Australian ISPs Must Hand Over Pirates' Info 136
wabrandsma sends this report from the BBC:
An Australian court has ordered internet service providers to hand over details of customers accused of illegally downloading a U.S. movie. In a landmark move, the Federal Court told six firms to divulge names and addresses of those who downloaded The Dallas Buyers Club. ... The court said the data could only be used to secure "compensation for the infringements" of copyright. In the case, which was heard in February, the applicants said they had identified 4,726 unique IP addresses from which their film was shared online using BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file sharing network. They said this had been done without their permission. Once they received the names of account holders, the company would then have to prove copyright infringement had taken place.
BitTorrent (Score:5, Interesting)
BitTorrent is a file synchronization protocol you insensitive clod. You assume slashdot readers need to be told what it is, and then you get it wrong by saying it's a file-sharing network.
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The article ends with this:
"If this [judgement] is upheld then the days of anonymous pirating may be over," Prof Fraser told ABC TV.
B.S. It would just mean that the BitTorrent protocol would need a tweak more urgently to enhance the anonymity.
It already needs it because I don't think there are currently any anonymizing solutions for BitTorrent: Tor doesn't work with it; VPN's can be subpoenaed.
Does anyone know a solution?
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BitTorrent by nature is difficult to make effectively anonymous. There are some networks that are designed for it (Freenet, for example) but anonymous access translates into a need to send everything via convoluted and indirect paths, which translates to a performance loss: Anonymous p2p is going to be slower at getting your downloads, and have more overhead. You can also consider the possibility of friend-to-friend p2p, like Retroshare, which only shares with those you trust - but for this to work well you
Anonymous Overlay Networks (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't get it... you all know networks like I2P, Phantom, Freenet, GNUnet, Tor, MaidSafe, Retroshare, and even CJDNS exist and are effectively bulletproof and a final FUCK YOU to the MAFIAA..... but you refuse to use them. Did you know that some like Phantom, Tor with Onioncat and CJDNS can even support your favorite sharing/torrent apps directly over native and private IPV6? Did you know you can download both a full lossless raw DVD-9 VOB rip and a lossless FLAC CD rip per day?
Yet like idiots with their h
Re:Anonymous Overlay Networks (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't use BitTorrent with Tor. The protocol itself leaks information. The safest thing to do is have a seedbox in another country..and if you're super paranoid; pay for it with bitcoin.
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FALSE. Actually, you CAN use BitTorrent with Tor, but doing so in some (standard) ways, without setting up an appropriate environment, will likely leak your IP address and possibly more.
> The protocol itself leaks information.
Oh you mean like the loopback or default-local IP address of an appropriately configured virtual machine running TOR?
> The safest thing to do is have a seedbox in another country..and if you're super paranoid; pay for it with bitcoin
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> You can't use BitTorrent with Tor.
FALSE. Actually, you CAN use BitTorrent with Tor, but doing so in some (standard) ways, without setting up an appropriate environment, will likely leak your IP address and possibly more.
Can you provide any link about how to do this? I've understood that one cannot hide oneself properly over Tor because of the BT protocol.
Also, are there any easy ways that don't involve leaching off the Tor network? Someone mentioned I2P?
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Basically, set up two VMs, the first only gets networking through the second, and the second is configured to run everything through TOR and TOR alone.
Now this has been made easy and "done for us" so to speak (but always, ymmv, everything has bugs, security is a mindset, etc etc etc):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
From the whonix homepage: "Whonix is an operating system focused on anonymity, privacy and security. It's based on the Tor anonymity network[1], Debian GNU/Linux
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PPS:
> Also, are there any easy ways that don't involve leaching off the Tor network? Someone mentioned I2P?
Run a TOR exit node (or possibly some other type of node - caveat runner etc etc).
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Or you could just get your internet connection in a false name. Or your grandmother's.
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Would suck to be your grandmother.
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You can use BitTorrent anonymously over VPN. Pick a provider you trust not to keep logs. In many countries VPNs are not subject to data retention laws because they are not ISPs, but check your local rules.
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How safe would someone be if they just deleted all the trackers before starting the torrent? I understood this means that "they" have to snoop real-time and see peoples' IP's because they won't be stored in trackers.
Re: Anonymous Overlay Networks (Score:1)
IPv6 is fully supported by several ISPs in AU. Internode is one of the more well known ones.
