Anyone Can Play Big Brother With BitTorrent

An anonymous reader writes "I was at the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats yesterday, and there were people from the French Institute for Computer Science who have continuously spied on most BitTorrent users on the Internet for 100 days, from a single machine. They've also identified 70% of all content providers; yes, those guys that insert the new contents into BitTorrent. As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

Comments

An Opportunity

[MarkvW]

Looks like a good way to earn a paycheck from the RIAA.

Re:An Opportunity

[poetmatt]

looks like something that won't work for those who understand that plenty of these IP addresses could be spoofed or not even uploading, or knows what I2P does, or uses VPN. This is just a list of IPs that they are assuming are 100% valid because they were listed in the tracker when the content went up. They're saying that if someone is listed on more than one tracker, it confirms who they are.

That= a bad study.

All they're saying is "We can tie an IP to a torrent", but that doesn't mean you can get anything more than that. Judges already don't accept an IP simply being tied to a torrent.

Re:An Opportunity

[feepness]

Judges already don't accept an IP simply being tied to a torrent.

What do they accept? My, err, friend wants to know!

Re:An Opportunity

[Bigjeff5]

If you can get an IP, you can narrow down the area quite a lot without the ISP's cooperation, possibly enough to force the ISP's cooperation. With ISP cooperation you can narrow an IP down to a physical address. At that point, you're screwed.

What people who don't understand how networking works is, if there is a connection then there is an IP address trail to follow. You cannot spoof an IP address and maintain a connection. You can spoof a MAC address just fine, because that is only used on the last leg of the connection, but the IP address is used the rest of the way and a link must be maintained if data is ever to get back to the source. Pretty much all IP spoofing is good for are cases where you don't want to receive the response, like a DOS attack (there are elaborate network hacks using IP spoofing, but they require direct access to the destination network). That's obviously no good for a BitTorrent connection.

What you can do is sort of "launder" the IP address to make it difficult to trace - that is, to route it through multiple NAT services. Each NAT maintains an IP trail to the previous address though, or the connection would fail, so this is only obscuring the source, not erasing the trail. Someone diligent enough (and with sufficient authority to force cooperation from various ISP's) could potentially track any sufficiently current IP address from destination back to source. Also, setting up such a route would go a long way to establishing intent to commit a crime, which will blow most of your defense out of the water in such a case.

There might be some honeybuckets in the tracker's list, which would be clever, but all it is going to do is waste a little bit of time for whoever is tracking these IP's, it's certainly no protection for anybody but the tracker (who would be monitoring the honeybucket, one would assume).

Re:An Opportunity

[Shakrai]

With ISP cooperation you can narrow an IP down to a physical address. At that point, you're screwed.

Speak for yourself. I do all my bittorrenting from open wireless networks ;)

Re:An Opportunity

[Stregano]

I lover living next to a Borders that has free wifi. Buying a wifi antenna is seriously magic for that exact purpose.

Apparently, porn is downloaded and/or watched from Borders alot.

Re:An Opportunity

[wealthychef]

This is actually an argument for buying a wireless router and leaving it open without a password. Sure, you can be owned by your malicious neighbors, but they could also be the ones doing the torrent downloads... hmm. LOL

Re:An Opportunity

[blackfrancis75]

Buying some Pringles is seriously magic for that exact purpose..

Fixed that for ya ;)

Re:An Opportunity

[Bigjeff5]

That doesn't change the fact that they can narrow it down to the access point you connect to, and its physical address. That gives you about a 150 meter range assuming conditions are excellent (it's potentially much higher if conditions are absolutely perfect, but you then become obvious for other reasons, like the giant wifi dish on your car). From there, if they ever do catch you (like if you use the same AP's over and over) and you aren't spoofing your MAC address they can directly link the IP to your machine.

Granted you've made the task much more difficult, but you still have not solved the problem.

Re:An Opportunity

[poetmatt]

You can indeed spoof an IP and maintain a connection. ever heard of a: VPN or b: a proxy, c: I2P or d: tor?

Good luck with that. None of those are new techniques by any means.

It's also one thing to identify someone just being connected to a torrent. It's another to prove distribution. You will have to connect to identify someone. None of this stuff from this report says they connected to the individuals to verify the IP addresses.

You can (if an ISP chooses to share the data) tie an IP down to a physical address and a time. That doesn't tie it to a person by itself. That's like saying - X time on Y day at Z location something happened. Since it was near you, it must be you! (accusatory). Considering more than one person lives at a location, well, do the math. If you have a wireless connection unsecured? Again, do the math.

Get real. Anyone can collect the data, but taking it to the legal level for this is basically not going to happen. Police care about this, oh, zero, unless you're doing it commercially.

Re:An Opportunity

[Bigjeff5]

If they get enough to get a search warrant, you're screwed, because even if you're masking you're MAC they'll be able to figure that out once they have access to your machine and make a positive link to the IP address.

If you use whole-drive encryption, recent court cases have shown you've opened up a whole new can of worms, and didn't really save yourself any trouble.

If you try hard enough at hiding it, you could be in a situation where the circumstantial evidence is enough to push a jury past the "reasonable doubt" threshold, in which case you've saved yourself nothing.

It really is not easy to shield yourself when you use a protocol that by its very nature must identify your machine uniquely. The best you can do is hide and make your discovery more difficult. You can't completely prevent it completely and still access the internet in any useful way.

Re:An Opportunity

[Bigjeff5]

You do realize that they can track it down to the boarders AP and will know with reasonable accuracy (within 100 meters or so) where the downloader must live, right?

Then it's just a matter of getting a search warrant to find the PC with the right MAC address. Even spoofing your MAC won't protect you at this stage, unless you catch wind of what is going on and remove all traces of spoofing from your machine.

Fortunately, the police aren't that interested in downloaders, and are the only ones with the kind of authority to get a warrant for a whole group of people at a time. Fishing for a defendant is pretty difficult for a civil action, and I can't see it happening if all you have is a list of 50 people who it may be.

Still, technically there is nothing preventing such a situation.

Re:An Opportunity

[dimeglio]

This was the idea behind bitTorrent from its inception as quick and efficient method of deploying large content to many users simultaneously. The drawback is the public display of IP addresses and yes, a simple computer, connected to several torrents, can obtain many addresses. This doesn't really mean anything except they are participating in the bitTorrent network. It does not necessarily mean any data from the torrent file is on the computer. It is simply a node unknowingly exchange inappropriate content.

Re:An Opportunity

[iammani]

Duh, Use a live cd and remove your hard disk. No traces left (the RAM would hopefully be erased by the time the try to get to you).

Re:An Opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're going to issue warrants to search every domicile within 100 meters? What if the "perp" lives in Manhattan? Do you think a judge is going to sign warrants to search ~30 apartments?

Re:An Opportunity

[Khyber]

Cantenna FTW. As long as you've got uninterrupted LOS you can leech freely!

Re:An Opportunity

[Agarax]

You do realize that your MAC address is lost at the layer 3 translation at the router, right?

Even if they pulled a list of MAC addresses from the router, there would be no way to tell which MAC address downloaded the material unless they caught you in the act.

People don't seem to realize that Bittorrent wasn't designed for anonymity or privacy. It was designed for the easy distribution of free *legal* content such as FOSS. Getting the tracker from the software's website removed the risk of downloading an infected fake.

Re:An Opportunity

[CastrTroy]

You do realize that the original downloader's MAC address isn't available from the outside internet because it changes at hop along the way. Your computer has a MAC, your router has a different MAC, your cable modem has another MAC. Your ISP gateway has yet another one. The only Mac you could end up reading with these methods would be your own, or that of your cable router.

Re:An Opportunity

[radish]

If they get enough to get a search warrant, you're screwed, because even if you're masking you're MAC they'll be able to figure that out once they have access to your machine and make a positive link to the IP address.

What would they link to which IP address? In a typical home NAT setup your MAC is only associated with your internal non-routable IP, and it never leaves your network. So again, they track your external IP to the router, but beyond that they're SOL without (a) very detailed router logs or (b) some very sophisticated packet analysis (which often doesn't work anyway).

Re:An Opportunity

[montibbalt]

If you also have a few random garbage generators installed on the system, that also makes it look more plausible.

Luckily, several of these are built into Windows itself!

Re:An Opportunity

[Shakrai]

You do realize that they can track it down to the boarders AP and will know with reasonable accuracy (within 100 meters or so) where the downloader must live, right?

High-gain antennas increase that range number quite a bit. I've personally connected to APs with a high-gain antenna on one side of the connection from more than a mile away. Others have done it from further out.

unless you catch wind of what is going on and remove all traces of spoofing from your machine.

Or use encryption.....

Re:An Opportunity

[Shakrai]

We are talking about civil actions here, not criminal ones. How would RIAA go about tying your MAC address back to you, even if you weren't smart enough to spoof it? Are they going to file discovery motions on every single house within range of the AP that was used? Heck, for that matter, how would law enforcement do it? No Judge would issue a warrant for "every computer within a 150 meter radius of this location", not for something as mundane as file sharing.

BTW, you can get a lot further than 150 meters with the right antenna setup. I've seen associations made at ranges exceeding two kilometers, under less than ideal conditions.

Re:An Opportunity

[bane2571]

An interesting point would be a swarm made up entirely of PCs recording who is in the swarm.Would each PC report the other PCs as breaking the law?

Re:An Opportunity

[cellurl]

what antenna [link please] do you use??
I need one and am clueless.
thanks

Re:An Opportunity

[cellurl]

I wish I knew some way to make people unlock their wifi like I do.
I want to ditch my cellphone and just put a laptop on a pole in the car.
Everyones just IM'ing anyway and I could do that for free with Google-voice.

The 4G greedies {verizon, ATT} are propagating paranoia simply to sell airtime...

Got an android phone?

Re:An Opportunity

[mgblst]

You can have your MAC address change every day, by a simple little script.

Re:An Opportunity

[Idiomatick]

Put your IP in a different country that doesn't like your country. Problem solved. Unless we become one big happy family this will always be an option.

Re:An Opportunity

[Dan667]

if the RIAA pays you on the same scale as they sue then they would tell you they were paying you $1 million while actually giving you $5. And that $5 would probably be copied.

Re:An Opportunity

[JoelisHere]

If you live in the UK you can say goodbye to those open wireless networks, 'cause it doesn't matter who does the downloading, it's whoever's internet connection that was used. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/04/08/132210/Digital-Economy-Bill-Passed-In-the-UK

Re:An Opportunity

[ashridah]

Newegg has a crapload of them. You just want to search for 'directional antenna'. There are ones that are rated for outdoor usage (water-tight casing) which you can just strap to a pole with line-of-site. see http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=directional+antenna

Re:An Opportunity

[Thanshin]

they would tell you they were paying you $1 million while actually giving you $5. And that $5 would probably be copied.

ffs... Stolen! Not copied, STOLEN!

Alternatively, you can use "pirated", "robbed" or "pillaged".

Cheers,
RIAA

Re:An Opportunity

[Kjella]

If you try hard enough at hiding it, you could be in a situation where the circumstantial evidence is enough to push a jury past the "reasonable doubt" threshold, in which case you've saved yourself nothing.

Almost all the copyright infringement cases are civil, so it's the boundary of "preponderance of evidence". It is very rare that circumstantial evidence is enough in a criminal trial.

Re:An Opportunity

[Thanshin]

You cannot spoof an IP address and maintain a connection.

But you can maintain a connection from a different computer than yours and another one from that to yours.

A one bot botnet.

Re:An Opportunity

[Eskarel]

None of those actually spoof your IP address, they just do some clever routing tricks, there still has to be a way for traffic to get from point a to point b, there might be another dozen points in between, but each point has to know the point before it and the point after it and so it can be traced.

As for the IP to physical address, so far it seems the legal view point is that the person who pays for the connection is responsible for its use or misuse whether they were aware or not, this defense doesn't generally work unless you've actually been hacked and there is evidence. The fact that your brother, mother, roommate, lover might have done it, no one cares.

As for the legal issue. As an ordrinary individual sure, no one cares, but if you're one of those people who publish the torrents to begin with, the cops have cared about that before.

Re:An Opportunity

[muckracer]

> Looks like a good way to earn a paycheck from the RIAA.

RIAA: "For every song you guys uncover we'll pay you $0.25, ok?"

Re:An Opportunity

[xQx]

In a criminal case, I wouldn't say you are screwed if all they have is evidence that a crime was committed from your IP address.

The unfortunate thing is that civil courts (those that the RIAA sue people in) work on the balance of probabilities, not beyond reasonable doubt.

It would be very easy for someone with some decent security and networking ability to demonstrate reasonable doubt that an IP address was not owned by the said computer at the said time; by questioning dynamic routing, log file security, ISP wireless networks or IP address misallocation... Or that the computer wasn't controlled by the individual in question (ie. rootkits, virus's) or even that the internet connection was being used by someone else (open wireless, or WAP insecurities)

That's assuming a DSL or Cable network... Unless Satellite network providers have seriously updated their kit in the past few years, they are as open as your proverbial mum's legs - Anyone with an ISP that didn't do source-address filtering could steal an IP in someone elses Satellite range and configure their satellite CPE to grab the down-channel. (That actually could be argued in a balance of probabilities case; but who's on Satellite these days in the reach of the RIAA anyway?)

However, in a civil court, they only have to argue that it was MORE LIKELY that it was you than anyone else, not REASONABLY POSSIBLE THAT IT WAS NOT YOU.

Of course, this is all much harder to argue if the police have ceased a computer that is full of movies and mp3s that were created over a period of months during times that you were home... Then, you're screwed.

I'd be interested to see one of these cases being argued entirely on IP and TORRENT 'evidence' ... Surely if that were all that the RIAA were relying on, a good lawyer would call it circumstantial evidence... Most cases seem to involve a ceased computer with hundreds of movies or MP3s.

I'd say encrypt... but it seems the UK has passed laws that force you to reveal encryption passwords if you're charged with terrorism... and hell, if you're encrypting you MUST be a terrorist. ... Conversely, you would hope that the RIAA or MPAA would give up and move on to the next case if they raided your house and didn't find anything to back up the IP Address evidence, after all, they can probably find a nice big library of MP3's on the person's computer who is next on the list of suspect IP's. - so.... Encrypt. Religiously.

Re:An Opportunity

[mrogers]

You can (if an ISP chooses to share the data) tie an IP down to a physical address and a time. That doesn't tie it to a person by itself.

Another recent paper by the same research group shows that it's often possible to identify an individual using BitTorrent through Tor, because the BitTorrent protocol leaks their true IP address, and their other traffic (such as webmail) passes through the same Tor tunnel as their BitTorrent traffic.

Re:An Opportunity

[darthflo]

There might be some honeybuckets in the tracker's list

The big name trackers have, for some time now, been sending random IP addresses out in every response. It's usually one to three in 50, which isn't a lot, but enough for some plausible deniability. With multiple trackers confirming a peer's address, that plausibility shrinks to very close to zero. Still, receiving a peer's address from a tracker hasn't been any evidence in quite a bit.

Re:An Opportunity

[darthflo]

For subscribers, that's true. Not for communications providers, though. Yesterday's /. story has some additional discussion.

Re:An Opportunity

[darthflo]

Without your knowledge, they'd track down the Borders' IP address to the store, drive up to it, have a cup of coffee with a laptop hooked up to the store wifi, wait for the torrenting to continue, gather your internal IP address, it's corresponding MAC address and, with some additional equipment might even track down the direction your signal originates from.
Then, they'd take a stroll in that direction, check neighboring apartments for cantennas strapped in front of windows and similar constructions. Upon finding one, a couple of CIA (Copyright Inquisition Agency) agents would fly by in a couple of black hawks and, guns blazing, join you for tea, crumbs and torrenting.

Re:An Opportunity

[Krneki]

I don't know about US, but in mine in to get the person name associated with the IP you need a judge order. And you won't get one unless you are charged with a criminal activity.

