Anti-Pirates Caught Spying on Thousands of Torrents

https://torrentfreak.com/anti-pirates-caught-spying-on-thousands-of-torrents-120829/

by nosensor • 14 years ago

11 11 14 years ago

nosensor• 14 years ago

"To put the spying activity in perspective, the BitTorrent activity of these two anti-piracy companies is three times greater than that generated by all customers of a smaller ISP such as Sonic.net. It is comparable to the BitTorrent activity of all Comcast Business clients combined."

You can protect yourself from spying (as it is an invasion of privacy) with a VPN.

http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anon...

wmf• 14 years ago

Or you could use the money that you would have spent on a VPN to pay for the content that you watch. (Exceptions may apply, etc.)

lucian1900• 14 years ago

And depending where you are and what you like, such exceptions may very well be the rule.

jmillikin• 14 years ago

  > You can protect yourself from spying (as it is an
  > invasion of privacy) with a VPN.

The torrents are posted publicly. Each client is adding their own address to the list of participants, which is also public. Whenever I download a torrent, the list of other participants is available plainly in a tab in my torrent client.

If some client chooses to keep a record of public data, how is this in any way an invasion of privacy?

This is like complaining that your privacy has been invaded when someone takes a photo of a public street, and you happen to be in the frame.

grailholder• 14 years ago

If someone takes a photo of a public street and they happen to see me in the frame and don't do anything with it that's one thing. This is more like they are following me down the street taking photos of me just to report anything even slightly suspicious that I might do at some point.

jfaucett• 14 years ago

I think people would rather pay than pirating anyway, I wish the film industry would finally come up with a distribution solution like itunes and quit wasting their efforts on crap like this.

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

At some level, I would like to see how it goes when one of the anti-piracy groups accidentally codes their piracy-tracking bit-torrent client to join in the torrenting. If they're already involved in the torrenting of their own products... is it illegal anymore? I mean, they're seeding their own data, isn't that like giving permission? "Here's a file, download it!"

IANAL, I'm curious.

ajross• 14 years ago

I don't see how. If you own the copyright, you can give it to whoever you like via whatever method you like, including bittorrent. That doesn't (absent a copyleft license) transfer a right to anyone else to do the same.

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

But if you're seeding the movie to others, wouldn't that be saying "yes, you can have the part of the movie that I gave to you." A thoughtful user could even strongly encourage their bit-torrent client to only download from, for example, Universal Studios Antipiracy Bot 1.2.

Did they acquire that movie illegally, now?

benologist• 14 years ago

This kind of content and the carefully cultivated outrage it fuels belongs on Reddit and Digg.

zeruch• 14 years ago

I worked at BayTSP for years (it's a dark scar on my soul really), and they have been DMCA crazy on torrent swarms for many years.

This is not something new. It's been SOP for a very long time. There was some recent activity in the last few years to get some lining up of ISPs along with a "graduated response" scheme (which from the looks of it transmogrified into "# strikes") but its also tied to other initiatives like trying to use data scraped from cyberlockers to derive knowledge about the migratory patterns (and marketability) of media...you can thank Movielabs and one buffoon from NBC that cooked up that laughable concept.

Anti-Pirates Caught Spying on Thousands of Torrents

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