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."

Comments

Re:Compare to legitimate drug dealers?

[fishdan]

Not quite:

From the article:

I placed this client on a number of torrent files that I suspected were monitored by BayTSP (For my own protection I don't want to identify the torrents used for this research. I used the fact that NBC is a client of BayTSP to find trackers.

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.