Sharing files for non profit reason is not a criminal activity, hence you will never get the name of the person using bitttorrent.

Re:An Opportunity

[MtlDty]

Thats exactly what I do. And I dont even spoof my MAC, I just ensure that the router is configured to only accept connections from my MAC, which I realise is pretty flimsy security. It means that the bad guys are *forced* to spoof my MAC for their illegal torrenting needs - and therefore it would be hard to prove WHO is doing the illegal torrenting (though of course I probably become suspect #1)

Re:An Opportunity

[AmiMoJo]

a: VPN

This got me thinking. Why doesn't the ISP set up a free VPN service for it's customers? That way when presented with an IP address it will be the one of their own VPN server and they would have no way of tracing it back to an individual connection.

It assumes they don't log at the TCP/IP connection level which seems reasonable as that amount of data would very quickly mount up to unreasonable levels.

Re:An Opportunity

[daybot]

With ISP cooperation you can narrow an IP down to a physical address. At that point, you're screwed.

Speak for yourself. I do all my bittorrenting from open wireless networks ;)

With ISP cooperation you can narrow an IP down to a physical address. At that point, your neighbours are screwed.

Fixed.

Re:An Opportunity

[Xest]

You seem to have a good grasp of the technical aspects, but a severe lack of the legal aspects.

The issue is that once you've got an address, then what? In most countries you can't simply hold the subscriber responsible for an illegal act, at best the ISP can hold them responsible for breaching their ISPs subscriber agreement and cut them off after which they go to an ISP.

Even if they get the police to issue a search warrant and search the house, then what next? They can find a computer with content on it, but they have to prove the content wasn't put there via a remote access trojan, they have to prove it wasn't copied through your wireless network to an open share on your computer, they have to prove that you were the person who downloaded the content. Even if they do forensics on the keyboard they may find other people's fingerprints there, but even then can they prove the keyboard hadn't merely been switched?

The fact is, short of catching you red handed there's absolutely no way to conclusively tie someone to a digital crime committed over the internet. Despite this many people get prosecuted, but it's often because they and their lawyers don't have an understanding of the technicalities involved in trying to prove someone guilty of a computer crime and so fail to put their case across, however the closest case to demonstrating was probably this one:

http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/breaking-craig-meehan-guilty-but.4495490.jp

Whilst it's almost certain the guy was guilty, what's interesting in this case is the circumstances in which he was discovered, and the judges comments on why he chose to rule against him. Specifically, he was only discovered because his computer was seized as the result of another separate investigation, and that the evidence that mattered was the times which those images were downloaded at demonstrating they were downloaded when he was not at work. So if you were to set downloads going remotely, using an unlogged piece of software, whilst you're at work, or if you also demonstrated the unreliability of time stamps on computer files it's very likely he could well have ended up getting away with it. The Judge had to rely on what came down to mistakes due to a lack of technical understanding on behalf of the defendant.

Of course, all this isn't too relevant to a civil case, the standards of evidence required there are lower, but similarly I think the chance of the police being involved in getting a court order for a search warranty over a few movies and MP3s is also unlikely.

The issue is, you're somewhat right in your analysis of how easy it is to follow an IP trail (with some caveats- covered below), but you're missing the weak point- connecting the IP trail to the perpertrator of the crime.

The caveats to your comments on tracking an IP are that you make the assumption that interim systems log all connections- you point out that someone can hop between routers to mask their IP and then suggest that if there is enough cooperation of IPs, the trail can simply be traced back, but that's only true if all those connections are logged. If I connect to a US torrent client, via a VPN connection to a country that doesn't demand ISPs such as the VPN provider log everything then any attempts to track this will stop at the VPN provider, as there's simply no way to tell which way the connection went then. This is similar to the situation of wireless- if someone has home wireless, and another person connects to it and leeches torrents through their wireless router, a device which rarely logs connections, then the buck is going to stop at the wireless router. There's no way even the police can reasonably say that the owner of the internet connection is responsible if they search his hard drive and find nothing, and if he has an open or low security access point, they wouldn't stand a chance in court.

So I think many appreciate it's true that you're always

Re:An Opportunity

[gr8dude]

What about networks such as TOR, which are designed to make it impossible to track the originating host of a request?

Also, what if one redirects their requests through hosts that are located in countries outside the jurisdiction of the authority that wants to track the person?

Re:An Opportunity

[GooberToo]

Sharing files for non profit reason is not a criminal activity, hence you will never get the name of the person using bitttorrent.

1. Clearly you've not been following trends over the last decade.
2. Unless your ISP is accepting liability for all of your Internet use, they have no idea if your use is infringing or not.
3. Its not likely an ISP is going to accept legal liability for your file sharing. As such, since sharing is potentially illegal, in most places its trivial to obtain the required information and ISPs are more than happy to corporate when asked and even more so when presented with a warrant.
4. Don't hold your breath.

Re:An Opportunity

[Shotgun]

Funny, I just use /.

Re:An Opportunity

[Shotgun]

I had a situation where a kid was using Skype to make bomb threat phone calls to the middle school my son attended. The kid had a history of the same behavior and could make a reasonable guess that it was the kids voice on the phone. There was also a phone call that reported a gun fight at my house. I was working in the garage when the police showed up with handguns and rifles locked and loaded.

There wasn't enough evidence to support the issuance of a warrant to get the call records from Skype. And that was for an actual bomb threat that shut down a school and a call that had police speeding through town and brandishing loaded weapons.

I'm sure the RIAA can by themselves some search warrants, but they're likely to go broke if they do more than make some example arrests.

Re:An Opportunity

[Lumpy]

Bah. Easy to do what you say I cant do.

Download torrents from someone elses internet.
Download from starbucks.
Download from Other open accesspoints.

If I use a different location each time the ain't catching me.

This is old skool hacker 100 tactics here. Rule 1 YOU DONT HACK FROM HOME..

In the USA you dont TORRENT FROM HOME. instantly you no longer have to worry about this.

I can give other ways to do this as well, but they are trivial and highly illegal (hacking a linux server and installing a bittorrent app there, etc....)

It's easy to hide completely from someone and use bittorrent.

Re:An Opportunity

[Lumpy]

I have a old dish network antenna with a home made biquad at the feedpoint. I can get a solid wifi connection from over 1 mile away if I have line of sight. It will burn through trees and snag a decent connection from 1/2 mile away. I installed one in the attic of a friend house, it fires through the wood and siding and makes a solid connection to a AP that is 5 blocks away at his sisters home. 100% hidden.

metal in the Fresnel zone causes range issues, but not too bad.

Re:An Opportunity

[Lumpy]

Hacked or payload PC at a location.

What? dont think it's possible? I can set up a sheeva plug that will go unnoticed in any business for years that will act as a hacking/torrenting point add in a 32 gig SDHC and I can have it even do the torrenting for me.

spread a few of these around town or even other towns and you can easily create a network of control points that will hide for you. at only $100.00 a pop

It would be trivial to make them hide from local IT until nightfall and also self destruct from tampering. (link went dead? erase it's self.) add a small battery and make it self erase if power is lost... etc... there is a ton of room inside them for that and stick a epson or HP sticker on it and nobody would give it a second look.

Re:An Opportunity

[CarpetShark]

You forgot "raped". Pretty sure that word has been tried at least once. By a politician, wasn't it?

Re:An Opportunity

[endymion.nz]

I'm pretty sure you just gotta move the dish a few cm left or right... helps if you live on a hill and have a wireless card that allows you to increase the output power.

Re:An Opportunity

[chris_7d0h]

Why bother with trying to link a MAC to a public IP address and how would you even do that? Provided the GP uses some NAT box, like take-your-pick model of a home router/wifi-AP combo at Best Buy, all the MAC will tell the storm troopers is that some machine with a MAC got an internal IP address from the router. It does not tell the troopers that this NATed IP actually downloaded a given torrent.

However, if the troopers find a file with the same message digest on one of the drives confiscated from the GP's home, then it'd be pretty darn hard to sell the court the tale that "John Doe with his MadWiFi skillz passed by the window and is the culprit you should be looking for". MAC addresses have nothing to do with it.

Copyright laws.

[headkase]

If copyright law was more sane we wouldn't have to argue so much about privacy.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Anonymous Coward]

interesting yet saddening to see someone actually admit that they only give a fuck about privacy because they don't want to get in trouble for all the shit they steal.

Re:Copyright laws.

[DarkKnightRadick]

I care about privacy and I only use bit torrent for legitimate purposes.

Re:Copyright laws.

[loufoque]

First off, Copyright infringement is not theft.

Secondly, transmitting copyrighted material over a computer network is not necessarily copyright infringement, even if copyright holders would like it to be.

Re:Copyright laws.

[jeffmeden]

Is privacy invaded because of people pursuing copyright violators, or is privacy pursued because people want to evade copyright enforcers? Seems that if you decide it's the latter you are prepared to give away the privacy of many (those who arent copyright thieves) for the protection of the few (those that own IP that is being copied)...

You know giving up the first little bit is always the easiest...

Re:Copyright laws.

[Red Flayer]

I dunno about that.

Privacy isn't just about keeping your illegal activities hidden from an authority that can punish you for those activities. I don't want anyone to be able to glean the details of my day-to-day habits, be they bittorent use, physical locations, or anything else. Even if we had NO copyright laws, I'd still have a problem with people being able to track my actions. And FWIW, I have nothing to hide, AFAIK[1], other than routinely exceeding the speed limit in my car. I refuse on principle to violate copyrights.

[1] the AFAIK is a big problem. There's probably a good chance I violate some law or other occasionally, but I have no idea since there are so many laws on the books. But that just feeds into the privacy issue... I'm no Randian, but the massive amount of laws we have on the books that make innocuous behavior illegal means that I'm probably a criminal without knowing it. The best way to protect against this extant situation is to make sure I maintain the privacy of my activity. Better not to have that situation in the first place, but that's a topic for a different discussion.

Re:Copyright laws.

[bonch]

You do realize that the GPL is a copyright license, right? Copyright law is fine. Slashdot is mostly full of pirates who have invented justifications so they don't feel guilty. The moment it's mentioned that people are ripping others off, someone immediately bashes the RIAA, copyright law, "greedy" corporations, etc. Someone else is always portrayed as the bad guy so that the pirate no longer feels like one.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Anonymous Coward]

Same AC here. I didn't say that everyone only cares about privacy because they don't want to get caught doing anything illegal, I said it was interesting and saddening to see one person admit as such. I personally don't download anything illegally anymore, though i'll admit that at one time i did so often and freely. i do however care deeply about my right to privacy. and you have to admit that there are a large number of people jumping on the internet privacy bandwagon, yet they have absolutely no real belief or feelings about the cause. they simply like stealing shit, and are scared that they're going to get caught, so they scream privacy violation till they're blue in the face. and honestly, i feel this is one of the biggest threats to privacy we currently face, because the actions of these cheap childish assholes degrade the cause in its entirety. to the average person on the street privacy advocate is becoming synonymous with pirate and various agencies and corporations are more than happy to fuel that fire.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

And most Playboy readers only buy them for the articles.

Re:Copyright laws.

[JoeBuck]

If the transmission is done with the permission of the copyright holder (either explicitly or because of a license), it's not infringement. And in some circumstances fair use (some countries call it "fair dealing") applies. But clearly most BT traffic is copyright infringement.

Re:Copyright laws.

[DarkKnightRadick]

I wouldn't know, but I don't like what you are implying.

Re:Copyright laws.

[commodore64_love]

I don't lie to myself.

I steal. Rather than go out and buy the DVDs, I steal the content. And no I don't care. Movie companies steal from their workers all the time ("Sorry Mr. Cameron, actors, and crew... Titanic made no profit, so your profit share check will be zero."). If the movie is any good (like Star Trek) then I will buy it.

Re:Copyright laws.

[biryokumaru]

Here's a thought experiment:

If I invent a replicator and make an exact, atom by atom copy (yes, this would be impossible space magic, just go with me here) of something with a copyright on it, is that copyright infringement?

If yes, then how can an exact digital copy of a series of 1's and 0's with a copyright on them not be copyright infringement?

Note: this wasn't really the conclusion I was aiming for... stupid thought experiment...

Re:Copyright laws.

[DarkKnightRadick]

I know that's not what you said. I wasn't trying to imply that was what you were implying.

I agree 100% with you.

Re:Copyright laws.

[betterunixthanunix]

You are lying to yourself. Copying something is not the same as stealing it; there is a fundamental difference, in that theft involves depriving someone else of the thing that is stolen, whereas copying creates more of whatever that thing is. Please, the copyright lobbyists' propaganda is bad enough, we don't need non-lobbyists to start spreading it.

Re:Copyright laws.

[calmofthestorm]

If I could magically trade the ability to pirate things for flawless DRM (impossible to circumvent but never infringes on any of your rights) and privacy, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

If anything, I'm more afraid that piracy is going to lead to the destruction of our privacy, which is worth far more to me.

Re:Copyright laws.

[calmofthestorm]

"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
-- H. L. Mencken

Re:Copyright laws.

[Chirs]

The enlightened argument is not that the act of copying is theft, but that illegal copying deprives the copyright owner of monetary gains which would otherwise have been earned.

It is those monetary gains which have effectively been "stolen", not the item itself.

Of course this assumes that the "thief" would have bought the item had they not copied it.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Arker]

Once again, copyright infringement is NOT stealing. Nor is copying copyrighted data necessarily and always copyright infringement. Finally, it's better to be on the right side for the wrong reasons than to be on the wrong side entirely.

Re:Copyright laws.

[kirillian]

Funny how much has to be assumed for the argument to be valid...

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

YOU are denying the person who created the content the sale. YOU have denied them the money they would have made. YOU have TAKEN from them something that was rightfully theirs. THE SALE.

<sarcasm>Just think of how much you've stolen by not-buying all those CDs you don't own! You must owe the RIAA more than the GDP of the United States by now!</sarcasm>

Choosing not to buy something is not theft. No one owns "THE SALE". They own their physical property, because it is scarce. And they have not been deprived of that property.

Re:Copyright laws.

[nmb3000]

I'm not going to get into the copyright violation vs theft argument (again), but this is just plain WRONG. Drivel like this reeks of **AA and artist entitlement whining.

YOU are denying the person who created the content the sale.

No, because I had no plans on buying whatever it was I'm downloading. If I can get X for free, I'll grab it. If I can't, I'll do without. No sale lost.

YOU have denied them the money they would have made.

They wouldn't have made any money, ergo I denied them nothing.

YOU have TAKEN from them something that was rightfully theirs. THE SALE.

Again, there was no sale to be made. 0 - 0 = 0.

If you want to argue on the basis of morals then I imagine most people would agree that violating a (sane) copyright is wrong. When you start talking about 120-year old copyrights or trying to prevent what most feel is fair use then people will start to disagree.

Regardless of all that, the monetary value of a potential sale is exactly $0.00.

Re:Copyright laws.

[kirillian]

Slashdot is also full of adults who have never created anything of value in their lives and see nothing wrong with taking compensation for sitting on their arses. The kids are just tired of feeling like they are paying for something that they never get. I feel for them.

Re:Copyright laws.

[loufoque]

If I invent a replicator and make an exact, atom by atom copy (yes, this would be impossible space magic, just go with me here) of something with a copyright on it, is that copyright infringement?

Ironically enough, while copyright law explicitly makes copying copyrighted material without the copyright holder permission an act of counterfeit, the act of copying itself isn't really so because it nearly-always falls under the fair use/fair dealing/private use exceptions; after all, what you do at home with your own stuff has nothing to do with the copyright holders (at least in most countries).

The real potential for illegal action is distribution of said copies, or acquisition thereof.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Barrinmw]

Actually, I did a report in High School on the creation of Playboy and this one girl got all pissy at me for it and said how it was degrading to women and everything. I told her that people do buy it for the articles too and she was like, Yeah who? My answer was the 10,000 blind people who order the braile edition. That shut her up pretty good.

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

The enlightened argument is not that the act of copying is theft, but that illegal copying deprives the copyright owner of monetary gains which would otherwise have been earned.

