi-fi is similarly liable. Sure, they can prosecute a single college student in a dorm to make a big example out of them, but eventually the case law will turn because it's obvious that there is no way to apply the law equally between private ISP account holders that do not make their wi-fi signal publicly available, and those more "corporate" entities that do. And the law makes no distinction between the two, and at some point in the eventual appeals process, even if the MPAA/RIAA was able to bribe a few judges here and there to violate the spirit of the law and uphold their legal position one case at a time, eventually some judge at the Appellate or Supreme Court level is going to overturn all of those decisions as being unconstitutional due to a violation to a right of equal protection.
A legal system that unfairly prosecutes individuals and refuses to prosecute companies for the exact same "crime" is no different than a legal system that chooses to only prosecute people of one gender for a crime, and not another. Or color, or national origin, or whatever.
Meaning, these laws, in their current condition, are doomed to fail, which is why the MPAA/RIAA refuses to push hard on enforcement that is "on point" legally, as they could have the ENTIRETY of the structure thrown out. Aside - One reason I don't respect sites like Torrentfreak is because their writers haven't any substantive legal background, and write their prose aimed for 14 year olds. They fabricate hollow "causes" and trumpet all sorts of social justice BS, and completely fail to simply boil the whole thing down to basic law and it's application, and the likelihood that the legal positions adopted by digital rights advocates, and/or the legal framework that they crafted and then paid for, will be able to sustain a credible legal challenge.
It's been years. There's no credible legal challenge yet. That's not an accident. They know what will happen. This is the best they can do, and the best that they can hope for, and so like vultures they pick at the bones of the carcass that they have, rather than going out and trying to kill something fresh. They CAN'T. We have knives; long sharp knives, and glinty, needle-pointed teeth, and we wait for them hungrily to come try it. We'll eviscerate them. We'll suck the feces from their intestines and then use those intestines to bind their wives while we rape them.
Oops. Sorry. I got carried away there a bit. Back to reality....
My personal philosophy on online anonymity and electronic rights is first to learn what "low hanging fruit" is, and how that applies to how "mass law enforcement" works, and then make certain you aren't the low-hanging fruit.
