Put yourselves in the prosecution's shoes - would you rather show a technologically illiterate judge and jury a screenshot on a big projection screen of the defendant's downloads folder with a whole bunch of clearly labelled and apparently illegally ripped files available for download, or try and explain to them that IP address 64.93.138.231 transferred 10000 512byte chunks of a single incomplete copyrighted file to IP address 12.83.110.209 (and possibly using encryption) from port 48119 at 17:49 EST and this means they broke ze law? Good luck with that one haha.Īs has been demonstrated fairly recently (can't be bothered to cite the case, Google if you're actually interested), an interesting defence has been to (claim to) operate an open or weak Wifi access point, which can throw a further spanner in the legal works as it casts more doubt that the prosecution's logs really prove the defendant was the one downloading / uploading infringing material. The main reason for this is that it is an order of magnitude harder for an anti-piracy group to get anything substantial against users from monitoring BitTorrent tracker activity because there is no "Shared Folder" concept, and all that can really be seen casually is random chunks of data being passed around from client to client. There are legal cases relating to BitTorrent the last year or two, but by a wide margin these are against BitTorrent sites and trackers, rather than the users. Interestingly, in some cases recently, this has been rejected or contested as prosecution evidence because all that is shown is an IP address and a bunch of files, there's no proof beyond reasonable doubt that you were the person uploading these to people, that these files are illegal, or that the screenshot hasn't been falsified to some degree.
Copyright infringement is an increasingly widely socially acceptable norm, and once that happens, there's not a great deal that can be done (see The War on Drugs for a basic example of this, although this is a obviously a quite different situation).Īs has been previously mentioned, a massive majority of people caught for copyright infringement these days are busted purely because a member of an anti-piracy group paid to do so has browsed through their "Shared Folders" directory on something like Limewire, ED or DC, and taken a screenshot. Pandora has opened her box, and there's nothing anyone can do to avoid the consequences. The fact of the matter is that the amount of people around the world actively engaged in file sharing is more than any organisation or even government can put a stop to (and you can severely decrease the likelyhood of "winning" the random copyright lawsuit lottery quite easily). If you stay clear of P2P applications like Limewire, and don't use highly public BitTorrent trackers like TPB / TorrentSpy etc regularly, you will likely have no problems at all. It'll probably help more against adware than anti-piracy spying. If you have no problem with the resource usage, then I guess it can't do any harm, but I wouldn't rely on it for any serious protection.
Even the generally uneducated wankers that the MPAA / RIAA employ to do their dirty work will be aware of these kinds of blacklists, and probably get around them by using non-descript ISP IP ranges. I have PeerGaurdian installed on one of my boxes as I was trying it out a while back, but I can't think that it will do a lot of good.
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