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To Media Companies, BitTorrent Implies Guilt
kripkenstein writes "The big media companies immediately assume you are guilty by your mere presence on a BitTorrent swarm, an investigation by a university security worker reveals. Turns out companies like BayTSP (which the media companies employ) will send shutdown notices to ISPs without any evidence of copyright infringment; all they feel they need is an indication that you are reported by the tracker to be in the swarm." From the post: "For my investigation, I wrote a very simple BitTorrent client. My client sent a request to the tracker, and generally acted like a normal Bittorrent client up to sharing files. The client refused to accept downloads of, or upload copyrighted content. It obeyed the law... With just this, completely legal, BitTorrent client, I was able to get notices from BayTSP. To put this in to perspective, if BayTSP were trying to bust me for doing drugs, it'd be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs."
You're lucky to have DSL service on that landline. A lot of people live outside of DSL range and are stuck with Cable for the most part. There are various wireless solutions, but they almost invariably suck for one reason or another (a big one being that the spectrum is just plain limited). There are lots of people that are lucky to have a single broadband option where they live, so they'd better hope that the guys are dicks (Whoops, non-dicky behavior and local monopolies don't go together at all).
At least with DSL you DO have some choice. The phone companies don't want to tell you this, but they're required to share the lines with competitors because it was your tax money that put up a lot of those lines to start with. If your DSL company is jerking you around, you can often switch to Covad or Speakeasy or some other provider and tell your phone company where they can stick it. Beware that most third party DSL providers are more expensive than the phone company, but they generally have much better service and TOS to make up for it.
I read the internet for the articles.
Basically, it had the connection setup but kept it idle.
Doing nothing.
And he got a letter saying that he was downloading illegal content while it was...
...doing nothing.
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I think you mean "illegal stuff". I download copyrighted music with BitTorrent quite often and it is very legal: DGMLive has lots of great King Crimson and Robert Fripp material that you are encouraged to use BitTorrent to download after paying them. Since DGM is owned by Fripp and has rights to the King Crimson catalog: they can do that legally and even make a profit.
The phone companies don't want to tell you this, but they're required to share the lines with competitors because it was your tax money that put up a lot of those lines to start with.
Not anymore they don't. The FCC ruled about 2-3 years ago that starting at that time if the phone company made any improvement to your line at all, it no longer had to lease it to a competitor at cost.
They called this "deregulation" since, after all, it was regulations that was forcing phone companies to share.
From the article:
So it's like going up to an illegal drug dealer (because the torrent is not of a legally shared file) and asking him/her "Can I buy some crack from you." (because the client sent a request to the tracker). Even though no illegal goods changed hands, we're are definitely NOT talking about the companies disconnecting people because thry are downloading FC6 or Ctrl-Alt-Chicken via bittorrent.I'm not agreeing with the media companies here, but it's not as draconian as you are making it out to be.
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