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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."
Your article on these BayTSP notices reminds me of when large parts of the Windows NT4/2000 source code were leaked. I created a fake "Windows Longhorn Source Code" file which was about 1.2GB in size and full of zeroes, and then shared it on eMule to see how far it spread (quite far, initially.)
A couple of weeks later I received a copyright infringement notice from my ISP for this fake file. They had been contacted by one of Microsoft's agents who obviously conducted their analyses using a method of similar incompetence to BayTSP's.
I placed this client on a number of torrent files that I suspected were monitored by BayTSP
Its not like they block everyone going to thepiratebay.org, only people who appear to be partaking in the sharing of a copyrighted work. I'm not saying this tactic is a good one, just not quite as bad as its being made out to be.I agree, but it probably won't have that much affect. Remember, in a civil suit, the plaintiff doesn't need to prove it's case "to a moral certainty and beyond a reasonable doubt" as the prosecution does in a criminal case. The standard is the more simple "preponderance of evidence." That means that if the jury feels it's more likely that the plaintiff is right than that the defendant is, they vote for the plaintiff even if they're not completely sure. This would make their claims less believable, but probably wouldn't be enough in and of itself to disprove them.
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While I believe that explaining bittorrent is complicated, surely understanding of the protocol is prerequisite to a judge making a decision in any of these cases. Once that has been established, demonstrating how this client collects swarm info, but rejects any data transfer should be a simple matter.
The harder part would more likely be convincing the judge that the user was using a torrent client in this manner, rather than for downloading. Its a good thing we're all "innocent until proven guilty." IANAL, but this should establish that the plaintiffs need to demonstrate that defendants actually distributed content. Presence in the swarm is clearly not enough for a conviction, so it certainly should not be enough for an ISP takedown.
The article's author would make for a great expert witness in any of these cases. If the only evidence being shown is the defendant's IP address in the cloud, they have nothing.
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What's to stop some people from adding a "screw BayTSP" feature to trackers and BT clients? I.E. the tracker could feed random IPs into the mix, or because TFA states that the BayTSP clients use peer exchange, they could exchange lots of phony peers with them.
This is even more a possibility due to the fact that TFA gives a number of features by which one can detect them. And when you further factor in the fact that they do such a poor job of figuring out whether or not they actually own whatever content they complain about people sharing, well...