So does simply choosing to go without. Should that be illegal now as well?

You can't "steal" the expectation of income. Only that which is owned is subject to theft, and theft only occurs when one is deprived of its use. If one cannot be deprived of the use of a thing—as is the case for everything subject to copyright, since mere duplication cannot deprive anyone of use of the original copy—then that thing cannot be stolen.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Jhon]

> YOU have denied them the money they would have made.

They wouldn't have made any money, ergo I denied them nothing.

While I agree with your overall point, I think this one is inaccurate. I don't believe they would have made money off *YOU* (or anyone infringing on a copyright), but I do believe the overall value is diminished. You've essentially made "more" of something -- and if there's "more" of something, it's worth less than if it's scarce. So, you MAY be denying them value on future sales -- but certainly not a sale to *YOU*.

Re:Copyright laws.

[vxice]

so when I copy all your private information that isn't theft either right?

Re:Copyright laws.

[N. Criss]

Cartoon on YouTube: "Copying Is Not Theft" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeTybKL1pM4

Re:Copyright laws.

[Zen Hash]

Here's a thought experiment:

If I invent a replicator and make an exact, atom by atom copy (yes, this would be impossible space magic, just go with me here) of something with a copyright on it, is that copyright infringement?

If yes, then how can an exact digital copy of a series of 1's and 0's with a copyright on them not be copyright infringement?

Note: this wasn't really the conclusion I was aiming for... stupid thought experiment...

Both would be copyright infringement. I don't know who said it wouldn't be. It doesn't even have to be an exact duplicate to be copyright infringement. The GP was simply pointing out that copyright infringement is not theft. Theft is when the item is removed from its original owner's possession.

Here's a couple side by side examples:

If you walk into a shop, grab a DVD, and sneak it out without paying for it, then you have committed theft. You have stolen the item from the shop.

If someone goes into the shop and purchases that DVD, creates an ISO of it on their home computer, and sends it to you over the internet, then you have committed copyright infringement. You have infringed upon the rights of whoever holds the copyright over it. They are in control of how copies of the item are allowed to be produced, and you disobeyed them.

Re:Copyright laws.

[klapaucjusz]

interesting yet saddening to see someone actually admit that they only give a fuck about privacy because they don't want to get in trouble for all the shit they steal.

If you really don't care about privacy except where you are infringing, please publish your browsing history for the last two weeks, censoring only stuff that is illegal in your locale.

Re:Copyright laws.

[xwizbt]

This links to the old philosophical trolley argument. You know - the one where you have the choice of *allowing* five people to die, or *choosing* to kill one person, with the aim of saving five. If we apply your argument correctly, you can turn your back, allow the five people to die and smugly claim you've saved a life. After all, a death you could have prevented isn't actually a death.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Jhon]

You can't "steal" the expectation of income.

No you cant -- but the GP brought up an excellent point.

A copyright holder as the rights to a "thing", and demands payment for you to have/use that thing. You copy/use the thing without payment. You now have it. There is now an extra "thing" out there for which the copyright holder has not been paid. You got value at his expense.

So, if the expectation is that if his intellectual property or whatever is *USED* on the condition of payment, then it's a fair argument that he lost "expectation of income" from you from your direct actions. It's not "theft" -- but arguably an intellectually similar act.

I believe there's also a good argument to be made that the act of violating copyrights devalues the intellectual property. If it's "easier" to get free, then less will buy. You can cite one-offs, but there will be a percentage who WOULD have purchased the IP had it not been available for free or there were higher risks and penalties for getting caught.

Re:Copyright laws.

[thesandtiger]

It's worse than that: they steal from us, the public.

Back when copyrights were first codified into law, there was a deal:

We, the people, gave protections to people who created works so that they could profit from those works, but in exchange for those protections, the creators of the works agreed to give us, the people, their work after a certain timeframe had passed.

Works may now - if the copyright holder wishes - no longer come into the public domain because copyright holders are corporations who are solely interested in making a profit, and who use their political influence (money) to ensure that copyright NEVER expires.

While it certainly won't give me any kind of legal defense, I simply do not care about copyright because the very basis for it has been completely violated by the holders of that copyright.

If we go back to the original law - life of the initial copyright holder + a small extension past that, and only real-live human beings can be considered to be initial copyright holders - I will give up piracy. Until then, I really don't consider copyright law to be valid because the fundamental premise of it: you get yours, we get ours, has now become "they get theirs, everyone else gets fucked."

Copyright no longer benefits anyone but the copyright holder, and that is NOT what it was intended to do.

Re:Copyright laws.

[loufoque]

But clearly most BT traffic is copyright infringement.

Clearly most road traffic is, too. Aren't all those trucks and cars full of copyrighted material?

Re:Copyright laws.

[ender8282]

In some (not all) cases the content owner is deprived of a sale. That sale would likely have put money into the pocket of the content owner. In that case the content owner has been stolen from. Don't get me wrong; I don't for a moment believe that EVERY download is a lost sale. If a person downloads something that they would have otherwise ended up buying, then the content owner has been deprived of a sale and has been stolen from. The flip side is that if after downloading content a person ends up purchasing the content because of the 'preview' they have added a sale. While I don't have any proof I believe that the former far exceeds the later.

Re:Copyright laws.

[biryokumaru]

Firstly, thank you for your well-worded and intelligent response. Unfortunately, it was the "transmitting copyrighted material over a computer network is not necessarily copyright infringement" part that I was getting at there. Isn't that just making a copy, regardless of what the specific protocol is?

Re:Copyright laws.

[Ant P.]

I think he's implying he's paranoid and delusional, believing everyone in the world around him is a sarcastic liar.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

Just like when you sneak into the drive in's in the trunk of your car. You watched the movie for free.

If the creator of the content wanted you to be able to watch the movie for free, he would have put it up for FREE download. See the word free there. That is the point. He fully expected the sale to anyone that WATCHED that movie.

It's theft.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Arker]

I think you meant to say, copyright infringement is not theft. Stealing is not limited to physical property; plagiarism is considered stealing (the credit for) words, for example. Legal definition of 'steal' is irrelevant, if U.S. law defines stealing at all. It does define 'theft'.

Stealing and theft are synonyms. See stealing: S: (n) larceny, theft, thievery, thieving, stealing (the act of taking something from someone unlawfully.

"Stealing credit" makes sense. It's a more metaphorical application, but you are still *taking* something. "Stealing copyright" could be used similarly, but it would refer to what SCO/Caldera is attempting to do in court, not to some kid downloading a song. He is not taking anything from anyone, at most he is violating a statute that granted someone else a monopoly on reproducion of a particular pattern.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

The argument of advertisement does not stand. That is an arangement made in advance with the full knowledge of the creator of the content.

Thank you for the comment about the AC

Re:Copyright laws.

[QRDeNameland]

so when I copy all your private information that isn't theft either right?

Bad analogy. While technically it's not truly "theft" either as you are not denying me the use of my private information, the fact of the matter is that you must violate my privacy and trespass my property (in either a real or virtual sense) in order to obtain it. It's the difference between copying and distributing a published book vs. doing the same with someone's private diary. Even if you believe both acts of copying/distribution are wrong, they are wrong for very different reasons.

Re:Copyright laws.

[A. Bosch]

While I also agree with the GP poster, I'm not sure that downloading decreases value. It might actually increase value from increased mind share of the downloaded item. I might be more likely to go to a concert of a group whose music I've downloaded, for example. At least, I'll be more inclined to discuss the group with my friends, or purchase a future album.

Re:Copyright laws.

[The_mad_linguist]

Q: Did bob steal this car?

http://www.angryflower.com/supergo.html

A: No, but he's being a dick.

Re:Copyright laws.

[hitmark]

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
-- Voltaire

Re:Copyright laws.

[Mad Leper]

If you create something and decide to sell it, and I proceed to make copies of it (without your consent) and give it away for free then am I not depriving you of income by forcing the value of your goods (or service) to zero?

Sounds like a kind of theft to me.

Re:Copyright laws.

[mlts]

This is something I agree with. Back in the early 1990s when hard disks were about 40-100 megs on average, while CD-ROMs had a lot more space, not many people bothered pirating, just because the space wasn't there.

However, with each generation of DRM system, it becomes more and more intrusive, and the true people who benefit are the pirates. The pirates don't have to worry about keeping a constant Internet connection, low level drivers, activation servers which may get turned off, or worry that when CD-ROM drives become obsolete like 3.5" floppies, that their games will stop running.

Maybe one idea to have is a progressive DRM system which lessens over time. For example, on release day, a game would use activation and a CD key. Next fiscal quarter when results on sales numbers are irrelevant, the activation is patched out, and the activation servers are freed up. When the game is about to be dropped from support, the CD key is patched out with the last patch for the game. By the time the game is obsolete, cracks will abound anyway, so might as well have a game company at least have their work be de-marketed with some grace with the final patch to the game.

Re:Copyright laws.

[blackraven14250]

It's a more metaphorical application, but you are still *taking* something.

Since it's basically intellectual property that you're stealing when you take credit, you can't distinguish between stealing credit for a work and stealing a copy of a work.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Anonymous Coward]

There is nothing left to even consider of your reply

100% of the time someone says something like this, what they really mean is "I can't think of anything that will refute your point, but I'm not honest enough to admit it". There has never been an exception.

Re:Copyright laws.

[betterunixthanunix]

"In some (not all) cases the content owner is deprived of a sale."

Except that it is really impossible to prove such a thing. If we are willing to set aside the fact that the sale never really existed (how can you be deprived of something that does not exist), there are a lot of confounding factors. The downloader might have decided to go out to a store to buy the media, had it not been available for download, and then seen something better to spend money on, and not purchase the media. Or, perhaps the downloader never even had the money to spend on the media, and the sale never even had a chance of happening. Or perhaps the media was not even available to purchase, and the copyright holder did not feel like spending the money on making further copies.

Even if we ignore all of the above, there is a new problem with declare "deprivation of sales" to be a form of theft. Maybe my business attracts more customers than your business -- does that now make me a thief, because I am depriving you of the sales you would have had if I had not been in business? What if I go around telling people not to buy your products -- is that thievery too?

This is the problem with trying to claim that imaginary things like "potential sales" can be "stolen." In general, "stealing" something that is intangible, whether it is some sort of media, or potential sales, or an idea, or whatever else, is illogical. The term "theft" is only used by people who want "copyright" to be considered the equivalent of "real estate," which it was never intended to be.

Re:Copyright laws.

[w0mprat]

If I pirate something I would not have otherwise purchased, not only has no theft taken place, but no sale has been denied. If I pirate something then decide its worth purchasing, the net result may be I buy more, because I pirate. I may be a happier customer for almost never buying a dud.

People frequently trade terabyte-range external hard drives with entire collections now. Beautifully untraceable.

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

If you sneak into a drive-in then you're trespassing, violating the drive-in owner's property rights in the physical land. If you can see and/or hear the movie without trespassing then no, you haven't stolen anything. Care to try again?

What the content producer wanted, or expected, is not the issue. No one is obligated to ensure that others get what they want or expect. They are only obligated to avoid preventing others from making use of their property. Which copyright enforcement—not copyright infringement—does. Copyright enforcement is immoral; infringement is neutral.

Re:Copyright laws.

[betterunixthanunix]

"He fully expected the sale to anyone that WATCHED that movie."

Then he was delusional and never really understood copyrights. First of all, copyright law does not grant you control over who gets to view your work, it only grants you a limited measure of control over who is allowed to make copies of your work. Second, copyrights do not grant or guarantee a right to sell, nor does it guarantee that a copyright holder will ever see monetary gain from the copyright.

Your argument is tantamount to claiming that reselling books is theft, because the copyright holder did not gain a second sale. Selling a used book is legal, ethical, and desirable for society, and there is a long history of book sharing and reselling.

Re:Copyright laws.

[calmofthestorm]

Incidentally I never seem to play games (purchased or pirated) within a year or so of their release.

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

If you're arguing that copyright could be transmuted into a contract governing access to the physical copy—not the abstract pattern which copyright currently covers—then I agree with you in theory but do not believe this transmutation to be likely, or effective. The contract would be similar to an NDA, with the same weaknesses. NDAs are only effective when distribution of the information is limited; copyright must cover the case where content is to be distributed to the public at large. Enforcement (tracking) costs would be high, and recovery limited to the individual who first broke the contract. Buyers would be skeptical of agreeing to formal contracts over a mere few hours of entertainment. Content providers are welcome to try it, but I don't think it would work.

If you are instead saying that there is a property right in the value of a secret, such that duplication (devaluation) becomes a violation of the owner's property rights—just think about that for a moment. That would mean that all production (and all decreases in demand) must violate the property rights of existing owners in the values of their goods. This way lies madness.

Property rights can only apply consistently to the goods themselves, not their values.

However, even taking the value-as-property approach, the change in market value of that copy, or any additional copies, is no different than if I had simply decided against having/using the "thing" entirely, or even created something which competes against it. If not-buying and competition do not infringe on this "property right" in the value of the good, then neither can the making of a copy, since the effect on the value is identical.

On the other hand, accepting that property rights apply to the goods themselves rather than their market values, the statement "You got value at his expense" is false; I did receive value, but there was no expense to him. He has exactly as much as he had before: the original copy.

Finally, if there is no objective harm then force is not a proportional, or appropriate, response. (Speak up if you disagree...) A rule-of-thumb in determining the existence of objective harm is thus: if you could not determine, by any theoretical means, that an action had taken place simply by observing your own property, then that action does not objectively harm you. When the "property" is the pattern embedded in some physical object, and the action mere duplication, then there is no change in your "property" which would indicate that the action had taken place. Ergo, there is no objective harm, and no justification for the use of force.

After all, what is the difference in outcome which would justify making the production of a deliberate copy illegal, but not the creation of an identical copy by random convergence? Surely the "harm" is the same in either case? Accidental harm is still harm, but accidental creation of a copy is not considered copyright infringement.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

He never intended to purchase the content. It wouldn't matter if he thought the content was the greatest thing sence bread. He wasn't going to compensate the person that created it. He admited it.

1). He doesn't care how much it cost to create the product, he will not compensate the people.

2). He does not care how many people rely on the sales of the content for a living, he will not copensate them.

What else is there to talk about. He is a theif. From the moment he logged on he was planning on stealing.

There is nothing else to talk about.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

After I posted that, I knew that was a bull shit argument.

5 of us watched the movie. Not all of us paid for the movie, only I did.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

Funny how you will be the first to complain because you are not compensated for your work, but will be the first to steal from others work.

Thats what it comes down to now doesn't it.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

What is content? Seriously. What is content.

Compiled code, which in the code I have license agreements. Unless my licesne says free for use, it is theft to take it.

Music. Someone wrote the music. Someone performed the music. Someone paid for the equipment to record the music. Someone paid for marketing of the music. Someone paid for the production of the music. You downloaded it. All of that money was spent with a return on investment fully expected. sales. You took from that by your illegal download.

Movies, see music.

Every single download had to be created and produced to be delivered. It cost money to do that. Old school delivery methods being the fool. Point beiong though. I put out the money to create and deliver the content. You stole from me when you downloaded it without compensation or my permission.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

Going without is making the decesion to not own a copy of the material. By you downloading, you now have in your posession a copy of the material which you never purchased.

Stealing

Re:Copyright laws.

[Time_Ngler]

If you enjoyed the content, it obviously is at least somewhat valuable to you. Maybe not the purchase price, but I don't believe you can plausibly say that the content was worth nothing (for most content at least).

If you want to argue on the basis of morals then I imagine most people would agree that violating a (sane) copyright is wrong. When you start talking about 120-year old copyrights or trying to prevent what most feel is fair use then people will start to disagree.

If you are downloading 120 year old content, then sure. But if you downloading something that would fall under sane copyright law, how does that excuse you?

Re:Copyright laws.