Anonymous Overlay Networks were not required (Score:2)
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We have a crime here called "demanding money with menaces" (or similar) that covered speculative invoicing. Without proof from an ISP a person that sent out demands for money while claiming to represent a copyright holder was at risk of serving jail time. A business set up here, with a lot of fanfare, just two years ago in the hope of getting all that "MAFIAA" money folded without sending out a single notice for that r
Re:Anonymous Overlay Networks (Score:5, Insightful)
We fought them instead, using law, years ago, so we don't need to hide anymore in Denmark.
The danish pirate organisation fought the anti-pirate organisation, by organizing together, donating funds, and creating enough funding for us to hire a full-time lawyer, which incidentally also was an activist within the specific area of law. The additional funds was used to pay pirates fines, such that we could counter the economical devastation they sought to bring. Also education in law etc., such that all pirates could legally counter them, in all possible ways, recording, filming etc., for gathering proof against them. (Should they touch the keyboard without judges approval etc., that would immediately win our cases for example, because that is a breach of privacy)
In the end, the anti-pirate organisation went bankrupt. They did not achieve legislation, as the IT unions made 10.000+ people demonstrations against them. They did not get a footing at all.
We continued to make statistics, and we can see that the media business are making more money now than ever, even though we have unrestricted privacy now. As we said in the beginning :-)
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Actually we can win. It is just a matter of not paying for movies and music for long enough and the Big Money will run out of money. Then the artists will have to reorganize in order to continue their career and make a living, and that will be the end of those huge media organizations as the only profitable way of making a living for the artists will be to sell directly to their fans, bypassing everything else thus both making stuff a lot cheaper to buy and to make distribution truly global and immediate -
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Thats a nice utopia you have there, pity it will never, ever come to fruition because humans just don't work like that.
Artists can sell directly to their fans today - they just have to not sign those lucrative contracts that they sign. So why are they signing those lucrative contracts?
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The contracts are only lucrative for the labels [salon.com].
The reason they sign them is because the labels can offer them promotion and distribution. Faced with the choice of building their name through hard graft, and having a pre-made audience delivered to them on a plate, many choose to sign for the label. Faced with a flash, successful, A&R man who promises the earth and knows some really cool people, many choose to sign for the label.
You have deals where the artist sells $188M of CDs, and declares bankruptcy.
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And yet the artists still sign them, despite all of this seemingly being "common knowledge". Funny that...
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Signing to a label is a gamble. Artists know that.
It's a gamble with particularly long odds and many/most artists just simply block that part out.
All but the megastars end their careers in debt to the labels, often despite selling well over their careers.
If I was Australia (Score:2)
I'd tell the US to go fuck themselves.
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Rupert owns Foxtel.
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And America.
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Just in time for the collection of metadata (Score:5, Interesting)
Last week we get news that the government is forcing all ISP's to retain metadata information for all usage by all subscribers 'coz of terrorists'. Now we get news that the current data ISP's have, which is only supposed to be used for billing issues, is being used to identify and sue subscribers who had their IP in a torrent tracker 2 years ago!. No Movie studio my IP appearing in a tracker doesn't mean that I'm downloading or seeding your video. It just means someone possibly is using my IP to view who else is connected to that tracker. Or maybe the tracker randomly puts generated ips in the list to mess with you. Or maybe I allow my neighbors to use my internet or the public as they walk their dogs in a nearby park. Should I be held liable for them viewing publicly accessible information (the torrents tracker list)? Or should torrent tracker administrators be suing you for stealing their customer information? Couldn't this be considered hacking (accessing unauthorized information?)?
I hope this keeps up. Next week we will all be hearing about how to access the internet you must use your australia.gov login.
Re:Just in time for the collection of metadata (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm so glad to be living in Australia at this time.
Last week we get news that the government is forcing all ISP's to retain metadata information for all usage by all subscribers 'coz of terrorists'. Now we get news that the current data ISP's have, which is only supposed to be used for billing issues, is being used to identify and sue subscribers who had their IP in a torrent tracker 2 years ago!.
I analysed the bill several weeks ago. I wrote to *all* the senators and tried to stop it and I tried to raise awareness, I was on a public forum answering questions and worked pretty much to 3am every night for 2 weeks trying to stop it from passing. I even tried submitting a slashdot story [slashdot.org] that it was about to pass. It was quite clear to see that it was going after downloaders otherwise why would the ACMA be referenced in the bill.
