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I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

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Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago there was a legal firm that specialized in tracking down people from their IP on porn torrents on the assumption that they wouldn't want their name in the public record and would settle for 5 figures. The law firm doing it was so shady they ended up losing the suits and having a judge tell them to knock it off.

Note that the conduct of Prenda which the judge objected to was that they were both the legal representation and the copyright owners, but didn't admit that before the court. There was no suggestion that their tactics posed any problems.

There's also the problem that if the copyright owner themselves made the torrent available, it's not actually illegal to download it...

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#562
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only moral problem I have in your anecdote is the lying about it. With every fibre of my being, I could not care less about torrenting game of thrones .

Can you explain why? I can understand why people want things for free, but thinking that you shouldn't contribute towards the production cost of the programme you enjoy seems strange to me.

It feels so weird to grow up in an age of rampant, unabashed piracy, where literally everyone around you is burning CDs or cracking games or handing out copied mixtapes, and see questions like these. It just goes to show how thoroughly streaming squashed piracy (at least before everything fractured into the current landscape), and how short our collective memories are.

Data yearns to be free -- sharing it and copying it cost nothing. Shows are just video data. Forcing real-world, scarcity economics, in a realm where the only currency of the land is plentiful, seems strange to me.

There are so many other ways to monetize media content, and yet we keep going back to DRM and publisher-controlled walled-gardens. It's a complete and total shame.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#563
post #89

An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning). Everyone denied…

I once pirated a Tv show and was accidentally on my work VPN for a portion of it. Had a moment of being a bit frozen and scared. Decided to email the IT head and explain the situation. I got a “thanks for letting me know” and that was it. Not as big a deal as my head conjured up. I could have done the wrong thing though and made it a big deal.

"Someday, and that day may never come, I will call upon you to do a service for me."

- your company's IT guy

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#564
post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, and how did that work out for you?

I'd bet that was a bouncer/client set address, for the joke. Sigh, people probably trust things like this today because FB(whatsapp)/Google/slack/discord forces you to sign up with valid phone numbers and probably expose that as your ID.

I think the joke may have been by ChrisLMB, who saw the opportunity when he read the unmasked second-level domain in ben174's address.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#565
post #125
post #89

An intern once thought it was a good idea to torrent a couple of Game of Thrones episodes using my startup's Digital Ocean box. We found out after Digital Ocean forwarded us an email from HBO (who presumably tracked Digital Ocean down via the IP) that we were engaging in piracy. We sent an email to everyone with access, saying whoever was doing it to stop. Then we got a second email (a final warning). Everyone denied…

The problem here is not recognizing that the piracy was actually the problem. In what way was it forgivable? Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie? Because you don't have a Netflix account? If everyone treated piracy as theft (it is) then no one would have to waste their time investigating it because the collective will would exist to prevent it.

"Piracy" is not the problem, it is the solution. The truth is all subscription services straight up suck. They don't hold a candle to copyright infringement. Despite making billions of dollars in revenue, they simply can't compete with what's essentially a bunch of enthusiasts. More often than not the reason why they can't compete is copyright itself.

They have clunky interfaces, making users miss mpv. They don't have chapters, making it annoying to seek to a specific part of a film or episode. They don't allow users to download content beforehand, locking them out whenever there's no internet connection. They have annoying DRM, preventing content playback on perfectly good computers and TVs for no good reason. They aren't available in most countries, locking out entire regions of the globe. When it is available, users get only a subset of the content and feel like second rate consumers. Whatever ends up being available is frequently modified, censored or cut. Users straight up lose access to content with no warning when licensing agreements expire. Every copyright holder launches its own little streaming service with its own annoying quirks. They compress the video so much even pure black frames have massive artifacts and have the audacity to charge for this garbage. They don't have enough subtitles. There's usually zero extra content such as commentary tracks. They track everything users do and watch.

There is exactly one area where streaming offers a superior experience compared to copyright infringement: multiple audio tracks. This is because of a technical limitation: video players can load subtitles that are external to the video file but not audio tracks.

Something as good as "piracy" shouldn't have to stop existing for the benefit of aging industries. It's the 21st century, copyright doesn't make sense anymore. Society must rethink its laws. The copyright industry must adopt new business models or disappear.

> Because everybody does it, that makes it okie dokie?

The fact everybody is infringing copyright is evidence that the law is wrong. Laws are supposed to codify the customs of a people. If everyone is violating a law then that law obviously does not represent the customs of that people. Society must recognize this and adapt so that the behavior can be allowed.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#566
We were hosting an Au Pair from sweden. One day comcast sent us an email saying our IP address had been used to illegally download content.

I confronted her about it, and she lied denying it was her.

Needless to say, we never received another complaint.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's potentially less anonymous to the people who might prosecute you. Probably didn't realize how anonymous it wasn't to the employer and didn't factor that cost in to the decision. But if you're willing to $5 to get a show, you're probably less likely to pirate it anyway (or at least be the seed).

As far as I recall, $20 wouldn't even get you a single GoT episode in Australia. As a consequence, Australia had one of the highest piracy rates on GoT / HBO shows.

Worse, there was one season (S2 or S3?) where it was released on iTunes the day after each episode aired, for I bought a season pass, think it was maybe $30-40, perhaps even $50. The following season that option wasn't available due to Foxtel having a big sook, so I just stopped watching altogether.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#568
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long long ago I worked at a small regional ISP. We offered dial-up and dsl. Users were assigned whatever IP was available when they connected, and this was logged (including disconnect time). So, it was very easy to search the logs and see who was using an IP at a given time in the past (assuming we still had the logs).

Earlier this year there was a case where someone was accessing illegal stuff (as in, the sort of stuff that does warrant police kicking their door down at 4am) using public WiFi. Except the ISP had forgotten to take into account daylight savings time and given the police the wrong customer's details. Oops.

So who found out the DST issue in the end?

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#569
post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seedr.cc, bitport.io or zbigz.com exist to solve this problem and would have saved him his job.

Seriously. The idea that it's just fine to pirate everything because you can or have the tech to do it is appalling to see in this community.

i pay for amazon prime, youtube premium, hbo max, hulu, netflix and spotify.

if i'm downloading something i'm 100% sure the media company that owns the rights is getting my money somehow.

Re: I Know What You Download on BitTorrent

#570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use your client to create a .torrent. Send the .torrent over. Other party adds your IP as a seed. No trackers or DHT required.

Unfortunately, I've never managed to get this to work, even though the two computers have open ports and can connect to each other via nc/telnet. The other peer m just never starts downloading when I seed the file. BitTorrent is a fantastic way to transfer files, except for this one hitch I keep hitting.

The workaround I usually use when that happens is to pick a existing torrent that you added from a magnet link, then have the other end add the same magnet link, which downloads the magnet-linked file and then (IIUC) finds your source computer via PEX. YMMV; it's worked something like four times out of four for me, but it's a bit cargo-cult.
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