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

Reminds me of ..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The important part is the proof!

[techno-vampire]

Here's to hoping that it screws up a few of their copyright infringement lawsuits!

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.