Slashdot Mirror
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."
Does this really surprise anyone that reads Slashdot? I've certainly come to expect tactics such as this from any media company.
Anyone who buys a VCR is CLEARLY only interested in pirating as many movies as they get their hands on, camcorder owners are only interested in filming screeners, people who run spyware scanners and firewalls obviously have something to hide, and anyone who asserts their rights is obviously doing something illegal...
Magic doesn't work in my presence. My power of disbelief is too strong.
Hanging out in a Pawn Shop. Cops know there are stolen items in there as well as legitimate items. So, anyone going into the pawn shop has to be only there for stolen items. Therefore you are served a warrant. What a bunch of A$$ Hats.
If I use my PC to connect to a BitTorrent tracker that offers legitimate free software, free media, and fair-use parody media, I still get a notice. This is as if I were to get arrested for hanging around outside a legitimate drug dealer such as CVS or Walgreens or Rite Aid.
In the spirit of slashdot, could I request that we instead get a car analogy? Preferably one involving hookers... and blackjack. You know what? Forget the analogy.
2^4 * 3 * 20929
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.
You aren't getting arrested for being in a bittorrent swarm.
Also, if you want a fair comparison, this would be like finding a notice board marked "people who buy/sell drugs", copying all the names off it, and putting yours on. Now, this isn't something you should be locked up for, but I think it's reasonable for the police to pop around and ask a few questions.
This kind of technical fiddling really doesn't help anyone, although I'm sure it helps you feel clever.
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
These torrents...what were they of exactly? If they were of Linux ISOs or other legally available material, then sure, get angry. But if you're connected to a torrent for movies, games, music etc...well, they can't tell how much you've uploaded or downloaded, can they? Whether you're connected to a torrent or not is the only truly reliable metric that there can be. I mean, if you're seen hanging around with drug dealers and talking to them in places where they tend to deal drugs, isn't it fairly safe to assume you're trying to buy drugs?
Outside of this application, a BitTorrent client designed to not do anything BitTorrent was designed to do except connect to a torrent, how many other people connect to torrents only not to (attempt to) download/upload what's on them?
So, the message here is: don't try to download copyrighted stuff and you won't get sued for downloading copyrighted stuff.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
...t'd be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs."
Hmmph - sounds like you're on the side of the Terrorists!
There once was a crazy ass country that had laws about "innocent until proven guilty", but in these Terroristic times it's just so much safer to fall back on "Suspicion of being under suspicion."
Three Squirrels
...Media Companies imply greed and incompetence.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Is coming back into vogue? It never left, the media companies have based a lot of their cases on it. Mostly they make money from the cases where their target simply doesn't have the cash to fight back. Thing is, they want to blame the net for their problems, well, it's true to an extent. Before the net and widespread cable TV, videos and DVD's, they had very little competition. Those were the glory days. Now they unfortunately for them, they are creatively bankrupt as a result of flooding the market with so much crap that a lot of people are going back to 60's, 70's and 80's music. Therefore, a lot of sales of new music suffers and kids are listening to ACDC and Led Zeppelin again.
Ditto for movies, only this time the industry is rehashing old TV shows, old movies and dusting off hackneyed plots that wouldn't see the light of day when they made fewer movies. Kind of like you see what happens to sports leagues with uncontrolled expansion. The more you try to produce in such endeavours, the closer you move to mediocrity.
So their sales suffer. It must be the web's fault. Like an old has-been blaming the new kid on the block, they whine and complain, and in this case lobby. Next, they will be demanding a tithe if you own a computer.
After all, the problem couldn't be with their product.
Yeah, that doesn't surprise us any, but it DOES provide proof. Why is that important? If you happen to get sued by them, it undermines their case!
This could, in theory, be introduced as evidence in a case and might be enough to shoot down their allegations of copyright infringement. I'd say that THAT is pretty important, wouldn't you?
Here's to hoping that it screws up a few of their copyright infringement lawsuits!
Don't vote. Don't voice your opinion to the representatives most of you didn't vote for. Don't organize a coordinated political attack on the DMCA and this is what we all get.
For dog's sake don't support the eff either. http://www.eff.org/ You wouldn't want to be marginalized as a zealot, fanatic or crackpot.
[\rant]
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
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.
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.
Yes, using any p2p software is suspect. Actually, just like if you purchased a means to store data, you should pay a tax just as if you were guilty. Guilty of what!?!? . Doesn't matter. You must be guilty of something. Like playing World of Warcraft.
IANAL, but copyright infringement must require intent, no?
No. Copyright infringement is a strict liability offense. Intent is not required.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
The system is unjust, and getting worse. I simply obey the laws I agree with, and disobey the ones I don't agree with. If the chance of getting caught is high, and the penalty stiff enough, I MIGHT not do the illegal things...but then again I might.
Can't let my 18-year-old son have a beer with dinner? Fuck you, bust me.
Can't trade DVDs in person with my friends? Fuck you, bust me.
Government using misleading statistics to incite fear (and then over reaching legislature) for issues like drunk driving and terrorism? I simply make misleading statements to police when given the opportunity. Alas, it isn't often I get that chance since I moved out of the city.
I can't imagine I'm the only freak like this.
Blar.
No, you're not missing anything. Notice that this guy had to write a special bit-torrent client in order to avoid actually doing anything wrong during his tests. Anyone connected with normal software would be either a) downloading the file and/or b) providing parts of that file to others. No one connects to a swarm just to "hang out". They are only targeting people connected to swarms that are sharing copyrighted works. I'd say the media companies method is sound, and accurate - if you're going to pretend to engage in illegal activity, you have to expect people to treat you like a criminal.
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...
Engineering is the art of compromise.
There was nothing legal about the torrents he joined with his modified client -- he was joining torrents for copyrighted material and got the notices
:)
Yet the very people who sent him the notices had agents also joined to that swarm. Applying your suggested standard would mean they were breaking the law. (actually that case is arguable, since sending false DMCA takedown notices is a violation in the DCMA too)
I could easily see the experimenter claiming he was doing exactly the same thing as BayTSP, collecting data on BitTorrent swarms without actually sharing files. I suggest that he could even offer the data collected for sale. Say like (pinkie to smirked lips) $1 Million Dollars per IP address to establish his Bono Fides.
-- 3 events that reshaped the world in the 20th century: WW1, WW2, and WWW