Sites like the Pirate Bay and uTorrent haven't enticed hundreds of millions of people to download endless amounts of free media content without making a few enemies. The increased acceptance of illegally downloading media has affected the bottom line of the movie and music industry over the past decade, and that isn't good news for torrent fans.
"You don't have to be a mass downloader. Someone who downloads a single movie will be logged as well," the lead researcher told the BBC. "If the content was in the top 100 [most popular downloads] it was monitored within hours. Someone will notice and it will be recorded."
The copyright police are banking on the idea that there are more people illegally sharing major movies like "The Avengers" than stealing music from small, independent record labels. It is still unclear how willing courts will be to prosecute individuals based only on the fact that their IP address was recorded.
Hacker reports that perhaps the most common way for ISPs to fight BitTorrenting is to "throttle" a user's Internet connection, slowing it down or even cutting the connection off. The practice is most prevalent in Canada, where it's had little effect. ISPs are also known to have fielded requests from copyright enforcers who pressure them to give up an Internet user's contact information, most often to send the offender a warning letter or a subpoena.
Bit-Torrent users can avoid throttling or legal trouble by hooking up to virtual private networks and proxies for their connection online. In the latter scenario, someone's IP address is re-routed through another one so a Bit-Torrenter's real IP stays relatively anonymous to the other users they are connecting with. There are also newer piracy sites that subvert peer-to-peer connections altogether, avoiding the inherent risk of linking to someone who could be working for the MPAA.Until those methods catch on, the Pirate Bay and other Bit-Torrent sites will continue their arms race against law enforcement.
What Does My Internet Provider See When I'm Downloading Torrents?In general, ISPs these days aren't so interested in what you're downloading. They leave that to the folks being stolen from. Instead, ISPs are more concerned with how much bandwidth you're sucking up, and whether that's slowing everyone else down. As such, many ISPs will throttle your connection—that is, slow it down—if they see you're using BitTorrent. They don't usually look at what you're downloading (even though they could, if they wanted to), but they will check what kind of traffic is coming from your machine. That is, they'll see how much of it is email, web browsing, video chat, online gaming, and so on. If they see any BitTorrent traffic, they'll slow it down—it doesn't matter whether you're downloading a legal Linux ISO or Batman Begins. All they care about is that you're slowing down their network.
To see if your ISP is looking for BitTorrent traffic, check out this list of the worst offenders, or try the previously mentioned Glasnost tool. If your ISP isn't throttling BitTorrent, then you don't have much to worry about, though they still could see anything they wanted.The Media Companies Sees What You're Downloading (and Will Tell Your ISP)
Once they find your IP address (which they can do just by clicking "more info" in their torrent client), they'll find out who your ISP is and send them a letter. Your ISP then, in turn, will forward you a notice that you've been caught pirating media. Usually the first offense is just a proverbial slap on the wrist, though if you're a repeat offender it could mean having your internet service terminated. If you're very unlucky it could even mean paying a lot of money in a settlement.
So What Should You Do to Stay Anonymous?
A movie studio or musician isn't going to give a toss whether you've 'stolen' a physical copy from HMV, because when you buy a CD (if anyone still buys CDs), you aren't buying it for a thin plastic donut and a booklet with some lyrics in (if you're lucky) - you're buying it for the enjoyment of what the disc contains. And besides, HMV has a stockroom full of the discs anyway, so you aren't depriving anyone of it in a real sense. The medium it's delivered from is irrelevant. You own it without paying for it. It isn't paid for.
Having said all that, I'm not actually condoning downloading stuff from torrents or newsgroups at all. It's a fact of life that it happens, has always happened, and always will. Distributors should find a way of adding value over pirated material and stop clinging to their outdated business model. That doesn't mean that wording it as 'copying' or 'stealing' actually changes what is being done.
