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Film companies demand names of Reddit users who discussed piracy in 2011
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
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On a similar note how safe is it to use private torrents such as IPTorrents? They obs keep a log of users and upload/download stats and probably the torrents downloaded and ip addresses. Surely rights holders would be better off going after this data no?
All they have to do is get an account and sit there seeding their own movies, then keep a log of the IP addresses of the people they connect to. That’s how most P2P enforcement is done.
Problem is that anyone with enough knowledge to get private torrent access also knows enough to use a seedbox or VPN. The whole business case for a VPN revolves around not giving out IP addresses so that’s generally a dead end for copyright holders.
Eh, you shouldn't get hit with anything serious unless you're hosting a server that's seeding tons of content. The worst I've seen people who occasionally pirate getting is a 'stop being a pirate, asshole!' letter from Disney or something. I tried cyberghost for a while and it was such trash that I wish I hadn't wasted money on it, I've just not bothered with VPNs since.
Agree with cyberghost being absolute garbage. I got a letter like that for downloading a Megamind cam once. Ironically it was to cut out a piece of the movie to show my friend to recommend he go watch the movie.
FYI, this was done a few years ago. I think the lawyers behind it just got out of prison.
I recommend people use a VPN even when using private torrents. Mostly because aren't really private, they are semi-public but kept behind some sort of application gate-keeping process. Do you trust every single user on these sites all the time? Are they actually vetting new applicants? Do they audit users at all?
Generally unless you personally trust every single user it just takes one bad actor to log IPs and start sharing that information somewhere else to compromise the privacy of the entire userbase.
If I were to torrent I could see myself using a seedbox for the downloading and uploading but sure I would be lax when it came to visiting the torrent site so my ip address would likely be captured.. ;-)
Exposing your public IP to the website itself is not typically as much of a risk. Bad actors would have to get law enforcement to force the website owners to turn over visitor and activity logs to prove that your public IP visited a site and downloaded a torrent. But if that same IP never downloaded or uploaded content using that torrent, then there is no real evidence of actual media sharing.
That makes sense but leads me to another question.. How do site like IP torrents track the user upload / download ratio? Say if I were to log in and use my home internet connection to download a torrent file from there and then use a seedbox to do the download the contents? It can’t be IP based as the IP’s would be different; is each torrent file downloaded different for each user?
My experience with private torrents is a little out of date but you might be right, that could cause problems with how your seed ratio is reported for trackers.
Just went down a rabbit hole.. Turns out IPTorrents give a different torrent file for each user so it’s independent of IP address. It’s the torrent client that reports back the down and upload volumes. Now need to see if this info could be used by the rights holders for claims…