TPB's Facebook posts about this have been quite entertaining.
"Sorry for not fulfilling your pirate needs tonight.
It's ok if you cheat on us with another site, just once.
We know that you still love us, deep down in your cursed pirate heart. ♥"
Yes, but many IP's--residential in particular--are rotated frequently. That's why grandmas and dead people got sued by the media cartels.
Actually I think this fact is an even better justification for pirating stuff. Anyone, anywhere can get sued by the media cartels--all that has to happen is that their ISP has to at some point assign them the same IP as a past file sharer. So if I could get sued tomorrow even if I'm a saint, why not download today and at least reap the benefits?
They could sue you tomorrow, but it would seem unlikely that they would win.
ISPs must surely keep logs of IP addresses -> account holders and make a record of when these are changed. I also assume that content enforcement companies get a hold of these records before deciding to take something to court otherwise they risk looking very foolish.
Of course it is possible that the ISPs record keeping is wrong, and there is also the worry about "3 strikes" type laws which may or may not require any level of evidence beyong a complaint being made. However AFAIK you can't be made to pay damages unless they directly sue you.
I'm not sure which country you're in, but there's a few things at play here...
- What's the definition of an ISP?
- Are all defined ISP's required to log IPs? If so, how long?
- Are ISP's required to make records public or offer them to 'enforcement companies'?
Basically in the US, the RIAA and others who were/are suing people based on internet activity are doing so under the belief that a person is responsible for all activity under an IP (1 IP = 1 Person). So they track a download to an IP, get the customer from the ISP, and file a lawsuit with the customer as the defendant. I _think_ most of those lawsuits have been thrown out or settled. Generally, you'll need more evidence than a public IP address to take someone to court.
We all know very well that a public IP address isn't an accurate way to identify someone. For example, you can torrent at most local coffee shops, libraries, schools, etc. Do you think that school keeps a log of all it's private IPs issued, tied to students, faculty, or others? Do ISPs really keep records of issued IPs for decades? IP addresses are generally public anyway, we don't see the sites or ad networks using them much for identification, they use cookies, and even that's flawed.
Are you referring to the BitTorrent tracker itself, or the fact that companies can and do scrape trackers to build their own databases for who knows what end?
The companies scraping and tracking, including your ISP... There is no real use for the data right now (apart from a few countries with anti-download laws). In the not-so-far-away future I think this will change... Then they've got your (ip)number.
Including my ISP? No. My ISP doesn't even want to keep historic records of what customers had what IP. Storing all that requires resources that they would rather mark as profit. You see, my ISP isn't in the content producing business, so it doesn't interest them that much what I do with my fiber.
But why would one trust a VPN more than an ISP? The article says "while making sure that nobody can see what you’re downloading," but that's clearly not true: they can.
How long until the FBI and CIA start working with VPN providers and trying to get warrantless VPN taps legalized? How many VPN providers today are NSA honeypots?
When these conversations come up, you can assume the above comments are talking about VPN providers outside the US that specifically do not cooperate, particularly in Sweden and Canada. Honeypotting these would be pretty tough and, if proven, the information gleaned from them would be largely off limits to most courts.
That assumes that they do not co-operate. Perhaps they are not required to co-operate by law. However, let's assume that you are running a VPN hosting service out of Russia or wherever that is not doing so well financially.
Now you get a nice offer from some men in fancy suits who represent some company that has some link to the MPAA/RIAA/whoever. They offer to help subsidise your server costs and in return they get access to your log files. Now maybe this country does not have such privacy laws as other places, so you aren't compelled to tell your customers about this change.
The new subsidies however do allow you to lower your prices to a level where you start getting a huge chunk of the business.
BTW, those articles are mostly wrong. In the US six strikes system the monitoring is done by DtecNet, not ISPs. This matters because ISPs see all your traffic while third parties can see much less about what you're doing.
There is no real use for the data right now (apart from a few countries with anti-download laws)
Since we're talking about torrents, (almost) every downloader is also an uploader, so there's plenty of recorded evidence of copyright infringement, and the RIAA has already sent thousands of threatening letters. But it's still a drop in a bucket compared to the dozens of millions of file sharers in the US alone.
Is a few pieces of a copyrighted file still copyrighted? How many chunks do you need to have before you are actually infringing anything? What if it's encrypted? How do you prove what a torrent says in its title is actually what it contains? How do you prove that a download was willful? What if individual files in an overall torrent are non infringing?
This isn't exactly simple stuff - there are lots of legal questions that have yet to be answered.
> Is a few pieces of a copyrighted file still copyrighted? How many chunks do you need to have before you are actually infringing anything?
Probably yes, by connecting to that particular swarm that is sharing "Piratesofthecarribean12.avi" you are showing intent to download that file. The onus would most likely be on you to persuade the court that you had some other reason for connecting.
What possible reason could you have for downloading a few kb of a 1GB file other than to get the whole thing?
