Internet Access being taken away for downloading Monk

a friend of mine just got a letter from her isp (cox cable) notifying that her internet access may be
disabled because she downloaded an episode of monk.

the episode in question is:

monk 5x14 (dsrip-lol)
added to eztv on 10 february 2007
tracker: 85.17.42.17:7001/
bt-chat.com/download.php?info_hash=63c55c7539a8ee65422d23bb971c87e52f27ed92

letter title: unauthorized use of nbc universal properties


what do you make of this?

we have all had them,

tell her to get a program like peerguardian2 and since you didn't mention
it, u shld get it too

i know she was using bittorrent. if she were using utorrent with encryption enabled would that have
made a difference?

does the tracker make a difference? if she were on a private tracker would she have still been caught?

ok so n3187 has not been to tvtorrents or bitemetv

the torrents are always alive with a huge selection

any tv show u can remember watching as a kid as well as recent ones are
available in full season torrents remember shows like automan? greatest
american hero? earth2 ? space above and beyond? blind justice? buck rogers
and the 21st century? animated stargate and star trek? u name it they are all
there and they all have seeds to d/l from 100k/s to 2m/s all you have to do
is seed back and credits u have

do they have a show called "crystal maze"?

no and personally don't blame them for not, a game show? seriously

1) i could definitely live with commercials if that's what it took. unfortunately at this point it wouldn't
matter if we included commercials as the advertisers won't be paying for the bigger audience. the
networks would have to get involved.

2) in this case i don't think the mpaa had anything to do with the letter. it came from nbc universal and
then passed through the isp.

to this point i thought the only ones getting in trouble for downloading tv shows were the ones
downloading hbo and showtime shows, because they are not aired on free public broadcast channels.

i found an article on torrentfreak that said cbs stated the whole downloading of tv shows through
torrents has increased their ratings and helped their business, so i didn't think any of these networks
would do anything.

i also found that nbc universal has recently signed a deal with itunes to distribute their shows at $2/
episode. it sounds to me like nbc probably knows downloading tv shows isn't hurting their business,
but they're trying to scare people into going to itunes instead to get even more.

thank god we don't have that kind of shit here in holland...

by the way, peerguardian kind of sucks up all your processor resources, because
of the large amount of connections made through bittorrent...

tvtorrents or bitemetv
anyone got an invite?? im not on these ones and would love to.

much appreciated.

you cant really hide, but you can make it more difficult to find you.

sure pg will block known ip of companies that dont want their content
distributed via bit-torrent and now get their cut.

but what prevents these same ppl from using their isp from home to gather the
same info?

why would you post that? nbc has clearly been targeting eztv...they don't need
another target. i've not been lucky enough to get invited to bitemetv, but if i
was a member i'd be pretty pissed at another member throwing bitemetv's name
around in a thread like this.

i realize the irony of this next statement, but you don't happen to have a
bitemetv invite, do you?

bear in mind private trackers aren't somehow magically invulnerable.

the `private` part just means that a user has to have ... an e-mail address.
hardly an extensive background check. 😉

private trackers tend not to get so much enforcement attention simply because
they have smaller user-bases.

just be aware of the facts, and that you can only minimize risk so far. it's,
as always, a personal judgement call.

so then what should she do? ignore the letter, install peerguardian and hope nbc doesn't use an ip not
blocked by pg to report ip's.

would your isp really shutdown your access for downloading tv shows aired on free broadcasts.

any other suggestioins for protection?

there are no foolproof,
guaranteed solutions. the only way to be 100% safe is to not torrent
copyrighted material in a juristriction that disallows it.

no matter what rhetoric gets thrown around by those opposed to it, and whether
the original material was nominally `free to air` or not, it's still illegal
in the us. period.

i'm absolutely certain that her isps terms & conditions will contain a clause
saying they can discontinue the service if it's used for illegal content
transfer - although most isps will give at least 1 warning before just cutting
a user off.

using peerguardian (or whatever ip blocklist manager) is a must. all you can
really do after that is to reduce the odds of being in a monitored swarm (use
private and/or small, not well known trackers), but you are still trusting to
luck.

it's up to her to balance the pros and cons of maybe losing that isps service
versus the availability of the content she wants to download.

this may be an idiotic question concidering the nature of the
internet,but,does peerguardian work globally ?

what i mean by that is,i'm in ireland and i assume that pg will block my ip
just as well as any other ip in the u.s or any other country.

correct ??