[betterunixthanunix]

You might have missed the point about "possible future sales that might help pay for something" not being something people are entitled to? Really, the fact that something costs money which may not be recuperated by its creator has nothing to do with "theft."

Re:Copyright laws.

[aeoo]

Copyright terms are way too long. The original 14 years plus a 14 year extension was sane. So originally, someone who republished the word after 15 years (assuming no extension was filed) was not a thief. It was not a criminal. That behavior later got unfairly criminalized. So calling someone a "thief" in a case like this is bad, because one's a "thief" only due to a bad law.

Since the parent was complaining about the flaws in Copyright law, I'm assuming the parent didn't have someone who is obviously immoral in mind.

What if you copy some data for a personal backup? That's moral. It's also legal in many countries around the world, even if you must break copy protection mechanisms to make that personal backup. What about giving a copy to a friend? Is that fair use? Is that moral? Many people think it is.

So when you call someone a "thief" you must be careful. Just because the law criminalizes a behavior does not automatically mean that behavior is immoral.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Internalist]

You've essentially made "more" of something -- and if there's "more" of something, it's worth less than if it's scarce.

This is an interesting point, and I guess something I'd never taken the time to think about before. Now, I'm no economist, but it seems to me that with the advent of digital media and the easy reproduction of perfect copies, along with various and sundry online distribution channels, anytime a piece of music[*] is created, digitised, and makes its way to the Net, supply is for all intents and purposes instantly driven to infinity, thereby reducing the value of said piece to zero.

Now, I am of the opinion that the artists[**] who create the music I enjoy SHOULD be remunerated. So what means are available of doing this fairly?

As an aside, for those who have posted something about downloading as a form of pseudo-protest against overlong copyright terms (not the parent post), it seems to me that your argument is basically null if you're downloading anything that isn't older than whatever you consider to be "fair" copyright.

[*] In principle this applies to any digital media, but the ease with which a 5MB mp3 can be shared (cf. a 700MB movie), makes this argument particular relevant
[**] This includes the knob-twiddlers and producers who get great in-studio performances out of artists.

Re:Copyright laws.

[tombeard]

And when the cost of making more is zero????

Re:Copyright laws.

[DarkKnightRadick]

That is exactly what I don't like. Tch.

Re:Copyright laws.

[DarkKnightRadick]

I'm actually quite surprised there is a braille edition.

Re:Copyright laws.

[tombeard]

I build a path in the sand for my own use. It is a trail well worn, but to make it easy for myself I have had it paved. If someone else walks my path should they have to pay for my improvements?

Re:Copyright laws.

[taucross]

Incidentally, I am exactly like this. If I am not compensated for my work I will moan and complain, but yet, it is still enjoyable to steal from others. The best part about being a pirate is enjoying the fruits of other people's labour, yet not paying for it. In addition, of course, to aggravating corporate lap dogs such as yourself.

Piracy is a victimless crime - like punching someone in the dark. If you've never punched someone in the dark, you're missing out.

Feels good man.

Re:Copyright laws.

[b4dc0d3r]

Cameron made piles of money from Titanic, and the actors/crew were paid as they agreed to up-front costs (fee or hourly). Enough that he made it possible for the kind of 3D video behind most modern 3D live-action films from Spy Kidz 3D to Avatar. Cameron gave up his fees voluntarily in order to keep Titanic going.

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/11/ff_avatar_cameron/

Fox executives knew it was in their best interest to keep the self-anointed king of the world happy. They decided to overlook the fact that he had given up his financial stake in Titanic and, in the wake of its historic Oscar run, wrote him a check for tens of millions of dollars. (Reportedly, Cameron eventually earned more than $75 million from the film.) He wouldn't have to work another day in his life.

"I had my fuck-you money," Cameron says. "It was time to go play."

Hollywood accounting is notorious, but at least try to come up with something real. Profit-sharing is kinda rare because of Hollywood accounting, so you usually have to go back a little to find an example of where it screwed someone over.

Re:Copyright laws.

[dudpixel]

with permission from the copyright holders. There's the catch.

Re:Copyright laws.

[b4dc0d3r]

Anything linked from slashdot.org or fark.com, possibly including comment threads, reactos.org and subdomains, piles of stuff at hp.com, dell.com, tigerdirect.com, some other similarly boring computer sellers and parts sellers, amazon.com. You didn't ask about my torrents though, which is the subject at hand.

GP thought they were being clever because they misinterpreted headkase up there. headkase had a point - privacy wouldn't be on most peoples' radar if not for the MAFIAA lawsuits. MAFIAA lawsuits wouldn't be such a big deal if people were downloading legal content. Legal content would be anything 28 years old or more (1982) or for lots of unmarketable stuff 14 years (1996). You'd either buy what's popular or download the old stuff you grew up listening to, which would give music more competition. I listen to the radio because it's free, not because it's good, and I frequently change the channel during songs as opposed to during commercials. If it doesn't sound like music I keep choosing radio stations, so I typically don't even hear the advertising at all - I'm moving that quickly. But if I could download music before 1982 I'd download the hell out of it, and more every year as the original copyrights expired, and listen to only that. The music industry would be forced to compete with itself and we would never have had to listen to Ke$ha. That would be promoting the useful arts and sciences, what exists today doesn't.

In other words, if copyright were more sane people could download piles of stuff legally, and you wouldn't have to worry about people piecing your information together. Of course people would probably still piece your information together, only it would be privacy freaks arguing about the implications with nerds instead of front-page news. But it's far more likely that the current broad-based p2p applications would not exist in their current forms if people didn't have to turn to p2p for music sharing, and could download directly from websites instead. So privacy returns to a non-issue, except of course for the people from which you download. RapidShare would still be a big hit I'm sure. so there's lots of "what if" to consider after altering history to have a sane copyright, making it difficult to really make a conclusion.

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

By you downloading, you now have in your posession a copy of the material which you never purchased. ... Stealing

Hardly. One can possess something one never purchased without having stolen it. In fact, this is the origin of all property, via homesteading: the appropriation of that which has no owner for one's own private use. Homesteading, of course, requires an actual scarce resource, and thus does not apply to information. Still, it is established that the act of theft requires more than possession without purchase. Gifts would be another example of possession with neither purchase nor theft. Agriculture, likewise; one does not purchase the food one grows—or even provide most of the energy required to produce it, which comes from the sun—but it belongs to one nonetheless. Your definition is far too broad.

To steal—more precisely, to commit the property-right violation commonly known as theft—one must deprive the owner of the use of their property. Duplication gives you a copy of the desired pattern (newly imprinted onto your own property) without depriving anyone else of the use of theirs. As no one has been deprived of the use of their property, no theft has occurred. You have merely received an external benefit, at no cost to anyone else.

Re:Copyright laws.

[brit74]

The enlightened argument is not that the act of copying is theft, but that illegal copying deprives the copyright owner of monetary gains which would otherwise have been earned.

So does simply choosing to go without. Should that be illegal now as well?

You skipped over the "would otherwise have been earned" part in order to make your point. The fact of the matter is that, copyright was created in order to create a support a market for intellectual goods. You have two options, both of which are perfectly legal: (1) Get the copyrighted material, and pay, or (2) Don't get the copyrighted material and don't pay. The problem is that you want option #3: get the copyrighted material and don't pay. Under most circumstances, it's hard to see why someone wouldn't always choose option #3 over option #1 - since the consumer gets the stuff, but don't have to pay - which is the best possible option.

You can't "steal" the expectation of income. Only that which is owned is subject to theft, and theft only occurs when one is deprived of its use.

Saying it's theft is convenient shorthand. It's close enough to the truth to be a rounding error. If someone snuck into a concert, and the bouncer threw them out saying "sneaking into a concert without paying is the same as theft", I don't think anyone would really waste their time splitting hairs about whether is was or was not technically theft. Yet, people do this with piracy - because they want to make it sound legitimate. Would you come to the defense of some kid ranting about how the bouncer who threw him out of a concert was technically incorrect to call it "theft"? Maybe if you wanted to make it seem okay.

And, if it's not theft, what if some store started creating their own copies of copyrighted material and selling it (without paying the creator)? What if they priced it lower than the average price on the street? Would you say this is "theft", that they have "deprived the owner of sales"? Would you say it is wrong? You can't prove that any of the customers who bought those copies would've bought copies elsewhere, and you can't prove that they would've paid $10 for the item that they bought for $9 from this store. And, hey, maybe they should be allowed to make money because they are "providing the service of distribution". Would you have a problem if Netflix or Blockbuster started burning their own copies of movies, paying no money back to the original creators? Personally, I wouldn't have any problem calling what that "theft", but I guess you'd disagree.

Re:Copyright laws.

[brit74]

After all, what is the difference in outcome which would justify making the production of a deliberate copy illegal, but not the creation of an identical copy by random convergence? Surely the "harm" is the same in either case? Accidental harm is still harm, but accidental creation of a copy is not considered copyright infringement.

To be consistent, you'd have to also agree to a whole bunch of other negative consequences. Random convergence "could have created" a copy of someone else's book with my name as the author (legalized plagarism). Random convergence "could have created" a bunch of your banking account details, your emails, or other personal information - therefore, companies should be allowed to release all your data onto the internet (no privacy). If someone at Facebook or your medical clinic doesn't like you, they can release all your data onto the internet with no legal consequences. Even further, the government can gather all information everywhere because "random convergence could have created" all the sounds traveling through your telephone line, and all the bits traveling over your ISP (no warrants needed to monitor everything). Random convergence "could have created" any digital sequence of bits, and therefore, you have to argue for complete copyright anarchy - Walmart can print up all the books, music, movies, and software that they want without paying anybody anything. Piracy - even when it involves the exchange of money - would have to be completely legal. These are the consequences of your position.

Re:Copyright laws.

[SeaFox]

Well then, I salute you and the other guy for your moral fiber. :-D

Re:Copyright laws.

[Caraig]

You don't have to be Randian to recognize that there's just plain too many laws, such that you can be dinged for just about anything a judge having a bad day can think of. Hell, I'm a left-leaning progressive and I think there's too many laws on the books.*

* - At least when it comes to the average citizen. In other cases -- like banks and other industries that should be regulated to within an inch of their profit margins -- it's not so much a matter of 'not enough' laws but rather not enough *enforcement* of existing laws. The biggest crooks in the country are the ones wearing suits, but you hardly ever see the cops coming into board rooms with arrest warrants.

Dammit. We need just plain reform from the top down. Maybe it's time we had another Constitutional Convention.

Re:Copyright laws.

[LuNa7ic]

All theft is crime, but that doesn't make all crime theft. Theft is the unlawful deprivation of property. When a song, or a game, or a show or a movie or any other copyrighted data is illegally downloaded, no deprivation occurs, thus no theft occurs. There is still a crime committed, and that crime is copyright infringement, not theft.

Yes, definitions DO matter.

Re:Copyright laws.

[L4t3r4lu5]

And yet they still own (have in their possession) the original article of which I now have a copy.

Tell me, if I take a photograph of the Mona Lisa, should the Louvre notify the Gendarmerie that it's been stolen?

Re:Copyright laws.

[andre_pl]

Sorry but that's just wrong. there is a HUGE difference between stealing credit for a work and stealing a copy. when "stealing credit" the original creator of the work is losing the recognition as the creator. when stealing a copy of a work, nobody loses anything.

Re:Copyright laws.

[loufoque]

I don't ask permissions to take my CDs on the road with me.

Re:Copyright laws.

[u17]

Don't you mean legal fiber? Morals being relative, sharing ordinarily encouraged, and all that.

Re:Copyright laws.

[qc_dk]

Regardless of all that, the monetary value of a potential sale is exactly $0.00.

I'm sorry but that is demonstrably untrue. Otherwise advertising would be worthless, which is clearly not the case. People are willing to pay for a potential to sell. Now it's obviously a lot less worth than the price of the song, and definitely not 500 billion dollars or however much the laws are charging at the moment in the US.

Re:Copyright laws.

[commodore64_love]

Actual the original law was 14 years (based upon typical author lifespan), plus the opossibility of ONE reneweal of the license if the author was still alive. So 28 years max. I'd be willing to extend that a bit for high-cost items like movies... maybe 25+25 years, but that's it.

Remember "It's A Wonderful Life"? That was a public domain movie in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, which is why it was played to death. On one hand we got sick of it, but on the other hand it became a part of our collective culture. For some it's a family tradition.

NOW that movie has been re-copyrighted and rarely seen (once a year on NBC). That should not be allowed. All of the original creators, actors, and crew are dead. They can no longer profit from their labor. The movie should no longer be copyrighted. Eternal copyright damages our culture.

Re:Copyright laws.

[commodore64_love]

Okay you discuss Cameron but what about people like J.Michael Straczynski who created the Babylon 5 series? He's not a poor man, but he's not rich either. He's an average guy just like us, and doesn't he deserve to earn profit-sharing from his work? As an engineer, I get profit sharing, so why shouldn't he?

And yet year-after-year, WB claims Babylon 5 lost money. Clearly a lie. (If it was losing money, why didn't they cancel it?) They are stealing from Mr. Straczynski. They are stealing from the actors. They are stealing from the crew.

This is true of every television show. The TV company always claims a loss, so they never have to pay out.

Re:Copyright laws.

[commodore64_love]

>>>Of course this assumes that the "thief" would have bought the item had they not copied it.

In my case - no. I think movies have really devolved into pointless roller coaster rides lacking story, so I'm not wasting my money on the DVD. I'd rather spend my money on the pre-CGI products, or TV shows, where they have to use story to keep people in the seats.

Re:Copyright laws.

[thesandtiger]

I'd be willing to be generous and make it apply for the life of the author given that lifespans are much longer now, and the giant archive that is the internet means that people will continually re-discover a work during an author's lifetime.

However, the instant the copyright gets transferred to anyone else - person, corporation, alien from tau ceti, ANYONE but the original copyright holder - the clock starts and they have 10 years before it goes into the public domain. And on lawsuits alleging copyright infringement, make a 3-strikes rule: If you bring infringement suits and lose 3 times (no matter how many times you win) the copyright ceases to be valid immediately. This will make copyright holders exceptionally cautious about who they choose to go after.

Further, it should not be possible to re-copyright a work - even if a special edition is made. That's insanity. How does that even work??

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

So? I do agree to all of that. Note that it doesn't mean that I have to give anyone my information, any more than a content creator is required to publish or mass-market their work. But if someone can get that information without violating anyone's property rights, and without agreeing to an NDA (or are willing to pay the required compensation for breaking it; contracts only extend to forfeiting alienable property, not inalienable freedom of action), then they are free to do what they wish with it.

If you want to keep that data private, keep it to yourself, or at least insist on an NDA where disclosure will cost them more than the information is worth.

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

theft (always unlawful) ... steal (sometimes unlawful)

Which is why I used the term "theft" rather than the GP's term "stealing". Who cares whether copyright infringement is "stealing", when "stealing" is not only not always illegal, but is not even always wrong? Clearly the GP mean "stealing" in the sense of "theft". Theft, not "stealing", has been the subject of this thread from the beginning. If the GP meant something other than theft then that comment is nothing but meaningless noise.

BTW, you left out other obvious uses like "stealing a base" in baseball, or "stealing a kiss", or "stealing time", etc. Obviously you would prefer those definitions which imply something shady or immoral, but not all of them do. "Stealing" is simply too broad a term for this discussion.

For your sake, however, I will state my conclusion more generally, without reference to "stealing" or theft:

To violate any property right one must deprive the owner of the use of their property. That which does not violate any property right does not justify the use of force in response—defined as any deliberate violation of property rights—and consequently should not be illegal (as anything illegal must be prevented or punished via a violation of the practitioner's property rights). Ergo, copyright infringement, which does not deprive any owner of the use of any property, should not be illegal.

Theft is one way to deprive an owner of the use of their property; murder, extortion, slavery, etc. are some of the other ways. Copyright infringement is not among them.

Re:Copyright laws.

[JesseMcDonald]

You skipped over the "would otherwise have been earned" part in order to make your point.