Remember this is civil law , not criminal law so the burden of proof on the people suing you is somewhat lower.
> What if it's encrypted?
That the transfer was encrypted doesn't really mean much, the way these people would catch you is to join the swarm themselves and send pieces of the file to others. So essentially they are the ones doing the encrypting so will know what the data was before encryption.
> How do you prove what a torrent says in its title is actually what it contains?
I assume they will just connect to the swarm, download the file themselves to verify it's contents and then serve pieces of that out to others. So they will know exactly what is being transmitted.
> How do you prove that a download was willful?
Again, I imagine the onus would be on your to suggest another reason such as someone broke into your wifi etc. Whether you have absolute responsibility for what happens on your internet connection appears to be a grey area however.
> What if individual files in an overall torrent are non infringing?
I don't imagine it would matter, they would be more concerned with the parts that were infringing.
The IP adresses are only useful as long as the ISP keeps the log of the IP assignments. While I'm sure some ISPs keep this around indefinetely (why?), most hopefully don't and there might be limits on the retention period imposed by law.
Of course the data is useful apart from hunting down unlicensed usage, for one thing it's an interesting way to measure a given product's popularity.
Yes. In fact, this is one of the biggest political issues regarding internet policy here in Germany. The government had to back down on a law imposing a six month data retention in response to popular pressure. Germany is currently in violation of EU directives on that issue. One prospective model has a retention time of two weeks.
At the same time, privacy laws may requireISPs to delete the data; I don't think German ISPs are currently permitted to keep the logs longer than necessary for billing, and, if a minimum retention time is passed again, they probably won't be allowed to keep them after the time has passed.
I can tell you they will definitely try to prosecute you. I own rental property and I let one of my tenets use the shared temporary Internet access (yes some would say that was stupid) but to me Internet is like water so I felt it was alright.
The annoying thing is that its not the studio company that is suing you its the IT company that is scraping your IP address. They then according to my lawyer do a geo-location lookup and based on your location determine if your worthwhile suing.
If your in affluent area your a target because they are confident you will settle. They reason people settle is that its almost impossible to fight the case with out revealing your identity. And I will tell you do not want to do that because they then resell that information because most of these IT scraping companies are offshore.
I heard from one lawyer when its all said in done they have done the risk analysis (counter-suing, cases dropped, etc) and they on predict on average making about $50 or more a case.
Could you clarify more? An offshore IT company that does not own any copyright is suing bittorrenters? On what basis exactly? And they're scraping IPs and are allowed to bring that up in court?
Reverse lottery is a good way to look at it. And for the same reason I don't play the lottery I'm not worried about this. 1/infinity are odds I'm confident I will never hit.
There's lots of room for "innovation" in the legal arena. Something like the digital equivalent of an automated speed camera? Adjustment on your taxes based on how many times your IP address shows up on public trackers? Rejected security clearances?
Well, ex post facto laws are generally frowned upon so it is not as risky as you make it sound. And in Europe there is also EU privacy laws you need to take into account. It is unlikely a new kind of law will suddenly appear without warning.
Yes those EU privacy laws are really great: "German police clearly state that they are monitoring Skype, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook chat ..." "Altogether more than a billion Euro was spent on private services by German police and other public authorities in the realm of the ministry of home affairs in the years 2002 – 2012". http://annalist.noblogs.org/post/2012/10/03/german-police-mo...
Unpopular? In some designer circles maybe, in 90% of working web developers absolutely not. Not to mention that the flow layout techniques are sub-par and worse than tables in every area where they overlap.
It's no coincidence that the w3c finally created a grid layout spec as well as the flex layout to surpass the "flow" mess, or that all desktop UI layout tools use some grid and/or constraint based system for layout.
Plus, content-presentation separation should be at the level of CMS/database/RESTful service where the data come from, not imposed at the level of the published content.
I agree that html tables are used and get the job done, but I would much rather deal with one container div, one 960 div, then 3 section divs for header, content, and footer, then, one or more tables doing the same thing.
It's 2012, and CSS is easy. With a little work, all the problems you can point out can be fixed easily, including flexible grid layouts, and columns, responsive design. Can you even make a flexible table layout?
Also, every site I maintain that uses tables for layout, uses more than one, and it's source is absolutely horrible. While you say that a CMS should level should handle this, that doesn't factor in responsive design, site creation, or massive overhauls to style. Semantics will be an important element in the web soon, and doing html tables for layout, is considered wrong by anyone who cares. http://www.w3.org/2002/03/csslayout-howto
yes, I had my wifi router with no password opened, I live in large apartment complex with 150 families around and the judge sent me to jail for 25 years and fined $3,000,000,000 (that's billions!) just because my IP was linked to 20,000 downloads.
"Sorry for not fulfilling your pirate needs tonight. It's ok if you cheat on us with another site, just once. We know that you still love us, deep down in your cursed pirate heart. ♥"
http://www.facebook.com/ThePirateBayWarMachine