But it is worse than that, there is little doubt that these systems will be a blackhat's wet dream because the data will be in one place, IMHO a free for all for online fraud. I suspect that most Australians will be furious when they realise that they are being told to pay extra internet fees for a system, that will create new classes of fraud crime against them, is of limited use to police, by businesses who don't want them there to complicate infrastructure who will seek taxpayer assistance to fund and install them.
I tried pretty hard. I won't post the whole letter here, as it is four pages of analysis of an 80 page bill that is deeply flawed and now law. This extract is core to the problems with the bill:
As for the Bill, the criticisms I derive from part one follow:
The 'Implementation Plan' IP under the act is too loosely defined in terms of data encryption and access requirements. The government should implement MANDATORY public key encryption standards for business that promotes business and consumer confidence. The act should also refer to data access standards that produce an audit trail for the Privacy Commission PC so abuses can be tracked and prosecuted, if required.
Encrypted access for law enforcement with revocable keys controlled by the Privacy Commission (P.C) and also accessible by the member of the public who produced the data. Either the Telecommunications Ombudsman (T.O) or the P.C should have the power to review the audit trail of accesses to the data and revoke access based on their findings and satisfactory resolution of a complaint. A person's access to their own data should not be audit-able and a complaint mechanism should exist through both the P.C and the T.O who receive increased powers to prosecute abuses, which would serve to stimulate business and consumer confidence because of the protections offered.
No definition of what the "plan" (under the Bill) requires for access under a Communications Access Controller's CAC - implementing the technology requires 'requirements' and standardisation however the Bill offers none. The public should be able to access the data collected about themselves and have assurances that it has an expiry date.
Clarification and revision based of the Bills inevitable and chilling effects mean consumer and business confidence will be affected for years, policing will receive questionable, if any, benefit. The Bill however is good for centralising data collection techniques for foreign organised crime whose work will be greatly reduced subsequent to the passage of this Bill.
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well i just want to say thanks for your efforts.
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well i just want to say thanks for your efforts.
I appreciate you saying so.
Since when (Score:2)
Since when is merely downloading something an offense? I think the article is most likely full of shit.
Re:Since when (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Since when (Score:4, Interesting)
Since when is merely downloading something an offense? I think the article is most likely full of shit.
Sadly since the conservative government took power in late 2013 they've had a hard on for helping out big business in any way possible. As such we've gotten new draconian laws and signed secret treaties giving away any rights they couldn't take away. Its not like the Abbott government cares about being unpopular. In the mean time, I'm just going to get a seedbox and recommend other Aussies do the same.
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Not to excuse the disgrace that is Abbott, but the reason this got pushed through is because BOTH SIDES supported this legislation. Labor have had a hardon for getting internet censorship in for years and had repeated failed attempts while they were in government. It is truly sad that now both sides have sunk to this level.
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Downloading pictures of naked children would be a really bad idea for testing that theory. I strongly advise against it.
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Since when is merely downloading something an offense? I think the article is most likely full of shit.
No, if you read the bill that is exactly what the new law allows under section 184KA. And protections from the Privacy Commissioner have been bypassed.
Unfortunately not enough people protected their rights enough for downloading to continue. Now the movie industry is coming after everyone they can.
Just a Moment... (Score:1, Interesting)
1. The applicants (plaintiffs?) claim to have identified 4,726 unique addresses from which a file was downloaded. So how does knowing the identities of the users of those addresses have *ANY* bearing on whether or not the plaintiffs can prove the crime? Surely the Court could and should have asked how this additional detail would change that proof? Then, *if* the plaintiff can prove, beyond the Court's threshold (does Australia use the "burden of proof" for criminal cases and "preponderance of the evidence"
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Australia has a different body of law which provides different rights and obligations, a different court system, and different precedents. What might have failed in the US court system may succeed in Australia's court system. That is neither right or wrong, but it does mean that similar facts can result in different outcomes in different locales. Different political entities often reflect different values and priorities in their laws. The US has the 1st and 2nd Amendments to its Constitution which provi
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Re:Just a Moment... (Score:5, Interesting)
I am sure that the plaintiff in this case would dearly love to engage in "speculative invoicing" and to do that they need somewhere to send a legal threat with a nice "make it go away for only $2000" clause. The judge has at least considered this, so the plaintiff must pass any correspondence destined for the parties revealed here through the court. That should at least control the extraction of money by threat of legal action with no intent to proceed to actual litigation. My guess is that the plaintiff will try to ID one or two endpoints that look like a business/individual with reasonable sized pockets and try to set a precedent with them.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
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This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
That is until George Brandis gets his way and the "speculative invoicing" (which is a wonderful marketing term for rent seeking) becomes perfectly acceptable.
