BayTSP

hi,

new to this forum and this site. i was quite excited when i discovered
several days ago that the final episodes of sg-1 and the last s3 eps of sga
had already been aired in canada and the uk. i did a search through mininova
and found sga eps 17-20 on this site and downloaded the torrents and the
avi's and was quite impressed with the speed of the downloads and their
quality.

imagine my surprise this afternoon when i received a letter from charter
stating they had received notification from mgm that they were notified by an
xml tag (created by baytsp) put on the specific files i downloaded that my ip
address had downloaded these episodes in violation of the digital millennium
copyright act (dmca) and that, if they "caught" me again, they would pull my
service! the files accessed had "mint," "nbs," and "nfe" in their file
names.

needless to say, this scared the crap out of me. i always thought that
downloading tv shows that i regularly watch was ok. i also thought the
bittorrent sites were fairly impenetratible, but now geez, how do you
know what's marked and what isn't?

has anybody else received one of these letters? i've read where some isp's
have turned off people's web service because of this rather innocuous act.

thanks,

wipster

it doesn't really matter how safe you think it is to file share, in a lot of
countries you are breaking the law. if you aren't prepared to suffer
the consequences of your actions you should probably consider another hobby.

why be scared? unless you are in a remote area and have only one isp, write back
to them and say "no worries, i'll take my money elsewhere".

i guess i was going commando, as i'm not using any firewalls other than norton
and microsoft's. does peerguardian work against these xml files? how do they
get "inserted" into the file/folder? one thing i did notice is that each of
these torrents (and these only) had .srt files along with them for spanish
subtitles... hadn't seen that before.

like i said in my earlier post, i was under the assumption that tv shows were
kind of outside the boundaries of illegal filesharing. there are many sites
around that provide the ability to watch tv shows that you've missed or want
to watch again, some just by streaming, but many through downloading.

as for being "scared," a more appropraite term would be "shocked." i've
always read that the bittorrent method was virtually untraceable, but i guess
that's for the sharer, not the receiver. from other postings i've read on
this subject, the studios don't really care about the folks that are
downloading as much as the folks who are sharing their downloaded files.
onviously everyone can't stop sharing or the whole system would break down.

regardless, i've removed the offending downloads from my computer(s), just in
case something acually comes from this. i'm wondering how long it will take
for a program to be written that detects the detecter or someone discovers an
indicator that this xml file has been added to someone's torrent.

thanks,

wipster

then it didn't come from here. once eztv files are released out "into the
wild" anyone can do anything or add anything to them. some will be
beneficial, some will be malicious, some will be the studios/broadcasters and
their legal apparatus chasing down whoever they think they can get a hold of.

your assumption about the legality of tv downloading/sharing is faulty. if a
show is made available for download `legitimately` by an organisation it's the
exception rather than the norm, and there will be some lengthy terms and
conditions applied if you care to look around on the sites in question.

the other dodgy assumption is about bittorrent being virtually un-traceable.
this is completely untrue, for sharer or downloader (as an aside : due to the
nature of bittorrent you will actually be both at the same time).
by the very nature of how tcp/ip and the internet works the remote sender must
know your ip address in order to send you stuff. as bittorrent works by
having a large number of senders uploading small pieces to you, then your ip
address is known to a large `cloud` of fellow users, and importantly, anyone
else (official or otherwise) that cares to connect to the swarm while your
download is active.

in terms of protection about the best you can (practically) achieve is to use
peerguardian, or an equivalent, to block out lists of *known* addresses of
official/judicial etc bodies. note the known part - there's absolutely
no guarantees that the copyright holder will be using a publicly known address.

as others have pointed out - if you live in a juristriction where sharing of
unauthorised copyright material is illegal then it's your risk - all you can
usefully do is lower the likelihood of detection somewhat.

if the torrent came with .srt then i can promise you that it 100% did not come
from our site or trackers.