To Media Companies, BitTorrent Implies Guilt

kripkenstein writes "The big media companies immediately assume you are guilty by your mere presence on a BitTorrent swarm, an investigation by a university security worker reveals. Turns out companies like BayTSP (which the media companies employ) will send shutdown notices to ISPs without any evidence of copyright infringment; all they feel they need is an indication that you are reported by the tracker to be in the swarm." From the post: "For my investigation, I wrote a very simple BitTorrent client. My client sent a request to the tracker, and generally acted like a normal Bittorrent client up to sharing files. The client refused to accept downloads of, or upload copyrighted content. It obeyed the law... With just this, completely legal, BitTorrent client, I was able to get notices from BayTSP. To put this in to perspective, if BayTSP were trying to bust me for doing drugs, it'd be like getting arrested because I was hanging out with some dealers, but they never saw me using, buying, or selling any drugs."

Move house to switch ISPs?

[tepples]

Choose your ISP wisely and you won't run into these problems.

Should people really have to choose where to live based on the ISPs available in the area? Often, there is only one or there are only two ISPs in a particular geographic area apart from dial-up: the local cable television provider and the local land-line telephone provider.

Re:Move house to switch ISPs?

[jandrese]

You're lucky to have DSL service on that landline. A lot of people live outside of DSL range and are stuck with Cable for the most part. There are various wireless solutions, but they almost invariably suck for one reason or another (a big one being that the spectrum is just plain limited). There are lots of people that are lucky to have a single broadband option where they live, so they'd better hope that the guys are dicks (Whoops, non-dicky behavior and local monopolies don't go together at all).

At least with DSL you DO have some choice. The phone companies don't want to tell you this, but they're required to share the lines with competitors because it was your tax money that put up a lot of those lines to start with. If your DSL company is jerking you around, you can often switch to Covad or Speakeasy or some other provider and tell your phone company where they can stick it. Beware that most third party DSL providers are more expensive than the phone company, but they generally have much better service and TOS to make up for it.

Wrong.

[AltGrendel]

The client refused to accept downloads of, or upload copyrighted content. It obeyed the law...

Basically, it had the connection setup but kept it idle.

Doing nothing.

And he got a letter saying that he was downloading illegal content while it was...

...doing nothing.

Re:Er

[snarlydwarf]

So, the message here is: don't try to download copyrighted stuff and you won't get sued for downloading copyrighted stuff.

I think you mean "illegal stuff". I download copyrighted music with BitTorrent quite often and it is very legal: DGMLive has lots of great King Crimson and Robert Fripp material that you are encouraged to use BitTorrent to download after paying them. Since DGM is owned by Fripp and has rights to the King Crimson catalog: they can do that legally and even make a profit.

Re:Seems the same to me...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Maybe I misunderstand the law, but I believe you CAN be arrested for hanging out with known drug dealers

They might have grounds to search you. As far as arrest goes ... you misunderstand the law.

Re:Move house to switch ISPs?

[Anonymous Coward]

The phone companies don't want to tell you this, but they're required to share the lines with competitors because it was your tax money that put up a lot of those lines to start with.

Not anymore they don't. The FCC ruled about 2-3 years ago that starting at that time if the phone company made any improvement to your line at all, it no longer had to lease it to a competitor at cost.

They called this "deregulation" since, after all, it was regulations that was forcing phone companies to share.

Re:Weak

[cpt kangarooski]

IANAL, but copyright infringement must require intent, no?

No. Copyright infringement is a strict liability offense. Intent is not required.

Re:Compare to legitimate drug dealers?

[fishdan]

Not quite:

From the article:

I placed this client on a number of torrent files that I suspected were monitored by BayTSP (For my own protection I don't want to identify the torrents used for this research. I used the fact that NBC is a client of BayTSP to find trackers.

So it's like going up to an illegal drug dealer (because the torrent is not of a legally shared file) and asking him/her "Can I buy some crack from you." (because the client sent a request to the tracker). Even though no illegal goods changed hands, we're are definitely NOT talking about the companies disconnecting people because thry are downloading FC6 [fedoraproject.org] or Ctrl-Alt-Chicken [revision3.com] via bittorrent.

I'm not agreeing with the media companies here, but it's not as draconian as you are making it out to be.

Re:Just like VCRs

[curunir]

...in the absence of any indication of what a user has downloaded or uploaded

Why wouldn't there be an indication that the user has downloaded or uploaded something? There's nothing that prevents them from actually connecting to the tracker and pretending to be a BitTorrent client, so all they have to do is start downloading and anyone who actually sends them something will give them a clear indication that they've both downloaded and uploaded copyrighted material. Moreover, they'll have an exact idea of what that copyrighted content is.

This isn't rocket science, it's just going the extra mile to actually prove the infringement took place rather than simply taking a short cut and making an assumption that can obviously prove to be wrong.

copyright law vs distribution

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright law is supposed to be about promoting the arts and sciences.
It is written to to protect against unauthorized copying, thus encouraging people to produce works without fear of being taken advantage of by publishers. Distribution implies multiple copies, so in that sense, distribution will get you in more trouble.

Re:It is more like

[HTH NE1]

After reading the article, BayTSP is running the tracker.

Then you didn't read the article correctly.

BayTSP is monitoring particular torrents on trackers with their own torrent client designed for monitoring the swarm, not operating their own trackers.

Re:The important part is the proof!

[number11]

Assumptions aren't proof.

Civil cases (i.e. suing you) don't require proof to win, at least in the USA. All they require is "better than 50:50".

Assumptions aren't even EVIDENCE

Having your IP number in a BitTorrent swarm is EVIDENCE. It may not be airtight, but see above.

Re:Not missing anything

[number11]

Are the "swarms" disjoint sets of nodes that are only sharing certain types of files?

The "swarms" are sets of nodes that are sharing (and downloading, usually) the same file.

Re:You forget that people hate this crap!

[Skreems]

I didn't say I thought it was right :-) Just that from a legal standpoint, this probably isn't gonna save anybody's ass. And as I pointed out, if lots of clients start screwing with the protocol by running non-sharing clients or feeding media companies fake peer addresses, this would gain a whole lot more credibility.