Are you referring to the BitTorrent tracker itself, or the fact that companies can and do scrape trackers to build their own databases for who knows what end?
The companies scraping and tracking, including your ISP... There is no real use for the data right now (apart from a few countries with anti-download laws). In the not-so-far-away future I think this will change... Then they've got your (ip)number.
Including my ISP? No. My ISP doesn't even want to keep historic records of what customers had what IP. Storing all that requires resources that they would rather mark as profit. You see, my ISP isn't in the content producing business, so it doesn't interest them that much what I do with my fiber.
But why would one trust a VPN more than an ISP? The article says "while making sure that nobody can see what you’re downloading," but that's clearly not true: they can.
How long until the FBI and CIA start working with VPN providers and trying to get warrantless VPN taps legalized? How many VPN providers today are NSA honeypots?
When these conversations come up, you can assume the above comments are talking about VPN providers outside the US that specifically do not cooperate, particularly in Sweden and Canada. Honeypotting these would be pretty tough and, if proven, the information gleaned from them would be largely off limits to most courts.
That assumes that they do not co-operate. Perhaps they are not required to co-operate by law. However, let's assume that you are running a VPN hosting service out of Russia or wherever that is not doing so well financially.
Now you get a nice offer from some men in fancy suits who represent some company that has some link to the MPAA/RIAA/whoever. They offer to help subsidise your server costs and in return they get access to your log files. Now maybe this country does not have such privacy laws as other places, so you aren't compelled to tell your customers about this change.
The new subsidies however do allow you to lower your prices to a level where you start getting a huge chunk of the business.
BTW, those articles are mostly wrong. In the US six strikes system the monitoring is done by DtecNet, not ISPs. This matters because ISPs see all your traffic while third parties can see much less about what you're doing.
There is no real use for the data right now (apart from a few countries with anti-download laws)
Since we're talking about torrents, (almost) every downloader is also an uploader, so there's plenty of recorded evidence of copyright infringement, and the RIAA has already sent thousands of threatening letters. But it's still a drop in a bucket compared to the dozens of millions of file sharers in the US alone.
Is a few pieces of a copyrighted file still copyrighted? How many chunks do you need to have before you are actually infringing anything? What if it's encrypted? How do you prove what a torrent says in its title is actually what it contains? How do you prove that a download was willful? What if individual files in an overall torrent are non infringing?
This isn't exactly simple stuff - there are lots of legal questions that have yet to be answered.
> Is a few pieces of a copyrighted file still copyrighted? How many chunks do you need to have before you are actually infringing anything?
Probably yes, by connecting to that particular swarm that is sharing "Piratesofthecarribean12.avi" you are showing intent to download that file. The onus would most likely be on you to persuade the court that you had some other reason for connecting.
What possible reason could you have for downloading a few kb of a 1GB file other than to get the whole thing?
Remember this is civil law , not criminal law so the burden of proof on the people suing you is somewhat lower.
> What if it's encrypted?
That the transfer was encrypted doesn't really mean much, the way these people would catch you is to join the swarm themselves and send pieces of the file to others. So essentially they are the ones doing the encrypting so will know what the data was before encryption.
> How do you prove what a torrent says in its title is actually what it contains?
I assume they will just connect to the swarm, download the file themselves to verify it's contents and then serve pieces of that out to others. So they will know exactly what is being transmitted.
> How do you prove that a download was willful?
Again, I imagine the onus would be on your to suggest another reason such as someone broke into your wifi etc. Whether you have absolute responsibility for what happens on your internet connection appears to be a grey area however.
> What if individual files in an overall torrent are non infringing?
I don't imagine it would matter, they would be more concerned with the parts that were infringing.
The IP adresses are only useful as long as the ISP keeps the log of the IP assignments. While I'm sure some ISPs keep this around indefinetely (why?), most hopefully don't and there might be limits on the retention period imposed by law.
Of course the data is useful apart from hunting down unlicensed usage, for one thing it's an interesting way to measure a given product's popularity.
Yes. In fact, this is one of the biggest political issues regarding internet policy here in Germany. The government had to back down on a law imposing a six month data retention in response to popular pressure. Germany is currently in violation of EU directives on that issue. One prospective model has a retention time of two weeks.
At the same time, privacy laws may requireISPs to delete the data; I don't think German ISPs are currently permitted to keep the logs longer than necessary for billing, and, if a minimum retention time is passed again, they probably won't be allowed to keep them after the time has passed.
I can tell you they will definitely try to prosecute you. I own rental property and I let one of my tenets use the shared temporary Internet access (yes some would say that was stupid) but to me Internet is like water so I felt it was alright.
The annoying thing is that its not the studio company that is suing you its the IT company that is scraping your IP address. They then according to my lawyer do a geo-location lookup and based on your location determine if your worthwhile suing.
If your in affluent area your a target because they are confident you will settle. They reason people settle is that its almost impossible to fight the case with out revealing your identity. And I will tell you do not want to do that because they then resell that information because most of these IT scraping companies are offshore.
I heard from one lawyer when its all said in done they have done the risk analysis (counter-suing, cases dropped, etc) and they on predict on average making about $50 or more a case.
Could you clarify more? An offshore IT company that does not own any copyright is suing bittorrenters? On what basis exactly? And they're scraping IPs and are allowed to bring that up in court?
Reverse lottery is a good way to look at it. And for the same reason I don't play the lottery I'm not worried about this. 1/infinity are odds I'm confident I will never hit.
There's lots of room for "innovation" in the legal arena. Something like the digital equivalent of an automated speed camera? Adjustment on your taxes based on how many times your IP address shows up on public trackers? Rejected security clearances?
Well, ex post facto laws are generally frowned upon so it is not as risky as you make it sound. And in Europe there is also EU privacy laws you need to take into account. It is unlikely a new kind of law will suddenly appear without warning.
Yes those EU privacy laws are really great: "German police clearly state that they are monitoring Skype, Google Mail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo Mail and Facebook chat ..." "Altogether more than a billion Euro was spent on private services by German police and other public authorities in the realm of the ministry of home affairs in the years 2002 – 2012". http://annalist.noblogs.org/post/2012/10/03/german-police-mo...