I didn't "skip it"; I considered it irrelevant.

The fact of the matter is that, copyright was created in order to create a support a market for intellectual goods.

Yes, that was it's (stated) purpose. It doesn't matter. Those who created copyright had no just authority to do so. Their motives are irrelevant.

Saying it's theft is convenient shorthand. It's close enough to the truth to be a rounding error.

No, copyright infringement and theft are as different as two actions can be, when considering whether the action justified forcible retaliation. One is a violation of natural property rights, the other is not. Only violation of natural property rights can justify the same in return.

If someone snuck into a concert, and the bouncer threw them out saying "sneaking into a concert without paying is the same as theft", I don't think anyone would really waste their time splitting hairs about whether is was or was not technically theft.

I agree. However, in this case you would be trespassing, which is a violation of the property owner's natural rights. Trespassing can be considered theft, in a general sense, or one could simply say that the definition of "theft" doesn't matter here; you were still guilty of trespassing, and as such they have the right to evict you.

And, if it's not theft, what if some store started creating their own copies of copyrighted material and selling it (without paying the creator)? What if they priced it lower than the average price on the street? Would you say this is "theft", that they have "deprived the owner of sales"? Would you say it is wrong? ... Would you have a problem if Netflix or Blockbuster started burning their own copies of movies, paying no money back to the original creators?

No, on all counts.

Personally, I wouldn't have any problem calling what that "theft", but I guess you'd disagree.

You guess correctly. They would merely be receiving an external benefit, at no cost to anyone else; that is not theft.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Ltap]

Supply and demand just doesn't apply to something that is infinitely copyable for a very low cost. It's designed to apply to resources that cost money in distribution and refinement, not content.

Re:Copyright laws.

[pgmrdlm]

Your argument has no merrit. None at all.

The content as is being discussed with this thread is media created from nothing. Concept thought of and carried through to delivery to the general public for a price. Wherer there was nothing, there is now something. Where there was not an idea, there is now content based on the idea.

Your argument, which has nothing in common. You are altering existing property/content which was never yours to start with.

Re:Copyright laws.

[IICV]

If we go back to the original law - life of the initial copyright holder + a small extension past that, and only real-live human beings can be considered to be initial copyright holders

Actually, the original American law was 14 years + 14 years if you wanted an extension.

The thing is, though, I would argue that the current author's life + 70 years or 120 years for a corporation is effectively unconstitutional. The Constitution states that Congress only has the power to secure things like copyrights for a limited time. If something is published in my lifetime, it is under copyright for an unlimited duration from my perspective - I will not live to be my current age + 120, or the rest of the author's life + 70 years, no matter what advances in medical science come about.

Basically, if something is published when I am born and it will not be in the public domain before I die, it is copyrighted for an unlimited time from my perspective.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Imrik]

By taking credit for the work you are depriving the original author of that credit. If you copy it, they still have their copy.

Re:Copyright laws.

[chris_7d0h]

You mean download advertisements collections?
That's the only content legal for downloading. I read it on the internet and also heard it on Fox News.

Hint: If the Ad collections you torrent aren't rar-ed and have nfo files you shouldn't trust the commercials.

Re:Copyright laws.

[DarkKnightRadick]

*chuckles*

Re:Copyright laws.

[MidnightBrewer]

Transmitting copyrighted material for the purposes of making another copy is, in fact, a very cut-and-dried example of copyright infringement. It doesn't matter where the destination is, whether it be your DVD burner or someone else's computer - if a copy of the data is made, then you've broken copyright. Furthermore, if the copy is transmitted to someone else for them to use as they see fit, then it's also theft.

You don't have to like the fact that the decent thing to do would be to pay people for what they create, but you could at least stop trying to justify not paying them.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Arker]

A friend of mine has a house that backs onto a small nature preserve. On the other side of that woodland area is an ampitheatre, at which a great many concerts are held. He can sit out back and hear the concerts from his patio, or he can pack a picnic basket and take his wife and kids on a short walk through the woodland to a point directly overlooking the ampitheatre and hear it much better - in fact at that range the volume level is just perfect. They can take binoculars and see the concert as well, almost as if they were in the front row, without suffering from hearing loss and without paying for (very expensive) tickets.

Do you think he is stealing too?

Re:Copyright laws.

[dudpixel]

you dont need to ask, you have already been granted that permission by the copyright holders.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Zen Hash]

Firstly, thank you for your well-worded and intelligent response. Unfortunately, it was the "transmitting copyrighted material over a computer network is not necessarily copyright infringement" part that I was getting at there. Isn't that just making a copy, regardless of what the specific protocol is?

Yeah, technically portions of the network traffic being reproduced on network interfaces between every node in the route would be derived from the copyrighted material. However, if something as trivial as that were considered copyright infringement then anyone who owns any network infrastructure would be guilty of infringing upon everyone else's copyrights. Technically, any electronic device that does anything with copyrighted material has to make copies of some form of it within it's circuitry to function.

I'm not a lawyer and my understanding of copyright law is pretty slim, but I'd imagine there are plenty of persuable instances of copyright infringement that occur all of the time. I frequently see TVs displaying copyrighted content, and hear people playing or singing copyrighted songs, outside of their homes. In the majority of these instances, I would bet that the person responsible is not actually licensed for that public performance by the copyright holder.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Wildclaw]

If you enjoyed the content, it obviously is at least somewhat valuable to you. Maybe not the purchase price, but I don't believe you can plausibly say that the content was worth nothing (for most content at least).

He didn't say that it was worth nothing. He said the monetary value was nothing. A very important difference, unless you think everyone should pay $1000 a month for the air they breathe. Because if you are looking at pure value as a measure of how much to pay for something and ignore to factor in scarcity, that is what would be right.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Wildclaw]

A: No, but he's being a dick.

Agreed. He is being a dick. Just like people who download from torrents and don't share back as much as they take. Or people who go and browse the local store for what they want to buy, note what they like and then go home and order it from the Internet. There are many ways of being a dick.

Re:Copyright laws.

[loufoque]

if a copy of the data is made, then you've broken copyright.

Of course not: there are exceptions to this. Fair use, fair dealing, whatever it is called in your applicable law. The exact exceptions depend on your country.
In most of Europe, for example, doing as many copies as you like is perfectly legal as long as it is for private use, and there is nothing the copyright holder can do to limit this.

Furthermore, if the copy is transmitted to someone else for them to use as they see fit, then it's also theft.

No it isn't.
Theft is a criminal offense (you can go to jail), this is a purely civil one (you pay compensation to an individual or organization).

Re:Copyright laws.

[Time_Ngler]

You're comparing downloading movies to breathing air. Don't you think see any difference between the two? Actually, breathable air might actually become scarce due to population explosion or the ruining of the environment. Or do you beliieve that if/when that happens we should let all who could not afford to breathe air die? Because if you are only looking at value multiplied by scarcity to determine the value of something, that would be right.

Re:Copyright laws.

[brit74]

So? I do agree to all of that.

Good. You've managed to put yourself so far outside the mainstream that 99.9% of everyone now disagrees with your argument. I take this as a 'win' for my argument.

Note that it doesn't mean that I have to give anyone my information...

Not all of my examples involved someone deciding to give away their information. For example, my wiretapping example didn't involve anyone consenting to being monitored.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Wildclaw]

Not much difference no. Both are things that have a real value that far exceeds the free market value.

Or do you beliieve that if/when that happens we should let all who could not afford to breathe air die?

If that happens, we will have to let all who can't afford to breathe air die. It is basic economics.

Because if you are only looking at value multiplied by scarcity to determine the value of something,

No, I am looking at market value and real value using basic economic theory. If something can be infinitely reproduced at a near zero cost, then it has a near zero market value.

As for the real value of things. Any prosperous society wants lots of stuff with low market value and high real value. That is how things becomes better for everyday people. Copyright and other intellectual property laws aims for the opposite, namely to bring market value as close to real value as possible.

Re:Copyright laws.

[Time_Ngler]

If that happens, we will have to let all who can't afford to breathe air die. It is basic economics.

We have to? Says who? The people who can't afford food today are fed by systems such as welfare. How can you explain that people are kept alive today who couldn't afford to do so by themselves if it's "basic economics" that people that can't afford necessities have to die?

No, I am looking at market value and real value using basic economic theory. If something can be infinitely reproduced at a near zero cost, then it has a near zero market value.

So, if something has a "near zero market value", then, simply because you can, illegally in this case, obtain it then that is the only consideration as to how much you should pay for it. So, I suppose you'd say that if you could steal something by murdering someone the only consideration should be if it would be effectively cheaper to do so then to buy it.

As for the real value of things. Any prosperous society wants lots of stuff with low market value and high real value. That is how things becomes better for everyday people. Copyright and other intellectual property laws aims for the opposite, namely to bring market value as close to real value as possible.

A society having "a lot of stuff" isn't the opposite of having copyright law. I don't see it as a probable outcome that abolishing copyright and intellectual property laws or ignoring them by copying things anyway will end up with society having more stuff then it would otherwise. Without copyright law, people can only produce works for free. With copyright law, people can produce works for free, and can produce works for a cost. So, without copyright law, we only get the products people produce for free. Whereas, with copyright law, we get two types of products, those that cost money, *and* free works. To me, that sounds like "more stuff".

Re:Copyright laws.

[Hurricane78]

My god, you actually really believe that MAFIAA brainwashing??

I’ll say this once: INFORMATION CAN NOT BE OWNED! At ALL. EVER.
Really. It is a physically impossible thing. You can’t. Asking who owns a piece of information, is like asking what happened before time itself. It makes no sense at all.
See, let’s define ownership:
1. Something you have control over.
2. Something that can be taken away from you.
3. Something that in unique.
Information does not fulfill a single one of those conditions.
Since information can only be copied. Never moved. Only be overwritten. Never “deleted”.

And now let’s define stealing:
> Taking something away from someone, so that you now own it, and he does not anymore.
Nothing of that is the case for copying information.
There is no loss. There is no control. There is no uniqueness. (There is only Zuul. ;)

And all this shit comes from a single misunderstanding... the thought that bitspace would follow the same rules as meatspace... growing into a giant delusion by a tiny media reproduction and artist extortion industry, to keep up their status quo of ripping off their clients AND the artists.
Sorry, but if you play their game for so much as a second, you are either mentally insane, or a sicko pervert.
Don’t do it. Ok?

Re:Copyright laws.

[Hurricane78]

And that deal is where the delusion started. Since every “work” was bound to a physical container, people continued to treat it as physical objects. But information is not a physical object. Only the container is. Information is the uncontrollable, not ownable, losslessly cloneable result of a service.

Now with the Internet, that container isn’t necessary anymore, which blows the delusion’s cover... and blows away the whole set of business models and laws which are based on it.

Those times are over. Accept it. Take the distortion goggles off, and get with the times.

Re:Copyright laws.

[thesandtiger]

Except that intellectual property laws were designed to protect the information, not the physical container - they were to stop other people from claiming the work as their own, or from simply copying it and publishing it on their own, without the copyright holder getting their cut.

I think you might be confusing IP laws with laws having to do with theft of a physical item - not uncommon since so many people refer to infringement as stealing, but there can be many ways "stealing" can apply without needing to involve a physical item.

To make it clear:

Going into a bookshop and physically taking every copy of a book that is there and reselling them: Theft
Copying the information in a book (or whatever) and then making multiple copies to resell: Infringement

The IP laws were not about physical objects, and even back in ye olden days, people knew that information was not a physical item, as you say. There's no delusion, just lazy language.

Shocked. Shocked!

[guspasho]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

Really? All you have to do is be on the torrent and connect to them.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[Peach Rings]

You mean, all you have to do is send a simple request to the tracker, which will happily provide you with a fairly complete list of peers.

And people make themselves available on the DHT network.

And people offer their peers freely through PEX.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[ravenspear]

Yeah I mean, that's really not a surprise. The torrent would be pretty useless if you couldn't connect to the other clients on it. And to connect to them you need to know the ip address.

Some torrent clients have a handy browser that lets you view the IPs of all connected clients.

Now, connecting to all torrents on the net would take some effort, but if you were able to do that then you would be able to see everyone using BitTorrent.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent.

let me fix that for you...

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what my neighbour's unprotected wireless network is downloading on BitTorrent."

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[CondeZer0]

> You mean, all you have to do is send a simple request to the tracker, which will happily provide you with a fairly complete list of peers.

Most trackers (at least most public/open trackers) insert random ips to give a degree of 'plausible deniability'.

This of course is not perfect, but to be certain that a peer is serving a file the only way is to actually try to connect to it and fetch some blocks, which is quite a bit more work than just querying the tracker, specially if you have to do it for hundreds of thousands of torrents.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[peragrin]

you forgot the real part.

You then have to download the entire thing to find out if those blocks are part of IronMan2.avi are actually part of ironman2 movie or some dumb students project on feeding excessive iron to a man.

what percentage of the RIAA music takedowns where not actually infringing music but someone's project with a similar name? I know of at least 3 separate incidents where they made a school take down a professors own notes because of a file name.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[natehoy]

Yeah, I'm shocked that anyone could be shocked.

P2P means "Peer to Peer". That means your computer makes a direct connection to other users who seed or leech you. In order to do that, you need to give your IP address so they know who to talk back to. IP addresses resolve to a host, which can always identify your ISP and in rarer cases can identify your username on the ISP (this is thankfully very rare any more).

I wonder how shocked the poster of this article would be if he realized that every web page he visits gets the same exact information?

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[CondeZer0]

This is a good point, but I assumed that if they can get a few random blocks that match the hash, that would probably be enough evidence form a legal point of view.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[iamhassi]

"Really? All you have to do is be on the torrent and connect to them."

What about protocol encryption or PeerGuardian? Do either of these help or are they worthless? Article is very light on details, just says "use torrent, we c u IPs"

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[Bigjeff5]

Now, connecting to all torrents on the net would take some effort, but if you were able to do that then you would be able to see everyone using BitTorrent.

Not really, there are a relatively small number of tracker servers, once you have access to the tracker it should be pretty trivial scripting out a request for each torrent they have on the server.

Private servers I'd expect they would not be able to connect to, but otherwise most of the trackers are public enough that they could crawl for most of them. It certainly not an easy undertaking, but it's far from shocking in my opinion. I think the OP just had no real concept of how BitTorrent works.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[ravenspear]

Encryption masks the content of what you are transferring. You still have to know who to connect to.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[Athanasius]

Neither of those stop your IP from being listed on the tracker(s).

Encryption only stops Man-In-The-Middle snooping, but practically speaking that would have to be by either your ISP or the ISP for the other end of the connection, which seems unlikely without court orders. A 'bad' IP can still connect to you (or place itself on the tracker so there's a chance you'll connect to it). What this *might* buy you, together with using ports other than the standard BitTorrent ones is obfuscation of what your traffic is for the purposes of avoiding ISP bandwidth shaping.

PeerGuardian, assuming the lists have all the relevant IPs, will stop people from being able to connect with you. But you're still in the tracker. However, I see a prior comment has said 'most' trackers include some random 'junk' IPs so as to confuse things. Obviously this makes the protocol slightly less efficient, but I doubt it makes any practical difference.

To sum up: Encryption is mostly to try and avoid ISP bandwidth shaping. PeerGuardian, together with trackers listing 'junk' IPs offers some protection against being fingered in this way.

Does anyone know if it's possible/practical to read from a tracker's list to get a list of IPs to connect to, but not place your IP in the list? You'd be limiting yourself to outbound connections only. Without checking I don't know if simply retrieving a tracker's data for a torrent places your IP in its list for subsequent retrieval. Either way this is an obnoxious thing to do (yes, for any torrent I join, whatever its content, I stay at least until ratio 1.00, and typically to 2.00 and beyond as local resources allow).

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[CondeZer0]

Still only needs to download the whole file once at most, not once from every peer.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[pipedwho]

But they'd still have to start by downloading at least enough of the shared file to be able actually view it so they can determine if the torrent is really infringing and not something else. After that, I suppose a few verified infringing block hashes would probably suffice as some level of evidence on a per user basis.

