Watch what you are sharing

My ISP turned off my ADSL for 4 days because of "suspected abuse against the Digital Millenium Act". After 3 days of phone calls to find out what that meant I finally reached a sympathetic Mac user (also happened to be the top manager) in the abuse department at Zoomtown who explained it to me. I am sharing all of this because I searched for days for answers and couldn't find anyone who wanted to do anything other than make dumb comments.

The software and music companies pay certain"organizations" to track people sharing/trading copywrited files. The RIAA is the big one for the record companies and the Business Software Alliance is the big one for Microsoft and other software companies (Apple does it themselves). Since these organizations make money everytime they find a file, they go after people sharing because its easier to make their case. All they have to do is download enough of a file's code to prove what it was and that you had it with "intent to distribute". Doesn't matter if they got all of the file or even if the file worked on your computer. It also doesn't matter if you legally own a license to the software, you are not allowed to make copies which are distibuted.

Some other ways you can be caught is your ISP may notice a large amount of traffic/bandwidth usage and start checking what files are being sent but this is rare. Evidently it would take alot for them to notice since they are so busy with all the other things the BSA and RIAA are bothering them with.

They then send letters to lawyers, the software/record company and your ISP. Your ISP is given a choice of shutting you down or being sued for being "an accesory to abuse of the Digital Millenium Act". The software/record company has the choice of instructing the organization to also proceed with court action but that really only happens with the RIAA.

This is all paraphrased from a 45 minute conversation he and I had. So what do you do to avoid all of this? Well since all this comes from the manager of my local DSL his exact words were "We don't care what you download, we only get bothered by these guys when they catch you sharing stuff."

And then he went on to say to turn off my sharing because he didn't want to permanently turn off my DSL but thats what they had to do if it happens again. He also mentioned that Gnutella and Kazaa where the most heavily watched because they were also the easiest to track.

So for now my 16GBs of music, 40GBs of movies and 25GBs of software are offline. Hope this helps anyone avoid facing the same thing. And if anyone has any ideas of how to get around this so I can get back to contributing, I would love to hear them.

 

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search for warez-pages ,don´t use p2p

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Had an idea today....
From what I've read on various news sites, the RIAA is/will begin tracking individual songs via their hash (such as MD5). So that way in court they have proof that the song you have was downloaded from the internet and not ripped from a CD. And if you say you DID rip it from a CD, then they have proof that you're sharing copyrighted music. Here's an idea. Any song you download, to make sure to open up the file in a hex editor and change 1 or 2 bytes in the header (or if you know the mp3 format, change them in the body). That way when anyone ran a hash, the hash is COMPLETELY different! Granted they could still do a simple binary diff on the files and discover they're almost the same, but im still working on that.

-AntonK

 

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If you use the default Kazzaliteuser handle that thousands of other people have, can you still be tracked?

 

They track you by IP address. If they have your IP address and the time you were on, they simply need to supeona the information from your ISP to get your name and address.

-AntonK

 

This is exactly what happened to me. Hansarde, now you need to be careful even with downloads, since they are visible to others while you are downloading. I have mentioned to David that we need an option to turn that new LimeWire feature off, but for now be careful.

Did the ISP tell you which company lodged a complaint against you? Mine was a software company (which published something I thought I'd try to see if I liked it, but since all the fuss I just deleted).

Just getting out the ol' crystal ball for a moment, I think the next generation of p2p clients will have to make IP addresses anonymous somehow. I personally like the irony in encrypting them, and copyrighting portions of the code in such a way that the RIAA & others have to break the DMCA to continue their witch hunt. Either way, I'm sure some bright people will come up with something. It's not unlike the floppy-disc copy-protection wars of the 80s. Each side will keep outdoing the other, until the whole thing becomes moot.

 

While not exactly on the subject...

here

But then again maybe it is...

(Slow connections should be warned this is around a 9 meg file)