This decision, and the recent data retention law that ensures these records exist for fishing expeditions, have essentially ensured that VPN providers will do well out of Aussies.
A DSL connection is $60 a month, adding on another $20 for VPN or a seedbox is not much at all.
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A DSL connection is $60 a month, adding on another $20 for VPN or a seedbox is not much at all.
It might work however under the act the table of collected data can be modified by the Communications Access Controller and I'm not going to start handing out ideas for what data to collect here. I suspect that tech savvy Australians will start to develop new techniques to protect themselves.
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Jobs Killer.
It remains to see if the so called ISP's can print 'Metadata Retention Tax' on their invoices - but when the do, their will be 10 million angry voters, and some of them will vote accordingly.
Both major parties voted it in, completely defying the wishes of the electorate. The spooks wanted their toys.
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The USA already has this shit, the UK is probably going to be worse very soon, and the trans-pacific partnership deal has this sort of stuff as part of it.
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"but then discovered that multiple people occupied the dwelling, and were unable to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt [see above] which of those individuals committed the alleged crime."
If it's a criminal matter this is the case.
Evidential burden is _much_ lower in civil cases.
The odds are pretty good that criminal law threats will be used to obtain data which will then be used in civil cases.
Please explain (Score:1)
Why exactly is the Australian government so aggressive with this? It's not even this bad in the US, where the content owners are generally located. Is there some nuance to Australian politics that puts this into context or something?
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Why exactly is the Australian government so aggressive with this? It's not even this bad in the US, where the content owners are generally located. Is there some nuance to Australian politics that puts this into context or something?
Power.
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Rupert Murdoch wants it and the current PM is a complete arselicker.
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Because there's been a lot of kick back from the aggressive tactics in the US, so they need to go further afield. The Australian government/judiciary has shown that they are willing to roll over, so it's a good target. They've learned to pick their battles and go for soft targets.
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I'm sure that it is because of the secret Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations. Wikileaks has released information on the TPP with prosecution of downloaders as one of the TPP's conditions.
We're screwed.
I'd say you've nailed it right there.
What I want to know is... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why all the stories I hear about mass-lawsuits over piracy seem to be for crappy films like Dallas Buyers Club and that Hurt Locker thing.
Why hasn't Warner Bros filed a mass-lawsuit over piracy of the new Hobbit film? Or what about a lawsuit from Universal over the latest Fast & Furious film.
I am sure there are films out there that have been pirated a LOT more than Dallas Buyers Club (a film I hadn't even heard of before the lawsuit showed up) so why aren't we seeing these kinds of mass lawsuits on those films? (or if those lawsuits do happen, how come they dont get as much attention as the ones we hear about like this Dallas Buyers Club film?)
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Well - I don't know...
I only know one thing. I got truly fed up with these power-hungry and money-hungry idiots in the movie industry several years ago already. For years now I never gone to wach, buy or download any movie or record. I only download any music that is available under the Creative Commons Licence, and if I like the music I give an donation to the artist. I also make my own music, and have an lot of fun with it...
In all these years I came to the conclusion I reall did not missed anything. Sure
Re:What I want to know is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because Dallas Buyers Club made almost no money. In total it made $59 million and out of that had to come all the expenses.
In comparison Frozen grossed $1.219 Billion at the box office alone. Lets not even count the merchandising on that film. That is why you don't see Disney suing over Frozen. They made their money and know they will destroy a cash cow in the process.
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The Hobbit had earned a billion by the end of January 2013.....
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Re:What I want to know is... (Score:4, Insightful)
made almost no money
Budget : $5M
Takings : $59M
While it's no Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (which apparently lost $167M after grossing $938M worldwide, on a $150M budget - go figure!), you'd think that was actually a respectable profit.
The whole of Hollywood is a scam.
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The $5 Million budget was the cost of the film to be made. Out of that you need to take the costs of the cinemas, DVD production, advertising etc.