So as the GGP said, the enforcement police still have a significant amount more work to do than just bulk harvesting IP addresses from the trackers.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[Altrag]

It might be enough though to introduce doubt -- seeing that IP address x.y.z.w is downloading "#SG*$#@" (my poor fake encryptions) doesn't tell you if the file is actually "Avatar (2009).avi" or "Fedora 12.iso". The former would be infringement (unless you managed to actually get rights.. har) whereas the latter is perfectly legal.

With infringement being criminalized means that there should be a much higher standard of proof needed for conviction (at least in theory).

On the other hand, I don't know how much proof (any these days?) is needed to subpoena ISPs and get a search-and-seize warrant.. and of course once they have your computer its pretty much red-handed if you've left any infringing files around that they can find.

And if it turns out you were only downloading 800 copies of various Linux distros well.. they'll have egg on their face, slashdot and maybe a small local newspaper or two might pick up the story but it will otherwise be hushed up. Can severely damage the individuals life and finances, but the organizations doing these copyright witch hunts don't really care as long as they can keep it under the radar of the wider public.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[CondeZer0]

> But they'd still have to start by downloading at least enough of the shared file to be able actually view it so they can determine if the torrent is really infringing and not something else. After that, I suppose a few verified infringing block hashes would probably suffice as some level of evidence on a per user basis.

That was exactly my point.

> So as the GGP said, the enforcement police still have a significant amount more work to do than just bulk harvesting IP addresses from the trackers.

That is what I said! :)

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[daten]

That's unfortunate. So you don't even have to use BT, if a tracker happens to generate your IP as one of the fakes you might still get sued. At what point do they believe you when you say you're innocent? before or after the search warrant is served?

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[JesseMcDonald]

What if the file is copyrighted, but not by them? They would themselves be infringing on others' copyrights, by their own rules. Of course, they might not be uploading, but still...

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[klapaucjusz]

You then have to download the entire thing to find out if those blocks are part of IronMan2.avi are actually part of ironman2 movie or some dumb students project on feeding excessive iron to a man.

Not in BitTorrent.

A torrent is uniquely identified by its "info-hash", and the first thing you do when you connect to a peer is to agree on the info-hash. So with BitTorrent, you only need to download the file once, check that it is the right file, and then ask all of the peers you find whether they are distributing files with this particular info-hash.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[klapaucjusz]

The point being, of course that the submitter completely missed the point of the paper he links to.

It was already well known that BitTorrent offers no privacy. What the researchers have shown is that the process of identifying the peers scales really well. To quote from one of their abstracts:

This paper presents a set of exploits an adversary can use to continuously spy on most BitTorrent users of the Internet from a single machine and for a long period of time. Using these exploits for a period of 103 days, we collected 148 million IPs downloading 2 billion copies of contents.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[CityZen]

I think folks are misunderstanding his misunderstanding.

It's obvious that if you connect to a single tracker, you get a list of peers who are downloading what that tracker has to offer. But that's not a picture of all the Internet's P2P traffic. It's just one data point.

What's not obvious is how you can start from zero information and then figure out who's downloading what across the whole internet. Do you do a google search for all torrent files, then try to figure out all the active trackers, then figure out all the peers? That seems like a huge task, and it's not exactly a real-time picture of who's downloading what so much as a collection of samples.

I peeked at the papers, and they start by going to the biggest providers of torrent files (The Pirate Bay, Mininova, etc.). Right away, this tells you that they don't see every single bit of P2P traffic. What they do reveal that isn't obvious to most people is that you can query a tracker not just about a particular torrent download, but about ALL the torrents that a given tracker tracks. This cuts down the work significantly.

In addition, those sites offer a list of brand new torrents, and if you hook up to one of those right away, you'll get a picture of who (which IPs) is injecting new content into the network. This is how they figure out who's likely to be doing that. Figuring out the big downloaders is more complex.

In any case, monitoring the P2P traffic is still a huge task, doesn't give a *complete* picture of all P2P traffic, and isn't as simple as making a single request.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[chickenarise]

But din dey done broke da law!

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[emj]

But you can only know that these people connect4ed to the torrent swarm you don't know for sure if they are uploading or downloading anything, or even how much of the file they have. To know that they have it all you have to download the file from all of them.

Re:Shocked. Shocked!

[Richard_at_work]

I've always considered PeerGuardian to be a false security - all it takes is for someone to rent an apartment somewhere cheap, get ADSL installed and they've bypassed PeerGuardians 'protection'. Protocol encryption also doesn't protect against the approach described in the article, since the 'attacker' is participating in the swarm alongside you.

Re:UNISEX?

[2obvious4u]

Did you know when reading you really only look at the first and last letter? Your mind fills in the rest. So that comment just shows where your mind is.

This is not an important security article.

[Spazntwich]

It is an important reminder of just how ignorant most technology users are of the very tools they're using.

Re:This is not an important security article.

[vxice]

Shocking, shocking I say that when I use p2p to upload and download files to other people that someone could possibly be sitting around listening to and recording my requests for data as well as requesting data that I have sourced that they 'want' who would have guessed?

Re:This is not an important security article.

[phantomcircuit]

The only thing even slightly interesting about this is how centralized the trackers actually are.

But I guess they wouldn't see the private trackers at all.

Re:This is not an important security article.

[0100010001010011]

I download something from Napster
  And the same guy I downloaded it from starts downloading it from me when I'm done
  I message him and say "What are you doing? I just got that from you"
  "getting my song back fucker"

- bash

Re:This is not an important security article.

[vxice]

so can you build the airplane you fly in? explain in detail internal combustion? how about ...

Re:This is not an important security article.

[Spazntwich]

I won't be shocked when someone tells me you can get a picture of at least 70% of the people on a flight if you bring a camera to the gate at boarding time.

Re:This is not an important security article.

[Thanshin]

It is an important reminder of just how ignorant most technology users are of the very tools they're using.

I would have no idea of how to fix the airplane I took this weekend.

I wouldn't even try fixing the elevator I've just used.

I don't think I'd be able to repair 95% of possible problems with my car.

It is an important reminder of how far we got from the middle ages, where one man could know most about all technologies he used.

Re:This is not an important security article.

[Fnord666]

It is an important reminder of just how ignorant most technology users are of the very tools they're using.

Just yesterday I asked a bunch of people who were wearing quartz watches two questions. First I asked what time it was, and second I asked how a quartz watch works. Oddly enough each and every one was able to tell me the time but not one of them could tell me how their watch worked. I guess that is also an important reminder of just how ignorant most technology users are of the very tools they're using.

Re:This is not an important security article.

[Spazntwich]

Are you disagreeing with me or what? You don't need functional knowledge of mechanical devices to use them, but you should probably be aware of the privacy implications of using them if you care about privacy.

Might as well be surprised facebook wall posts are public. It's knowledge that comes from the most basic familiarity with the tech. Familiarity one should probably possess before making use of said tech, especially if you're using that technology to violate copyright laws.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

Seriously? BitTorrent is a completely open, unsecured protocol. Yes. Anybody can be listening in. The only difficulty is finding the trackers, and it's not like that is THAT hard...

Whether or not the list created is ACCURATE, however, is another matter. It's also incredibly easy to 'poison' those lists with fake addresses, as in the case of the music-sharing printer...

Re:Huh?

[allo]

bittorrent client should download random parts from random files to some degree. So the log who has downloaded parts of a file does not correlate to "who has downloaded the complete file and saved it on his/her computer" anymore.

Redacted

[StikyPad]

[This post removed under the first rule of USENET.]

Re:Redacted

[Anonymous Coward]

But if I copy the redacted post and paste into my favorite editor, all is revealed!

Re:Redacted

[value_added]

ME TOO!

--
anon@aol.com

Re:Redacted

[Bigjeff5]

[This post removed under the first rule of USENET.]

Don't tell me, "Don't talk about USENET?"

Re:Redacted

[HTH NE1]

ME TOO!

tl;dr

Re:Redacted

[spartacus_prime]

What's USENET?

Re:Redacted

[blair1q]

If you don't know then I don't know either.

Re:Redacted

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

[This post removed under the first rule of USENET.]

Don't tell me, "Don't talk about USENET?"

Your grasp of the obvious is impressive.

Good!

[feepness]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent.

This is good news. It means BitTorrent is no longer relegated to those who are even remotely user savvy. This means more sharing!

Hint: BitTorrent is a protocol that relies on users talking to each other about what they're downloading. This, strangely enough, provides users with information on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent.

Re:Good!

[Jer]

Actually, despite the credulousness of the summary poster, if you click through to the abstract you also get this bit:

To circumvent this kind of monitoring, BitTorrent users are increasingly using anonymizing networks such as Tor to hide their IP address from the tracker and, possibly, from other peers. However, we showed that it is possible to retrieve the IP address for more than 70% of BitTorrent users on top of Tor [LMC_POST10]. Moreover, once the IP address of a peer is retrieved, it is possible to link to the IP address other applications used by this peer on top of Tor.

Perhaps I'm exposing my own ignorance (because I've never felt the need to use Tor myself) but that strikes me as surprising if it's true. And something that even savvy internet users might not think about.

Re:Good!

[Knara]

Well, things like Javascript can expose the originating IP over Tor to the receiver, so it's probably not a large leap to assume that you can look at torrrent traffic and find the originating IP at the application level.

That said, its a "problem" with the originating application, not Tor specifically. As said on the Tor website "Tor does not automatically make all your communications secure."

Re:Good!

[c0lo]

Perhaps I'm exposing my own ignorance (because I've never felt the need to use Tor myself) but that strikes me as surprising if it's true. And something that even savvy internet users might not think about.

The sawy internet users are kindly invited to read the paper on weaknesses of BitTorrent over Tor to reduce their level of ignorance. There are 2 passive ways and an active way (running a Tor exit node) to exploit "BT leaks" (not really leaks since it wasn't designed with security/privacy in mind).

Re:Good!

[blair1q]

No, it's a pretty simple application of basic undercover investigative technique.

They pretended to be part of the Tor web, joining it at a point where the user's IP address was visible.

People willingly handed them the IP address.

And since the web was fairly limited in size, and connection points were selected randomly, and most users did multiple connections over time, eventually 70% of users willingly handed them the IP address. Since Tor has no way of ensuring trust in its security servers, its security is void. You couldn't have designed it better to funnel users' IP addresses to a spy unless you had only one server in the whole web and faked the rest of the topology.

it was wide-open to being exploited by sting operations.

This is also the reason you should never trust anonymizing proxy servers or Arab sheiks.

There's nothing so useless as a lock with a voice imprint - Lord President Borusa

Re:Good!

[dissy]

Perhaps I'm exposing my own ignorance (because I've never felt the need to use Tor myself) but that strikes me as surprising if it's true. And something that even savvy internet users might not think about.

The best way to picture it is a man wanting to go outside anonymously, so he dresses in a full solid color suit, gloves, face mask, etc etc so you can't tell who it is.
Then when he gets outside, he starts screaming his name at the top of his lungs :P

Using tor, the source IP that the server sees is the tor exit node, not you.
But if your application spams out the IP it thinks you have (be it from your network interface, or router IP with nat discovery) to the end points, your app effectively just signed your name to your anonymous otherwise untraceable letter.

Re:Good!

[plasticsquirrel]

Yeah, some assholes use Tor for BitTorrent, and it's awful for the network. Then people like me who live behind the Great Firewall of China, get slower-than-molasses browsing of censored web sites (terrible things like Google Pages, Blogger, anything from Taiwan, any page containing a string the PRC doesn't like, etc.). The main use for such work-arounds is usually just for my own research and education, and this is the basic reason that Tor exists. Users who run BitTorrent through Tor are really abusing what is basically a charity for people who need it.

Re:Good!

[Agarax]

It's asshats like them that suck up all the bandwith in Tor.

Tor is meant for people that want to surf and post anonymously.

Thus, someone in China who is trying to research democracy and human rights is unable to connect because someone else really wants to catch up on old seasons of Lost without paying up $15 bucks for a netflix subscription.

Re:Good!

[ffflala]

Goodness, I also find that surprising. I have long been aware of TOR vulnerabilities if a single entity controlled a high enough ratio of TOR nodes, but I still don't understand how these researchers were able to undermine the the protocol so readily in the first place.

Re:Good!

[JesseMcDonald]

Yeah, Tor isn't designed for bulk data transfers. If you want to use BitTorrent anonymously, via onion routine, try I2P instead—but make sure to configure your client properly. The actual peer connections need to go through I2P, not just the communication with the tracker. There's a built-in web-based client that's correctly configured by default. All the peers have to be inside I2P, of course; you couldn't join a non-I2P swarm without giving away your real IP address anyway.

Hi, I'm new here

[EkriirkE]

You mean to tell me when I connect to a large pool of people, there is a large pool of people there?

Re:Hi, I'm new here

[Bigjeff5]

You'll also be surprised to know that when you tell everybody what you're downloading, everybody knows what you're downloading.

Shocking, I know, and completely counter-intuitive, but there it is.

OMG

[Anonymous Coward]

This must mean my IP address is being BROADCAST TO THE WORLD! And I thought I had punched the monkey to prevent this.

Re:OMG

[Hurricane78]

See, that’s the thing. You spanked the monkey! And that only makes it worse. ;)

Shocked?

[Zedrick]

First day on the internet? Welcome.

Re:Shocked?

[Bigjeff5]

Come on now, it could reasonably be his second or third. Don't be so hard on the guy!

are you new here?

[Colin Smith]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

Why? Have you been downloading really compromising porn?

WTF? It's peer to peer. All they need to do is have a copy and other people download stuff from you... so you know what they're downloading...

 

Re:are you new here?

[Spad]

Much worse, it was the Backstreet Boys discography.

Re:are you new here?

[Spatial]

Dickography.

Everyone?

[neoform]

BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent.

How could they possibly spy on me if I'm using a private tracker with DHT disabled?

Re:Everyone?

[CondeZer0]

> How could they possibly spy on me if I'm using a private tracker with DHT disabled?

They can't.

While ignorance is widespread among bitorrent users (as the poster illustrates with his surprise at this story), this story also seems to include some amount of FUD.

Re:Everyone?

[blueg3]

You're assuming, among other things, that everyone else in the torrent has PEX disabled -- or at least that the "private" flag in the metainfo file is set and that everyone's torrent software honors that by disabling PEX.

Re:Everyone?

[blueg3]

By story, you mean the submitter's comment on the story. Both the "quote" from TFS and also TFA say "most", not "all".

Re:Everyone?

[lpq]

They are on your private tracker?

Re:Everyone?

[neoform]

If I have PEX disabled, my client wont connect to anyone that has not been sent to me by the tracker... which means anyone who was shared my IP outside of the tracker, will never connect to me, and never know what I am doing.

Re:Everyone?

[blueg3]

I'd be willing to be that your BitTorrent client will accept a connection from someone not on your peer list.

Further, even if it doesn't, they know exactly which torrent you're a peer on, they just can't necessarily demonstrate it. Certainly sufficient for their research purposes. (For law enforcement purposes, if that was relevant, it would probably be sufficient to get a search warrant.)

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent.

Really? I guess you never looked at the protocol. I can't find a reference, but I remember a news article from a few years ago in which Bram Cohen responding to a reporter who asked if he felt responsible for the piracy enabled by BitTorrent. Bram pointed out that BitTorent is a terrible protocol to use for piracy, because anyone can see who is doing the pirating.

Re:Really?

[TheSHAD0W]

Yup, BitTorrent was designed for distributing content legitimately, even commercially, rather than sharing w4r3z. As such, trying to hide the identities of downloaders was silly and would have slowed distribution.

Well duhh! Of course you can find thm out!

