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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."

3 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. So they are uploading the movie? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So surely the companies are distributing the movies to everyone. As they are the rights holder, it should be legal to download it?

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

      Tell that to the lawyers who are suing people. I received a letter from a law firm claiming to represent a movie studio. They stated that they had "proof" that my IP address was being used to download a movie called Split - I had never even heard of the movie prior to the letter. I took it to a lawyer and they are handling it.. it's been almost 18 months now... they challenged the idiots who are trying to sue me, and it turns out they blitzed out 10,000 letters in the city I live in... all claiming infringement on the same movie based on the IP addresses collected via torrent clients they were monitoring.

      Proof? How do you prove it wasn't you? They say it was, and they have an IP address that may or may not have been yours at the time... they say that the IP address was at the time, involved in downloading said copyrighted material. Where's your defense? How do you prove it wasn't me (or anyone else) that was downloading the file. I can't prove it. All I can do is say.. I didn't do it, and if it goes to court... it's my word against theirs, and they have ISP records that appear to "prove" that I did download the movie.

  2. Military folks love porn! by gorzek · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I did a search on some IP addresses assigned to overseas US military facilities. Let's just say it turns out US soldiers like transsexuals and big girls. And possibly big transsexual girls.

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