Help Torrent Legal Q

[Vladamir]

Got a letter through this morning about downloading music, checked it out t'internet and it looks like the first letter is just a warning, no problem, no more music downloading.

Does anyone know if it applies to other media? The letter was specifically from the British something or other of Recorded music. In particular i normally keep up with Heroes/House as they come out in the US earlier than in the UK, but obviously if i'm gonna end up getting stung i'll have to stop that too

Cheers bints

 

[fettoken]

Have you only used a torrent to download, or Direct Connect (DC)? Have you shared / uploaded alot? Because the only time i ever gotten a warning because i downloaded something was the far away days when i used DirectConnect. If you only used a torrent, did you download from a private torrent or just some random at www.torrentz.com ?

 

[Vladamir]

It was random sites, mainly isohunt - the only bits uploaded would've been while the other stuff was downloading

 

[Corran]

i assume you use something like peer guardian to block out the known IP's for these buggers that get in on the torrents and log all IPs that connect to them.

 

[Jeremiah]

AFAIK, people are getting letters because they are sharing files, rather than just downloading them. The sharing part is far more illegal than downloading, because its responsible for the lost revenue.

If you download tv shows, you would need to ensure you arent sharing them as well. I don't know how easy it is to not share files over torrents, since you download and upload parts at the same time.

 

[fettoken]

Private torrent sites is the way to go.

 

[Sharma]

Did you get that letter off your ISP?

If so it's been sanctioned as illegal in itself iirc.

So if it's an ISP, report em to OFCOM and get their arses kicked since Virgin got a big whooping off them not so long ago for their process of issuing warnings to users.

 

[Vladamir]

They haven't got any details Sharma - the letter's been forwarded by Sky to us from the British whatever company.

Corran - i've not used anything like that. All my limewire stuff is tagged as not shared - so i'd presume that it's not this thats caused me a problem (as Jeremiah mentioned the torrents upload as you download so i would guess thats the likely cause)

 

[cHodAX]

They haven't got any details Sharma - the letter's been forwarded by Sky to us from the British whatever company.

Corran - i've not used anything like that. All my limewire stuff is tagged as not shared - so i'd presume that it's not this thats caused me a problem (as Jeremiah mentioned the torrents upload as you download so i would guess thats the likely cause)

Limewire is so easy to track it ain't funny.

 

[fettoken]

Limewire is so easy to track it ain't funny.

Thats why you download all music through google (some googling skills needed tho)

 

[Marc]

Or newsgroups, where its pretty much impossible to track whos downloading what

 

[Vladamir]

What exactly is newsgroups? I keep hearing it thrown about but don't know what it is.

Anyone care to explain?

 

[Corran]

vlad, get peer guardian 2 and have it running when you download torrents. Even if not uploading it will block your download connections to them (in the whole )

 

[Vladamir]

Nice one Corr - what does it do for uploading though? I had a look around and i think thats where the problem may lie (and obviously you can't stop uploading from torrents)

 

[Corran]

it does the same for upload and download. The torrents will not be allowed to connect to any of the known IP addresses for these various buggers that want to log the users

 

[Marc]

What exactly is newsgroups? I keep hearing it thrown about but don't know what it is.

Anyone care to explain?

Its basically an indexing tool for all of usenet. Im not an expert on it. I use newzbin and I have to pay something silly like £1 for a months use of it, or 20p a week, something like that. I also had to make a one off payment of about £20 to download the software. There is probably a free way to do it all, I dont know. But you always get cap download speed, so in my case i get 16mb a sec. I never got that on any kind of P2P, not even close.

 

[Huntingtons]

in denmark Piratebay just got blocked from 1 ISP, which probably is gonna be followed through for all ISP... yay for a censur-free world!

 

[Access Denied]

PeerGuardian2 rox! I've been using it for years. Hides your IP from the stream so you can download with complete anonymity. Far as I know it works for Limewire too but not certain on that.

 

[megadave]

rapidshare 4tw mates

 

[Bahumat]

Its basically an indexing tool for all of usenet. Im not an expert on it. I use newzbin and I have to pay something silly like £1 for a months use of it, or 20p a week, something like that. I also had to make a one off payment of about £20 to download the software. There is probably a free way to do it all, I dont know. But you always get cap download speed, so in my case i get 16mb a sec. I never got that on any kind of P2P, not even close.

Yep I used to use newsdeamon or whetever its called. Luckily a guy at work had the username and password for his unlimited account (its like £8 a month lol) so he shared that with me. Installed the software and was getting almost 1mb a second. I've got an 8mb line and most downloads cap out around 500kbps.

Oh yeah, I think it converts the files into text as you download films etc in chunks or packets of about 20 files. I think because its converted into text, your download speed is much faster.

 

[Chronictank]

Yep I used to use newsdeamon or whetever its called. Luckily a guy at work had the username and password for his unlimited account (its like £8 a month lol) so he shared that with me. Installed the software and was getting almost 1mb a second. I've got an 8mb line and most downloads cap out around 500kbps.

Oh yeah, I think it converts the files into text as you download films etc in chunks or packets of about 20 files. I think because its converted into text, your download speed is much faster.

You can only have 1 person (IP address) using the acc at any time
Just to nip all the "let me have your internetz" before they begin

Converting to text is not to increase speed, to a computer everything is the same (binary, 0's or 1's) so it being stored as text has little/no influence on download speed. The speed comes from you downloading from dedicated servers on fast connections which you pay a subscription for allowing cap download speeds

Traditionally newsgroups were for exactly that news, bb's and discussion forums
They were kept that way to utilise a legal loophole where it is stored as chunks of text rather than an actual file making any copyright protection on the file null, if rescent law suites are any indication this loophole may have been closed