[MarkTina]

It's P2P, you can't hide your IP from someone when they ask for a bit of movie file and your computer cheerfully sends it! It's the equivilant of the police walking down your street shouting "Are their any thieves here ?", and you sticking your head out the window to shout back "Yes Me me me! I'm a thief!!" ;-)

The best you can do is not respond to requests from IPs on a block list ... or steal Wifi from a poorly secured neighbour.

Encryption helps?

[plaukas pyragely]

What about if I select my bittorrent client to connect only via encrypted connection? Is it possible to tell what torrent I am downloading without getting all torrent files that are tracked by the tracker (which is obviously easy to identify)?

Re:Encryption helps?

[EkriirkE]

Encryption only helps when sniffing someone's network for BT traffic as ISPs do. All you need to do is open your favorite torrent client, wait for the tracker for your *.torrent to give you peers and look at your peers window. Pure unadulterated IPs, for which the client either allows to connect directly to you, or you connect directly to them.

If for some reason your client doesn't have a peers tab/window, just do a netstat and see the flood of IPs and hosts you are connected with.

Re:Encryption helps?

[apqvist]

But his question was whether it is possible to tell what "torrent [he is] downloading", not it if is possible to see which clients he is connected to. And I would like to know the answer to that question as well. :)

Re:Encryption helps?

[JWSmythe]

    Correct. The ISP can't identify your traffic, but the endpoints obviously can. Otherwise, the encryption would be worthless.

    That's an argument I've had with people about https:/// sites. Sure, the data is hidden in between your machine and the server, but both ends know exactly what it is. Otherwise, it just wouldn't work.

    From your machine, you can see who is requesting what from you, and likewise they can see what you request from them.

    It can work to blacklist known snoopy peers, but since anyone can set up their own machine to monitor, the only safe way to remain anonymous is to not do it in the first place. Well, you could do it off a stolen connection, but if the authorities are determined enough to figure out who you are, they will. It's not all that hard to identify the location of a rogue wireless client.

Re:Encryption helps?

[EkriirkE]

Indeed it is.
In uTorrent, for example, the peers tab displays everyone you are sharing with for the highlighted torrent(s). i.e. One torrent hilighted only shows the IPs/hosts for that one, multiple highlighted (shift+click, etc) shows the concatenation of IPs/hosts. Encryption does not hide this fact from clients, only form passive network sniffing.

Re:Encryption helps?

[apqvist]

Thanks for taking the time to explain.

Re:Well duhh! Of course you can find thm out!

[CannonballHead]

or steal Wifi from a poorly secured neighbour.

That's not theft, it is only theft if you take a physical object... ;)

[sarcasm]

Wouldn't Peer Guardian prevent this?

[jbeach]

Or is that completely wrong and sooooo 2009?

Re:Wouldn't Peer Guardian prevent this?

[blueg3]

Only if they have an IP address in a known-dangerous block. Being security researchers, they're probably well-aware that an excellent way to spy on P2P users is with a laptop on a local coffee shop's WiFi.

Re:Wouldn't Peer Guardian prevent this?

[Degro]

I switched to the PeerBlock (http://www.peerblock.com/) fork when I switched to Vista/7 64-bit. Peer Guardian doesn't seem to get updates anymore and doesn't support those versions of windows anyway. How effective either are/were I couldn't attest to. I run it as a precaution. I do know that when I am torrent'ing the block history list moves right along at a fairly constant rate.

Re:Wouldn't Peer Guardian prevent this?

[jbeach]

I can't prove Peer Guardian has been effective. But I have been torrenting for years without a sign of trouble, whereas a friend of mine in the same area who wasn't using PG received a snail-mailed warning from Time Warner.

This guy's a joker.

[Zexarious]

"I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

Really, you were shocked? What were you doing at a tech conference then, you did not belong there. Back in 01 when the bittorrent protocol was released the #1 thing about it was that 'you could see everyone and everyone could see you'. That's pretty much the definition of bittorrent, that's what the tracker does, connects you to other people. How can someone be so ignorant and apathetic to not even have a basic understanding of how a technology that they use works.

Nice

[Hognoxious]

I was at the 3rd USENIX Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats yesterday

Awesome. Meet any chicks?

Re:Nice

[Hognoxious]

I don't know how to break this to you, but she stopped being a chick five years after I was born. And three years after that she was hit by a truck. At least it was quick.

You insensitive clod, etc etc.

Sees thru TOR!?

[JackSpratts]

Well thank God TOR is transparent.

- JackSpratts

Founder, Society for the Elimination of Opacity. ;)

They cracked Tor?

[VTI9600]

That you can view peers on a BT network is not shocking. What deserves more attention is the fact that they were able to identify IP's of even those users who used Tor. Of course, BT and Tor should never be mixed (to protect the network of those who need privacy for something other than piracy). This just proves it.

Re:They cracked Tor?

[FooHentai]

Proves it? The two points you mentioned are valid but not related.

Re:They cracked Tor?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Achilles' heel of TOR is comprised of the application protocols. For example, if you browse the web through TOR and don't disable "active" content, e.g. Flash, then an attacker can use Flash to find your external IP address locally and send it as payload back to the server. If you browse unencrypted pages, the attacker who provides an exit node through which your requests are routed can make the necessary changes to the web pages on the fly. The attack on Bittorrent over TOR is similar: Bittorrent leaks the public IP of the computer its running on.

To avoid this whole class of attacks, the application PC should only ever see a network with RFC 1918 addresses and no direct internet connection. The router should then encapsulate all packets and hand them to the TOR network.

Re:They cracked Tor?

[VTI9600]

Indeed...it proves to all the paranoid jerk-asses that they should keep being paranoid because screwing with Tor won't help them. Obviously there are technical reasons why using BT over Tor is bad, but try explaining that to the jerk-asses. Paranoia is the only thing that motivates them.

fear-mongerish

[drDugan]

Saying you "can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent" and TFA stating "major privacy threat" are over-the-top and fear-mongering exaggerations.

A more accurate way to state this is: Using BitTorrent will make our IP address public regarding what content is downloaded and shared online from that IP address. When someone monitors the same content, then they can log your IP address. This is obvious from how the protocol works to anyone who looks into privacy questions seriously. Yes, there is less privacy with what you download with BitTorrent compared to a direct download, as other people also sharing the same content can see your IP address.

But remember, with every download method online someone else knows you have downloaded it, with direct downloads and with all the different peer-to-peer distribution options. If you go to Adobe and download the latest Photoshop demo, they know, they log your IP, and usually even ask for even more information about you.

The only a real privacy problem (a "major threat") is for people using BitTorrent for illegal redistribution of content; it is not a major problem for distribution of open licensed or public domain content, businesses or organizations using BitTorrent for distribution to lower costs, or to distribute free content for viral or marketing purposes.

(Disclaimer: our company, ClearBits, does exactly this, offers distribution as a service to others, and we use BitTorrent extensively)

bittorrent...

[GastronomicalEvent]

Free month of netflix + dvd decrypt > bit torrent. Sure netflix knows where you are, but the French never will!

Re:bittorrent...

[ClioCJS]

You mean, if 480i is acceptable to you. If you want 1080p because you sit 4 ft from a 52 inch screen [like the one I'm typing on right now], then it's not quite so trivial, is it? [is it? really.. i'd like to know]

Re:UNISEX?

[Anonymous Coward]

Joey: No, I had sex a couple of days ago.

Rachel: No no, U-N-I-Sex...

Joey: Well...I can't say no to that...

card

[RichardJenkins]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent.

Your geek card, hand it in!

Re:UNISEX?

[spartacus_prime]

Only on /. would this be modded as Insightful.

Re:I know. Nevertheless, it's a warning. See...

[biryokumaru]

The scary part is that it doesn't have any of the torrents I've actually downloaded in the past few days, like BT4 which was a huge swarm and came in at like 3 MB/s.

Re:UNISEX?

[biryokumaru]

No, it means their conclusion is highly flawed. Or, at least, 2obvious4u's interpretation of their conclusion.

If you think that's fun...

[Call Me Black Cloud]

1. Host TOR exit node
2. Eavesdrop on traffic
3. Post results
...
4. Profit!

I'm sure the traffic coming out of TOR is far more interesting than BitTorrent traffic (unless you're a media company).

Can I get a DUH here?

[jridley]

Seriously, this is news? Come on, 2 minutes looking at how the protocol works is enough to know this wouldn't be hard to do.

Re:Can I get a DUH here?

[Xugumad]

While I suspect most people don't routinely read the protocols they use, I am distressed by how many people don't realise that when they're communicating with a large group of people, a large group of people know they're communicating.

BitTorrent was never designed for this sort of use (the original sample use cases suggested were a lot closer to how Blizzard uses BitTorrent, for example), people just decided to use it because it's a nice P2P protocol...

Re:Can I get a DUH here?

[jch.pgh]

Thank you for that DUH. Bram Cohen originally designed the protocol to be an ultra-scalable file distribution approach, and every attempt to add security, encryption, or whatever is trying to add something against the grain of its origin. (It may still be worth doing it, in the same sense that steganography may still be worth doing.) Bittorrent is for above-board, everyone-knows-you're-doing-it file distribution. If you want to hide what you're doing, do it with something else.

"Most", but not ALL

[macraig]

There's a reason they chose to use the word "most" to describe their success: in order for their snooping to be successful they have to connect to the offending machine(s). Deny them that connection, and they have nothing. Deny them that connection, and anonymizing proxies are irrelevant.

Re:UNISEX?

[HTH NE1]

Yeah, that has been disproven.

There exist pairs of words which are anagrams of each other while still having the same first and last letter. Thus you would not be able to distinguish them if the intervening letters were scrambled. Two examples are protuberantial/perturbational and, even more on point, undefinability/unidentifiably.

Re:UNISEX?

[StikyPad]

Y'ruoe rghit, it's cpetlelmoy libelge. Fantacising!

Re:UNISEX?

[Labcoat Samurai]

Loosely yes, though I don't think it's quite so simple. First, the paragraph they gave has a lot of context and flow going for it, and it's mostly comprised of short, easy words. Also, the other letters matter quite a bit. With even a few random letters not in the original word jumbled in to each word, I suspect it'd be substantially harder to read. And as for the power of context, my mind originally turned "slelinpg" into "sleeping" rather than "spelling" and "aulaclty" into "audacity" rather than "actually". I still figured them out quickly enough on a second pass when it was clear they made no contextual sense, but, the first and last letters aren't the only important part of the pattern recognition.

Re:UNISEX?

[Bigjeff5]

For most situations the first and last letter plus the context are enough. Occasionally it doesn't work. Give it a shot, it's pretty cool.

You do have to be familiar with the words you're reading (i.e. a strong vocabulary), and beyond sub-vocalizing, so if you suck at reading it won't work. As long as you can sight read though, it works just fine. It's also easier the faster you read.

Re:Well duhh! Of course you can find thm out!

[JesseMcDonald]

The router is physical, and the GP presumably doesn't have the owner's permission to interact with it and thereby influence its behavior. The radio signals are also physical, albeit transient. Apart from that, you're quite right (disregarding the sarcasm): if there were nothing physical involved then no theft could have taken place.

Copyright infringement, on the other hand, concerns patterns, which may describe an arrangement of physical matter (fixed or transient) but are not themselves physical. It's the different between the shape of a wave and a mass of water (or sand or photons or whatever) of that shape. The former is abstract, whereas the latter is physical (concrete).

Re:UNISEX?

[Bigjeff5]

That doesn't disprove anything, because you'll pick the correct word based on context, even if the incorrect word was stated.

The only time it won't work are the rare occasions where two such anagrams can also be applied in the same context. For example, it would be hard to come up with a scenario where protuberantial and perturbational can be used interchangeably in a sentence and still be correct. Same with undefinability and unidentifiably.

Such occasions are extremely rare, and you're just as likely to infer the incorrect word when it is spelled correctly as you are when it is jumbled, for exactly the reason this technique works.

Just look at how many times someone on slashdot says "At first I thought it said X", almost always with odd acronyms that are very similar to other acronyms. The exact same thing is going on there, they aren't looking at the whole word, just cues, and the cues were the same for both words, so at first glance they picked the one they are most familiar with. When that seemed odd they re-read it more carefully and realized the mistake.

The fact that this is a problem at all is strong evidence that the brain really does work this way.

Re:UNISEX?

[HTH NE1]

For example, it would be hard to come up with a scenario where protuberantial and perturbational can be used interchangeably in a sentence and still be correct. Same with undefinability and unidentifiably.

Sure you can: you just did it twice.

And you can have a lot more fun coming up with words that aren't in the English language, especially in sentences that attempt to teach you the correct spelling of words are rendered farcical when you scramble them. Much of science fiction would make little sense when you scramble words like joojooflop, swut, and turlingdrome, let alone unusual proper names.

It is reasoned that it is a subset of scrambling, i.e. the exchange of pairs of adjacent letters, that is readily discernable, and not the full-fledged scrambling of the word. In that it is fairly provable that the distribution of letters have enough rules regarding what adjacent letters and phonemes are common to be provable.

Re:UNISEX?

[Bigjeff5]

It is entirely dependent on your familiarity with the words and your ability to put them into context. Basically, if you subvocalize at all it won't work - so unfamiliar words will throw you, as will an unfamiliar context.

First, the paragraph they gave has a lot of context and flow going for it, and it's mostly comprised of short, easy words.

Context is vital to reading in general, if there is no context you can follow it doesn't matter if the words are spelled correctly, it will simply be a confusing mess. Large words are no problem as long as you recognize them on sight. If you don't recognize it such that you need to sound it out, then it isn't going to work, obviously. It relies on you already knowing the words you're reading.

With even a few random letters not in the original word jumbled in to each word, I suspect it'd be substantially harder to read.

You'd be wrong, the first time I saw this the letters were substituted randomly instead of jumbled, and it worked fine. Jumbling is actually harder than substituting for a single letter - for example replacing the middle of the words with all x's makes what is going on abundantly clear, and actually easier to read. Your brain is not un-jumbling it in your head, it's comparing cues in the word with what you already know - for example "audacity": The first and last letters are easiest to recognize, a and y, and you see it's 8 letters long. There are maybe 15-20 common 8 letter words that start with "a" and end with "y", and given the context of a sentence using "audacity", there generally isn't any other option to confuse it with. Your brain is very good at this kind of estimation, so this process lets you read twice as fast or more as someone who sub-vocalizes.

If you had to read every single letter, you'd never be able to read faster than 300 words a minute or so, which is pretty slow. That's the whole idea behind breaking out of the sub-vocalizing stage. The next step up is to read whole phrases at a time, instead of just looking at words. After that are blocks of paragraphs, which you read in quick succession and put together the sentences in your head - you essentially read whole paragraphs at a time. That's extremely fast reading there, and not many people can do it. Reading phrases is not rare, and reading individual words by sight is common.

Theft - defination of.

[pgmrdlm]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&defl=en&q=define:theft&ei=c8bYS_30C4KsM7uVrI4K&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title&ved=0CAwQkAE
In criminal law, theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theft

Re:Theft - defination of.

[betterunixthanunix]

How is that relevant? Copyright law is not and has never been property law (in the USA). Here are a few key differences:

• Copyrights are not mandatory in the constitution; property rights are.
• If copyrights are implemented, the constitution mandates that they be valid for a limited time only; property rights are perpetual, assuming the property can be perpetually maintained (by the owner and whoever inherits or comes to own the property).
• Copyrights are about the right to copy something; there is nothing in property law that governs a person's ability to replicate your property (i.e. if I like the way your house looks, I can build a copy of it on my land, and I have not violated your property rights).
• Property can be owned by the government; all government works are automatically in the public domain (no copyrights).

Now, remind me, how is copying a form of theft?

Re:Theft - defination of.

[pgmrdlm]

How is that relevant? Copyright law is not and has never been property law (in the USA). Here are a few key differences:
Copyrights are not mandatory in the constitution; property rights are.
-- Please provide a link to back this up. No offense, but I am not going to take your word for it. The content created is the property of individual creators. You copying it, without their permission is taking from them. Until I see case links, you have no counter point.

