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--- Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and uploading pi

by lini 15y ago

--- Film companies pay snoops to troll BitTorrent sites, dip into active torrents and capture the IP addresses of the peers who are downloading and uploading pieces of the files. --- This is a very vague way of gathering evidence. I am sure that the ISPs don't hold logs of the actual connections each IP is making, so I am wondering how is it possible to prove that the accused person actually downloaded the files in the torrent. Unless the snoops use a hacked BT client that downloads a whole file from only one specific peer, which is highly unlikely and will take a huge amount of time for all 23000 people.

yock 15y ago
I'm fairly certain that deep packet inspection would be required for an ISP to connect customer to IP address to visited resource. That being said, it would be trivial for an ISP to log the date and time each customer held a given IP address. If a plaintiff were to provide that date and time information, it seems at least technically possible to link that activity to a subscriber account. What I don't see though is how you prove that the person listed on the account was the one performing the activity. Then again, all it takes is convincing a few people (6 for a civil trial jury?) who weren't clever enough to get out of jury duty.
- lini 15y ago
  What I was implying is that a snapshot of the peers in a given torrent is not exactly hard evidence that each of those peers has a 100% downloaded copy of the files. For example, I remember that some torrent clients have a "super-seed" mode, where they appear as a normal peer with less than 100% completion. I know this sounds a bit like "the dog ate my homework" excuse but it sets a bad precedent of what constitutes an infringement - is it downloading a whole copy, uploading a whole copy, or just a part (unusable by itself) of the work?
  - yock 15y ago
    Well, what's a worse precedent? Being technically innocent of infringement since you skipped a single bit on the end of a download or the court ignoring your intent? Intent has been the cornerstone of many copyright infringement defenses. It would seem a bad move to claim that intent is irrelevant at this point.
ZoFreX 15y ago
Peers in a bittorrent swarm advertise which pieces of a file they have, it is very easy to see which IP addresses in a swarm have 100% of the data (and thus have downloaded the complete files). Proving that a particular person downloaded those files is an exercise left to the reader ;)

by lini 15y ago

yock 15y ago

I'm fairly certain that deep packet inspection would be required for an ISP to connect customer to IP address to visited resource. That being said, it would be trivial for an ISP to log the date and time each customer held a given IP address. If a plaintiff were to provide that date and time information, it seems at least technically possible to link that activity to a subscriber account. What I don't see though is how you prove that the person listed on the account was the one performing the activity. Then again, all it takes is convincing a few people (6 for a civil trial jury?) who weren't clever enough to get out of jury duty.

lini 15y ago
What I was implying is that a snapshot of the peers in a given torrent is not exactly hard evidence that each of those peers has a 100% downloaded copy of the files. For example, I remember that some torrent clients have a "super-seed" mode, where they appear as a normal peer with less than 100% completion. I know this sounds a bit like "the dog ate my homework" excuse but it sets a bad precedent of what constitutes an infringement - is it downloading a whole copy, uploading a whole copy, or just a part (unusable by itself) of the work?
- yock 15y ago
  Well, what's a worse precedent? Being technically innocent of infringement since you skipped a single bit on the end of a download or the court ignoring your intent? Intent has been the cornerstone of many copyright infringement defenses. It would seem a bad move to claim that intent is irrelevant at this point.

ZoFreX 15y ago

Peers in a bittorrent swarm advertise which pieces of a file they have, it is very easy to see which IP addresses in a swarm have 100% of the data (and thus have downloaded the complete files). Proving that a particular person downloaded those files is an exercise left to the reader ;)