Uk Bitorrenting

[WizardStan]

Anyway, I think critiquing someone for cultural tourism is a little odd. Whatever floats your boat, though. I trust that your cultural tastes are entirely mainstream, of course.

Why would you think that? Because I said (paraphrased) "since you cannot legally obtain some obscure movie, you should consider finding something else"? Seems to me that it would be your "cultural tourism" is a little odd, finding one thing that you enjoy and going to great lengths to obtain it by any means necessary, rather than seeking out alternatives. Seriously, there is a world of good movies, music, and video games out there that actually can be obtained quite easily. Emerge from whatever bubble it is that you've found yourself desperately striving to remain within, and seek out these alternatives. You may be pleasantly surprised.

 

[b._.o._.b]

Darknet - freenet.
http://freenetproject.org/

I have tried it but it is pretty slow right now and it made my PC very laggy.

 

[OrR]

I love Freenet for the great ideas behind it and the fascinating technology. It can work quite well for popular files. The problem is that too few people use it to really get general file sharing going. I've been following it (and running it) for a few years and lately it's a lot more stable and easy to set up. I'm still amazed that it works at all.

there is no point trying to stay safe. if they want to find you, they will.
the more ridiculous measures you take to try and remain anonymous, the more suspicious you look when they eventually "find" you.

just do what you want, safe in the knowledge that the chances of actually being caught are probably about as good as the chances of winning the lottery.

That's exactly the wrong way to behave. Better be safe than sorry. You have to avoid being found in the first place and there are ways to improve your chances. If they ever find you and search your house, it doesn't matter if you look suspicious because you have lots of encrypted drives etc. What matters is if they can find any evidence. At least that's the way it still works in most civilized countries for now.

 

[lulzfish]

If they ever find you and search your house, it doesn't matter if you look suspicious because you have lots of encrypted drives etc. What matters is if they can find any evidence. At least that's the way it still works in most civilized countries for now.

1. Get legal stuff that's free or a clearly legal backup
2. Encrypt it
3. Have loads of heavily encrypted stuff
4. Arouse suspicion
5. Be forced to give up encryption password
6. Prove that everything's legal
7. ???
8. TROLL RIAA

 

[danielliu88888]

If they ever find you and search your house, it doesn't matter if you look suspicious because you have lots of encrypted drives etc. What matters is if they can find any evidence. At least that's the way it still works in most civilized countries for now.

1. Get legal stuff that's free or a clearly legal backup
2. Encrypt it
3. Have loads of heavily encrypted stuff
4. Arouse suspicion
5. Be forced to give up encryption password
6. Prove that everything's legal
7. ???
8. TROLL RIAA

that... would be epic.

 

[Username]

Anyway, I think critiquing someone for cultural tourism is a little odd. Whatever floats your boat, though. I trust that your cultural tastes are entirely mainstream, of course.

Why would you think that? Because I said (paraphrased) "since you cannot legally obtain some obscure movie, you should consider finding something else"? Seems to me that it would be your "cultural tourism" is a little odd, finding one thing that you enjoy and going to great lengths to obtain it by any means necessary, rather than seeking out alternatives. Seriously, there is a world of good movies, music, and video games out there that actually can be obtained quite easily. Emerge from whatever bubble it is that you've found yourself desperately striving to remain within, and seek out these alternatives. You may be pleasantly surprised.

Think of a movie you really want to see. Fuck that movie, go watch a different one. That is pretty much what you're saying .

 

[El Jefe]

So, let me get this straight:
a. The way this works is, some company somewhere knows its wares, be them music, video, software, are being pirated over bittorrent.
b. They hire people to score ip's of people downloading their wares over bittorrent.
c. They press charges against the ip's.
d. They get a search warrant, and search drives for offending material.
e. Shit brix.

Is it correct that you will only be prosecuted if the company whose copyrights were infringed chooses to investigate and prosecute?
So say you download some hella obscure software from an obscure and small company. Chances are they don't have much of a legal team to prosecute right? so its not terribly dangerous. Is this correct?

Finally, if there are records of downloading illegal material, but all of that has been deleted, and there are no traces on actual local hard drives, can you still be prosecuted?

All completely hypothetical of course h34r:

 

[Javacat]

Remove D from your list and you've pretty much got the current situation. AFAIK, once they have your IP they just start trying to get money out of you straight away, no search warrants or disk scans. It's easy money for them. If they are 99% sure that you are a big distributer of pirated material then they will probably try and go through all of your drives as they know they will be able to sue for huge amounts of money.

