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BitTorrent requires you to give up your IP address to join a swarm of users downloading a file. Usenet doesn't. That's what I meant by anonymous.
by modernerd 15y ago
BitTorrent requires you to give up your IP address to join a swarm of users downloading a file. Usenet doesn't. That's what I meant by anonymous.
- pyre 15y agoThe Usenet server is centralized though. They could sue the provider to get the names of everyone that downloaded a set of posts. This is made much easier by the fact that most popular Usenet servers are paid for nowadays (especially ones that carry alt.binaries.*).
- modernerd 15y agoThey would first have to pass laws to force Usenet providers to log their customers' viewing and download history. Many Usenet providers make a 'will not track' promise to their customers. This is from Giganews' homepage, for example: "We will never sell your information to third parties or track what you download." http://www.giganews.com/ http://www.giganews.com/
- cma 15y agoHas anyone ever been prosecuted for downloading something? Every case I have seen is about uploading, otherwise you can't even safely browse youtube--someone might have used a copyrighted song in their cat fart video.
- jrockway 15y agoThey could. The answer they'd get is, "it's too expensive to store everything people downloaded, and our paying customers don't want us storing that information anyway." A law could be passed requiring Usenet providers in country X to log downloads, but then you could just use a server hosted in some other country. Preventing people from copying information is like preventing water from being wet. You fail.