I'm not sure where to post this but I thought this was a good start, I was just curious how people usually get caught downloading torrents.
or I should say how not to get caught.
You use a proper ISP(you know, one that isnt a major one and wouldnt care about your piracy) followed by a proper torrent client. (usually rutorrent or transmission or even Vuze).
Finally you need to use a proper tracker in combination with a seedbox or a VPN to be absolutely sure.
You just need to do the first two steps though unless your traffic is larger than 100GBs a day.
Also : the russian tracker is not really monitored as much and has a load more stuff than others.
you are open and free to talk about torrents all day long, just no linking to any site with illegal material as per rules.
not a warning in the least I'm just putting that out there.
Torrenting is a completely fine technology; link to as many legal torrents as you want, like the magnet link for an Arch ISO. When it is illegal content, however, the line should be drawn. I think we need to specify that in the rules more explicitly.
I was wondering if completely bottling down the upload speed of a torrent would at least give you lower chances of getting caught. Because I was told that as a downloader, you are not going to get snapped, unless you are uploading something copyrighted, because it's also like saying you're trying to distribute that content.
You get detected by connecting to peers that are being monitored ( A.K.A planted there by copyright holders ) Not uploading does nothing for you, and screws everyone else on the network.
Can it be that easy to detect suspicious trackers, as in those trackers that are being monitored?
i use peerblock.
They go after ip-adresses of sharers, using a vpn is working for now, but why not create a sharer-union for legal battles: Instead of giving 10 bucks/month to a vpn provider sharers could pool those recourses and make legal action against a single sharer astronomically expensive. That way sharers could make an example out of any law firm that dares to go after a sharer.
I don't know but i downloaded more 300+ torrents :/
Yeah a gazillion people are torrenting, very few get legally pursued in comparison, so i guess the probability of negative consequences is very low. My guess is that you are more likely to be in a car-accident than before a judge for sharing files.
But still it's worth while being a difficult to reach target, because lawyers are as just as lazy as anybody else, so they'll go after the low hanging fruit. So don't be that fruit.
Problem is that those laws does not affect me here in croatia...
It's that easy. you see the IP adresses of those who connect to you on the torrent network. If you're someone with a lot of resources ( say the mafiaa ) you can crosscheck these IPs the tracker connects you with, with the ones you've got in your database,( from say, comcast users ) and then use that to send warnings.
It's hard to justify the cost to go after every torrent user.
There's few that are made examples of with 20 year prison sentances and 5 million dollar fines for 'damages' in the US.
Outside the US and the inner circle of the EU piracy is rampant. I have over 2.5 terrabytes of upload monthly and nobody seems to care.
since wenn is it forbidden to download torrents for personaly private use? i never had trouble with this.
To answer your question OP, the methodology that ISPs and authorities use to catch people are very opaque, no one really knows what they do to find you. I suspect that the ISPs just have a list sent to them by "important" figures like the MPAA and then they do name-matching with torrent names. Obviously this doesn't really work too well since it's so easy to just fiddle around with names and use private trackers.
This is why piracy is such a gray area, how do the authorities exercise their power over it? They can't, the state can't build "roads" to police the Internet as easily as they can the ground. The only reason legislation like SOPA, CISPA, PIPA, etc exist is because lobbyists will it. Any sane person will tell you that enforcing anti-piracy is much too troublesome for a government.
In Germany, this is a disease with many law firms that have nothing better to do.
They can't touch you if you're only downloading, only if you're uploading, and they need to show what exactly you have uploaded and when.
In Germany, you can download anything that is offered over the Internet, because you download in good faith, you can't know whether something is what it says it is until you download it, and you pay for GEMA to do their job, being to protect copyright holders, when you consume copyrighted content. An Internet user can in good faith presume that if GEMA is capable of blocking Internet content on YouTube (which they are very good at), that they can also block content on other Internet sources.
So in Germany (and the Netherlands, and Switzerland, and some other countries), you can legally download torrents as long as you don't upload. So set your upload bandwidth to 0. To make monitoring your activity even harder, set the encryption to "enforce" or "require", depending on which client you use.
The whole lawyer business against torrent users revolves around one single thing: the fact that people are impressed when they get a letter from a lawyer. Many people that have done nothing wrong therefore pay. If you're doing nothing wrong (i.e. you're not uploading), you shouldn't be impressed with any letter you get from a law firm. You have to know that law firms that do this kind of thing are losers. Just don't leave any letter unanswered. Just answer them that they are misinformed and that you will file a complaint if they incorrectly accuse you or bother you any further, both with the Anwaltskammer and with the Police, and that you will be seeking proper monetary indemnification if they persist. Write them also that you're appalled at the criminal violation of privacy they committed by retrieving your customer data from your ISP without proper ground, and include a copy of your formal complaint letter to the Anwaltskammer, which costs nothing. This kind of practice is very much frowned upon, they will be summoned by their Anwaltskammer to explain what they were doing, and they will be one step closer to being stopped, because if the Anwaltskammer receives multiple complaints, these gangsters will be publicly reprimanded and if they continue, ultimately punished.
A thing to note is that these lawyers provide themselves a market, they can't prove that they have a proper mandate from their client before they decided to violate your rights, which is a very bad thing for a lawyer to do. And even if they have a mandate, most of the time, the client they have a mandate from, is not properly mandated by the copyright holder himself, so it's all in all pretty ridiculous altogether.
Please note that I do not condone downloading of copyrighted materials! Even IF you're downloading it legally for private use yourself, you're not really acting in good faith because in reality you know that the uploader is violating copyright, you're just hiding behind legal crap just as much as the shitty lawyers that go after torrenters, and it's basically acting like a loser and a coward. There are many channels through which you can legally obtain copies for private use from copyright holders themselves, even for free, and there are plenty of ways to buy copyrighted materials from the artists themselves in the form of very good value/price propositions, for instance by going to concerts and buying vinyl and CDs there, and asking for the artists to sign them. CD's and especially Vinyl, which is offered by a lot of bands now in their stores or at their concerts, have much better audio quality than downloaded mp3's, and even when you download FLAC's, you don't know how it was transcoded, you don't know if it's kosher, there might be malware in there, and it might cost you a lot more than just buying a CD.
Anyone ever heard of an article that said savvy pirates tend to purchase legal content than "normal", "everyday" users?
As a resident of Florida and a customer of Comcast (yup...them) I have received 1(one) P2P infringement notice caught by an RIAA anti-piracy node. I had been seeding the "hot" file for about a week, just being lazy - I usually remove from list+delete torrent then keep the desired file(s).
I have almost 1.5 TB of data obtained from bittorrent, and because of where I live and our present laws I do not seed most of it. Comcast was nice enough to save the notice they received due to my actions and they tell me I can view it anytime, fun!
EDIT: The alert I received is apparently not a definitive accusation. They merely believe I violated a copyright, they do not know for sure. It also apparently has zero repercussions and is less serious than a DMCA-violation notice, which also isn't very serious (I think, not sure)