

Anti-Pirates Caught Spying on Thousands of Torrents - nosensor
https://torrentfreak.com/anti-pirates-caught-spying-on-thousands-of-torrents-120829/

======
nosensor
"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...](http://torrentfreak.com/which-vpn-providers-really-take-anonymity-
seriously-111007/)

~~~
jmillikin

      > 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
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.

------
zeruch
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.

------
jfaucett
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.

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

------
sukuriant
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
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.

~~~
sukuriant
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?

