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Sony, Universal and Fox Caught Pirating Through BitTorrent

Posted by Soulskill on from the hand-in-cookie-jar dept.

New submitter Bad_Feeling sends in a followup to the story we discussed on Monday about a new site that scanned a few popular torrent trackers and linked torrents to IP addresses. The folks at TorrentFreak decided to check IP addresses belonging to major companies in the entertainment industry and published lists of pirated files from several, including Fox, Sony, and NBC Universal. Of course, they used the information to make a slightly different point than the industry usually does: "By highlighting the above our intention is not to get anyone into trouble, and for that reason we masked out the end of the IP addresses to avoid a witch hunt. An IP address is not a person, IP addresses can be shared among many people, and anyone can be behind a keyboard at any given time."

4 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So they are uploading the movie? by HopefulIntern · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not only that, but if they are indeed sharing, you could argue that all the stuff you have downloaded were from their IPs, so really the rightsholders were giving it out for free.

  2. It's a TRAP! by The+Jynx · · Score: 5, Insightful

    FTA:

    "In a response Buma/Stemra issued a press release stating that their IP-addresses were spoofed. A very unlikely scenario, but one that will be welcomed by BitTorrent pirates worldwide. In fact, they’d encourage Sony, Universal and Fox to say something similar. After all, if it’s so easy to spoof an IP-address, then accused file-sharers can use this same defense against copyright holders."

    This is quite a smart move. Getting these big organisations to explain this away will only add credence to the valid reasons that the public should be able to use to protect themselves. It doesn't matter what your personal opinion is on the morals of the situation the plain fact is an IP is not a person and the clearer this is made to the judges the better. Of course there is a the chance that the IPs were added manually by the guys who set the project up, they already admitted that there is still test data in there (do a check for 192.168.*.*) so it's far from perfect.

  3. Re:So they are uploading the movie? by jpapon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If they are downloading them, they are sharing them as well.

    That's simply not true. They could have turned off uploading.

    --
    -- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
  4. Re:This story is somewhat confused or editing was by glop · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Actually it's pretty much a story if it's low-level employees doing it.
    Come on! the MPAA and RIAA are always trying to get ISPs to police their customers and make sure nobody is using their connection to pirate stuff.
    But then they can't even block their own freaking employees from going to torrents and pirating copyrighted works?

    I mean, it should be easier to control employees than customers, no? So this makes the point of the ISPs that have long said that they can't monitor their customers and make sure they don't pirate.