The box office take was $55 million for the movie. A quick bit of googling showed me that, on average, 51% of movie ticket prices go to the film studio. So gross revenue on the $55m comes down to $28m straight away. Then you need to guess what the advertising budget was. Old information says that in 2007 the AVERAGE spend on marketing hollywood movies was $37
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Because Dallas Buyers Club made almost no money. In total it made $59 million and out of that had to come all the expenses.
In comparison Frozen grossed $1.219 Billion at the box office alone. Lets not even count the merchandising on that film. That is why you don't see Disney suing over Frozen. They made their money and know they will destroy a cash cow in the process.
Correct. Hurt Locker cost $15 million to make and almost nobody in the USA watched it when it was in theaters. It barely made $15 million in US box office, so depending on what was spent for advertising and such, it either lost money or was barely profitable when counting foreign receipts (I don't know what it made in foreign box office receipts). This is why those 2 films are singled out. Rather than admit that the films either sucked or nobody was interested in the subjects even if the films were good
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Also Dallas Buyers is rated in the 90%+ on rotten tomatoes. I've never seen it so I can't comment but if your movie flopped financially, but was critically acclaimed it would be easy to convince yourself it was all down to piracy.
Re:What I want to know is... (Score:5, Informative)
The Voltage Pictures VP of Royalties was interviewed on the radio as I drove home today. He said that Voltage is doing this because a small producer they cannot cannot cross-subsidise from other parts of the business to cover the losses due to infringing copies of their movies (His argument was clearly based on the assumption that every infringing copy is a lost sale). The big players can afford to do this and see the negative press as more costly than the potential increase in revenue. He refused to be drawn on what they would be demanding from the alleged infringers. There were also some poor choices of words, assumption of guilt, and sense that they are the law.
Read (http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/stories/s4212674.htm) or listen (http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/triplej/hack/daily/hack_wed_2015_4_8.mp3) to the show.
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While I haven't actually been sued over pirating (I'm Australian), I've received plenty of copyright infringement notices.
The last one I received was for "48Hrs", a 1982 Eddie Murphy/Nick Nolte movie. (I was feeling nostalgic.) This was about 2 weeks ago.
They're not just going after downloaders of new or recent movies, or limiting the list to movies that failed at the box
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I'm sure the long-term endpoint will be
1: Not many using trackers (this is pretty much already the case thanks to DHT)
2: Obfuscation switched on, along with blocking other parties from seeing exactly what parts you are seeding.
3: Crossborder VPNs (As a non-australian I'd be more than happy to buy VPN endpoint access there, etc)
4: Tor-style protocols with data passing across a few intermediaries.
This is already happening but this kind of litigation simply speeds up the inevitable ubiquitousness of the soluti
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Who says they still have it? They had no obligation to hold on to it so they may have deleted it prior to any court ruling to nullify any ruling against them.
Democracy (Score:1)
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."
H. L. Mencken
The only part that matters (Score:2)
Once they received the names of account holders, the company would then have to prove copyright infringement had taken place.
So long as they have to prove the infringement took place, then I have no problem with this. If someone commits copyright infringement, and the copyright holder can go to court and prove it, then the legal system is working. But does it seem likely that they will file 4,726 unique court cases? They will instead send extortion letters, or do a big massive case, or sue the ISPs to recover the money, or something like that.
Is it possible... (Score:1)
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Pollute their data (Score:2)
Lots of people should find torrents of popular movies and just get the "README" or "NFO" files in them, but not the actual movie. That way, when they get your IP as a participant in the torrent and to sue you for (downloading &) uploading the movie, you will have nicely defensible case.
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It's been clear for a while that many of the studios were simply suing based on the the file name.
In order to establish that a file actually contains what you think it does you need cryptographic checksums, etc and the only way to guarantee this is to seed the files yourself.
Lookup "Prenda Law" to see how well that tactic worked out.
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That is the biggest problem here. A lot of the time, the people identified after this sort of discovery are not people that have done any of the alleged pirating. Dynamic IPs, spoofed IPs, people making crap systems - at all adds up to a lot of stuff that is not correct.
I know I have had nothing to do with downloading or sharing Dallas Byers Club in any way, but I am personally still a tiny bit concerned I might end up involved in this (I do use of of the ISPs listed in all this.)