Block of text below explains why I think they don't do the warrants or scans, most of the time.

<blah>
If they had to go through every hard drive of someone they accused then I bet they'd soon stop going after so many people. For example, if they decided to go after me, and I got any hint that they were (and I'd got any dodgy material ), I'd soon either delete all of the material with some advanced deletey software or just dispose of the hard drive. As the data wouldn't be available by a quick browse of the computer they'd then have to take all of my drives, computers, etc in to scan and try and find the offending material. The problem being, personally, I've 4 desktops, along with 3 laptops. One desktop has 5 drives, another has three and another has two. There are also 2 other desktops and laptops in the same household and I've got numerous old hard drives lying around. In total they'd need to go through about 25 hard drives. It'd take huge amounts of time and money to go through all of the drives, in the hopes of finding what they are after, and would probably cost more than they would be able to sue you for.
I could also have downloaded it to one of many different SD/CF cards, so if they were determined, they'd have to go through them as well. If I had downloaded it to something like that, I could just stick it in the food processor and washed the remains down the drain
</blah>


If you wanted to be evil, pirate and get away with it, you could get yourself a botnet and route downloads through that. The victims of the nodes in the botnet will get all of the flack and it'll be a bugger to explain how the material was passed through their IP's. If you make it leave the files on the victims PC's, hidden away in some random location as well, then if they do fight and have their computer analyzed, they'll be pretty screwed

 

[OrR]

Finally, if there are records of downloading illegal material, but all of that has been deleted, and there are no traces on actual local hard drives, can you still be prosecuted?

All completely hypothetical of course h34r:

Depends on what the judge accepts as evidence really. It probably varies from country to country and even courrt to court. If you use an IP address with a few other people, it'll be hard to tell who did the downloading in that case. It might also be your neighbour surfing on your open WLAN or a trojan you got, or the Tor exit node you are running. In Germany, you still won't get away with that because you are responsible for what people do through your open WLAN or your Tor node as well. To be safe, you probably shouldn't use an IP address for downloading (and especially not uploading) that can be traced to you.
Getting more obscure stuff is probably safer. However, you shouldn't bet on that too much as a small company with one obscure expensive product might feel much more threatened by filesharing than a big media house (and rightfully so).

Usually in file sharing cases in Germany, they aim to settle out of court. So they don't need evidence, they only need to scare you enough. I think it's similar in the US.

 

[WizardStan]

Think of a movie you really want to see. Fuck that movie, go watch a different one. That is pretty much what you're saying .

That is EXACTLY what I'm saying. Only when the movie you want to see cannot be obtained through proper channels, and depending on why you want to see the movie, of course. If you want to watch it because your deceased grandfather starred in it, or it contains some scene you think would be useful for your thesis, or some other specific reason, that's a different kettle of fish. It gives that movie a unique property that no other movie can satisfy. Recently I recalled a movie from my youth and, filled with nostalgia, eventually tracked it down. No other movie could have satisfied that nostalgia.
But if your reason for watching it is because you've heard it's good, then that is exactly the marketing hype I was talking about. There are lots of good movies from all over the world that can be obtained perfectly legally. So you don't get this one movie that you'd heard was good; no big deal, find a different one, perhaps a more popular title from the same country even (if international cultural exchange is what you're after). Expand your horizons.
Good games and good music, too.

 

[klikklak]

Regarding availability. I find the filesharing a bit similar to libraries 'recently returned' section, you look around and see that someone's sharing some film you like, then you look at what other films they're sharing and bam, you've got a lot of recommendations. Well, that and the fact that I'm dirt poor. I've sort of taken an interest in comes with music in an vain effort to legalise what I've got though, similar all you can eat's might get me to join in other areas as well. There's the political side of it though, distributing that's done by the people is governed by the people, while a centralized system is well, centralized. Might not matter to you, but does to me.

 

[Mithrildor]

Buy a subscription to a newsgroups payserver. I pay 7,50 euro a month for unlimited downloads, files will stay 100% for 400 days and a max of 30mbps download. Thats really cheap and because you dont upload and noone can see what u are downloading its safe

 

[OrR]

In Germany, the newsgroup provider would have to keep records about what you downloaded for 6 months. All this stuff is getting increasingly unsafe... :-/ Those records should not be used unless you are suspected to have committed a major crime but I wouldn't rely on that rule too much.
Also, I've got a problem with paying for downloading of pirate copies. That's why I don't like Rapidshare and newsgroups, in addition to the fact that you have to trust your download provider.