*If copyrights are implemented, the constitution mandates that they be valid for a limited time only; property rights are perpetual, assuming the property can be perpetually maintained (by the owner and whoever inherits or comes to own the property).
--We are talking about downloading content. There has been examples of the movie Star Trek in the various threads. Even with a time limit for a copyright to be invalidated, Star Trek has not reached that point. Please, you really think that this conversation is about content that is years and years old? You are skewing the argument.

Copyrights are about the right to copy something; there is nothing in property law that governs a person's ability to replicate your property (i.e. if I like the way your house looks, I can build a copy of it on my land, and I have not violated your property rights).
-- Really, your saying an architect didn't design the house you live in? Unless that design is of a certain age, your previous argument, that design is worth money to that architect. Did you purchase those designs from a architect? I’m copying your house, but guess what. I purchased the same designs. I compensated the creator. I did not steal his work.

Property can be owned by the government; all government works are automatically in the public domain (no copyrights).

        We are not talking about the government, please stay on topic.

Now, remind me, how is copying a form of theft?

Re:Theft - defination of.

[betterunixthanunix]

"Copyrights are not mandatory in the constitution; property rights are. -- Please provide a link to back this up. No offense, but I am not going to take your word for it. The content created is the property of individual creators. You copying it, without their permission is taking from them. Until I see case links, you have no counter point."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_copyright_law

The text authorizes Congress to create a copyright system; it does not mandate that copyrights be created. Property rights, on the other other hand, are mandatory:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Note that property rights are assumed -- no law had to be passed establishing property rights, the constitution simply assumes that the citizens have the right to their property and restricts the government's ability to deprive the citizens of that right.

"Please, you really think that this conversation is about content that is years and years old? You are skewing the argument."

The argument is about whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, and hence whether or not copyright infringement is a form of theft. Any difference between copyrights and property rights is relevant, including the fact that copyrights have a mandatory expiration.

"Unless that design is of a certain age, your previous argument, that design is worth money to that architect. Did you purchase those designs from a architect?"

None of which has anything to do with the fact that there is no infringement of your property rights when someone builds a copy of your house. As you point out, the house may be old enough that its design is in the public domain, yet the person who owns the house still has property rights over it. Again, this is a question of whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, so let's try to stay on topic.

"We are not talking about the government, please stay on topic."

We are talking about whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, and any difference between copyrights and property rights is relevant, including the fact that the government can own property.

Re:Theft - defination of.

[drsmithy]

In criminal law, theft is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. ...

What property was taken ?

Shocked?

[Anachragnome]

"As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

Shocked? Why? I use BitTorrent myself and it is pretty obvious that anyone can do exactly what you state. The peers and associated seeders are clearly listed in the "peers" tab by IP address. BitTorrent even logs them for you. By necessity, that data (IP addresses) must be available to the clients and is thus available to anyone with the client.

It is rather naive to think that someone wouldn't put this data to use on a large scale. Creating an app to track new torrents, and the users of that data, doesn't seem too difficult to me(although I don't know how and could be wrong about the ease of doing so).

There is BIG money in data-mining. It should be of no surprise that data-mining would be applied to such an open network.

As with any online activity, use equates to a certain amount of exposure. Accept it, or don't use the resource.

I confess I'm a thief: A True Story

[mangu]

He fully expected the sale to anyone that WATCHED that movie.

Let me tell you a true story very much like the theoretical example you posted. When I was a kid there was a Rolling Stones song I loved, but I had no money to buy the album and my parents hated rock music. Our neighbors had that album, and I used to run to the backyard to listen when they played it. Was I stealing?

Re:I confess I'm a thief: A True Story

[haploc]

He fully expected the sale to anyone that WATCHED that movie.

Let me tell you a true story very much like the theoretical example you posted. When I was a kid there was a Rolling Stones song I loved, but I had no money to buy the album and my parents hated rock music. Our neighbors had that album, and I used to run to the backyard to listen when they played it. Was I stealing?

(RIAA) - Did your neighbours have the permission to broadcast it publicly?

Re:I confess I'm a thief: A True Story

[Nalgas D. Lemur]

Where's +1 Crotchety when you need it?

Unfortunatly ...

[Agarax]

Most people don't act like you claim.

In most cases, if someone really wants to watch back seasons of Lost and they can't get it off the Pirate Bay, they'll spring the few bucks to rent it from the local Blockbuster or from Netflix.

Personally, I just don't see why the media corporations just don't release their own torrents. I think most people here would be willing to live with watching the same amount of advertisements you would get on TV in return for a high quality torrent of their favorite shows that was seeded the second the show ended on primetime TV.

Re:Unfortunatly ...

[JesseMcDonald]

Did you mean to reply to some other comment? I don't see where I made any claims concerning how most people behave. I simply said that copyright infringement and choosing to go without have precisely the same effect on the income of the copyright holder.

As for official, ad-laden torrents: do you really think anyone would watch the ads if their player didn't force them to?

If they did release a player which enforced the ads, do you think it would be (a) cross-platform; (b) secure (e.g. not spyware); (c) and used in preference to ad-free, standard-format video torrents playable in standard malware-free media programs? I admit that they'd have a bit of a time advantage—assuming they did away with separately-timed releases in different countries.

Re:UNISEX?

[HTH NE1]

Well, how about a shorter example: form/from. There's no altering the scrambling rules that can exclude that pair form ambiguity. And there's nothing wrong with the previous sentence either.

Re:UNISEX?

[blackraven14250]

You didn't consider that your brain can see the first and last letter, then if your brain didn't understand it, go back and look at some more letters. I mean, that's what a time-saving accuracy-needing brain would do...

The scanner committed piracy itself

[frizzantik]

From the PDF it says the scanner downloaded pieces of data from all of the 1.2 Million torrents it listened in on. Shame Shame!

Talking about shock

[ElusiveJoe]

As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

That's nothing! Imagine how shocked were content providers, when they discovered that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can insert the new contents into BitTorrent!

You misspeled and blasphemed!

[ElusiveJoe]

Thor is a God, you insensitive clod! And he is not transparent!

Re:Or a warning

[fbjon]

Not so sure. I checked out one of the swarms indicated, and sure enough, I found the peer listed on the that site.

Incidentally, the CLI interface is fragile, and it can break out into a standard apache directory listing. It also occasionally redirects to an RFC document for some reason. Anyway, there's a log of all tried passwords there. But more interestingly, there's a lot of other stuff elsewhere in the tree, an 18MB text file with a Twitter social connection graph (just a list of name pairs), and a monitor/ directory with what looks like GSM/email/p2p monitoring stuff. Can't access most of it except an auto-refreshing IRC monitoring page though.

Somebody is using it for something it seems.

Re:UNISEX?

[Labcoat Samurai]

You'd be wrong, the first time I saw this the letters were substituted randomly instead of jumbled, and it worked fine. Jumbling is actually harder than substituting for a single letter - for example replacing the middle of the words with all x's makes what is going on abundantly clear, and actually easier to read.

Not for my girlfriend, who I just tried this on, and who gave up after a minute on "Yxx'd be wxxxg, txe fxxxt txxe I sxw txxs txe lxxxxxs wxxe sxxxxxxxxxd rxxxxxxy ixxxxxd of jxxxxxd, axd it wxxxxd fxxe." without working it out. For the record, her relaxed, typical reading rate is awfully fast, such that she routinely finishes 300+ page novels in an evening (normally, I wouldn't consider this pertinent, but I figured I'd anticipate a potential response). Furthermore, when I see something like jxxxxxd, I want to think "juxtaposed" because of the x, but if I were to see jlemubd, instead, I'd read the word in context without slowing.

My point was not that you read individual letters but that you recognize patterns of letters. That's why I pointed out that I parsed aulaclty as audacity rather than actually. Contextually, audacity made no sense in the sentence, but it had the right number of letters and it started and ended with the right letters. If that was *all* that mattered, I'd have chosen the word that made more contextual sense. But it isn't all that matters. It's just the most important thing.

Incidentally, I don't see what this has to do with speed reading or subvocalization. I didn't mistake aulaclty for audacity because it *sounds* similar but rather because it *looks* similar. If I were stumbling around on trying to sound out all of the jumbled words in that paragraph, I'd have read it very slowly indeed, and I misread aulaclty in an instant.

Mod Parent Up

[Valdrax]

I was also kind of horrified to see a paper talking about trying to use BitTorrent over TOR.
It's widely considered to be abuse of the network.

Not very observant?

[Runaway1956]

"As a BitTorrent user, I was shocked that anyone with a box connected to the Internet can spy on what everyone is downloading on BitTorrent."

All of my bittorrent clients show the IP address of people I'm downloading from, and those that I'm uploading to. Just click the tab labeled "Peers". Yeah, some of them are spoofed - no big deal, I can't identify EVERYONE. But, I'll just bet that more than 80% are real addresses, and I could send a "cease and desist" on any letterhead I chose to each of the ISP's.

It would be no big deal to maintain a log of the data in the peers tab. When a new torrent appears, one IP address alone will have a complete file. Logging that will indeed give you the majority of people who actually provide content. Again, some of THOSE are probably spoofed - but you can identify most of them.

It didn't take an astrophysicist to figure this out.

Re:Not very observant?

[gronne]

I was just thinking that in the year 2010, how is it possible for a Slashdot reader not to know that Bittorrent is not private?

You don't need whole thing to determine partial

[lpq]

you forgot the real part.

You then have to download the entire thing to find out if those blocks are part of IronMan2.avi are actually part of ironman2 movie or some dumb students project on feeding excessive iron to a man.
----
If you have the first part, the consecutive parts after that are automatically watchable -- immediately. And about 50% of the time you only have to download 50% of the torrent to get the 1st piece...

But even if you don't, I don't see why it wouldn't be possible for a computer algorithm to be
developed to 'synchronize' with an active stream in progress. Surely, the only place to sync with a video stream is not the beginning, -- how do you seek?

If you can synchronize with the video at any point, you can see the video from that point on.

you can prioritize those chunks after a synchronization point to watch a bit of the video from that
point on...

I know you don't have to download an entire BT stream to watch any part of it -- it's a feature of
BT, that it can be divided into files -- and you can specified which parts of the stream you want to prioritize or download at all -- you don't have to download the whole thing to get partials.

I take it you've never actually used BT?

Re:Solution:

[lpq]

Just use a linux box as home router....should be able to handle sufficient clients to saturate most links.

RTFA, important if you use BT

[Anonymous Coward]

The article goes into a lot of detail about how they identify those users who are on VPN, Proxy, tor, etc. They've also identified over 10,000 IPs that "monitor" only, from a few data centers in the United States. If you're using BT, you should definitely read this article..

not fresh news for me

[Scotch42]

A friend of mine (I'm a debian sysadmin) has developped a tool to find who is downloading a given file in realtime. It is used by police to track chlidren porn downloader in several european contries. It's quite effective and has a long strory of success. I wanted to sell that product to the police of my country (european) to track those guys but they wanted to use it to track music downloaders (our license restrict the use of the tool to track chlidren porn downloaders). We did not agree here but in other places we did. So I know for sure that those kind of tools is around for years...

Obligatory XKCD reference...

[mcrbids]

I don't know why, but your post made me think about this XKCD cartoon.

Don't know, just sayin'...

Use VPN services

[dimovich]

If you'd like to remain anonymous (in the most effective way), use VPN services like ipredator.se.

anonymity

[GNUPublicLicense]

Internet is not anonymous... wow they are smart! :P What they don't say: IPs can be poison and computers behind some IPs could be compromised. Then they may identify some IPs which share some content. But do they check the content? And above all, they cannot link what happend with an IP to its owner. They cannot prove it with inexpensive systems.

Are Pringles illegal under the DMCA?

[jolyonr]

Sounds like they might be!

worm potential

[Monkier]

I'm surprised a nasty worm hasn't propagated via torrent client exploits. Get a list of IPs from a tracker AND the client/version they are using. Not only that: all the users would've opened the port on their router..

Copyrighted my IP address

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I just sent the paperwork in to copyright my IP address. I hope the RIAA will use it, thus exposing themselves to liability for the unlicensed use of my work.

Hey, if I copyright all my torrent packets, I'd get them on multiple violations!

1 - copyright IP address
2 - copyright all my IP packets
3 - wait for RIAA action
4 - ?
5 - PROFIT!

just use freenet

[WhiteDragon]

It's been known for a long time that the bittorrent protocol is not anonymous. Just use freenet.

Re:UNISEX?

[HTH NE1]

No, that's domesticated turkeys.

Re:UNISEX?

[MartinSchou]

That is untrue! Just ask the newly formed Farmers Union and the Framers of the Constitution! ;)

"Werhe did you get taht form?"

[HTH NE1]

But while the examples scramble every word, the thesis is that not every word need be scrambled and that any scrambled word can be derived from context.

The second sentence in my (the GP) post contains no misspellings. I wrote "pair form" and I meant "pair form". If you misread it as "pair from" that's an error on your part, not a valid correction.

I don't discount the phenomenon, only that it is stated too simplistically as a general case in a way that is easily disproven. If it were that easy, even a machine should be able to correct anything so scrambled without any special logic to even understand what is being written (and just as rapidly as the human brain provided the right relational database).

I've submitted my observations to snopes.com on this topic, including a link to this subthread, as an update to their article on the topic.

The "paper" is cited as saying correct spelling is unimportant. However, it doesn't say that the letters in the middle are unimportant, only their order. They still contain the correct letters. (Otherwise, no one w3d h2e any p6m u11g t2s p4e and we'd have discovered a new efficient standard for compressing English text.)

It boils down to saying that having only the correct first and last letter makes solving a scrambled word easy. Apart from the three example anagram pairs I've cited, that is correct in English. But those three examples disprove it as a rule with no exceptions as it is generally taken.

And it makes light of the plight of dyslexics. Not that I have a horse in that race.

oldnews

[Jerslan]

Umm... This isn't news. I've known this since the protocol first got big back in 2003-2004-ish.

The MPAA and RIAA are both well aware of it and take advantage of the more stupid users regularly. A friend of mine in college even got a couple DMCA letters and the IT group punished him by shutting off his network access for a couple weeks (only in his dorm room, he could still use lab computers).

My question is how did this get a green light and put on the front page as "news".

Semantics and bullshit

[Petersko]

"You can't "steal" the expectation of income."

Let's say I find myself a man to play the guitar at dinnertime each night. It's now the end of the week, and he has the "expectation" of income. He was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour. If I choose to not pay him, have I not stolen from him?

Instead, let's say he recorded the dinnertime performances for me in advance. I have not agreed in advance to buy them, but he expects that if I do wish to listen to them during dinner I will pay him. Let's say I copy them, listen to them, and I do not pay. He has the "expectation" of income, he was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour.

If I'm not stealing in the second case, I'm not stealing in the first.

Re:Semantics and bullshit

[JesseMcDonald]

Let's say I find myself a man to play the guitar at dinnertime each night. It's now the end of the week, and he has the "expectation" of income. He was deprived of the use of his time, and I enjoyed the fruits of his labour. If I choose to not pay him, have I not stolen from him?

That depends. What does your contract say? If the contract states that you give him a certain amount of money on the condition that he plays for you, and after he plays you refuse to turn over the money, then you are indeed stealing from him—that's his money you're withholding. One can envision other circumstances, including the absence of any contract (not necessarily written), where refusal of payment would not be theft. The expectation is not enough, by itself.

If I'm not stealing in the second case, I'm not stealing in the first.

In the second case you explicitly did not agree in advance to pay him. This changes matters. If you did agree to such in the first case then the situations are not analogous.

he was deprived of the use of his time

Perhaps, but not by you. The decision to spend his time playing or recording his performances was his own. You have not deprived him of any additional time by listening. He was under no obligation to make his recordings available to you without first arranging for payment. Only the existence of a voluntary contract would create an obligation on your part for payment after the fact.

Re:Why are you concerned?

[fnj]

To the fucking asshole who moded this troll. Get a brain. Words have meaning, moron.