Study: Majority Of File-Sharers Are Heavily Monitored

Birmingham University in the UK, during a three-year study using software emulating the file-sharing program BitTorrent, revealed that monitoring firms were tracking activity within three hours of a download.

“You don’t have to be a mass downloader. Someone who downloads a single movie will be logged as well,” research leader Dr. Tom Chothia was quoted as saying. “If the content was in the top 100 it was monitored within hours – someone will notice and it will be recorded.”

One distinction was allegedly made by monitoring firms, however – less popular content was not checked on nearly as frequently as more prominent or desirable items.

Washington CBS Local

The Birmingham University researchers note that at least 10 different different monitoring establishments logged downloaded content.

Nonetheless, the researchers note that the monitoring establishments appear to be merely sitting on the data, perhaps with the expectation that it may be useful at some point in the future.

Its very worrying and ive thought this before.
You go to internet, you see the 'Avengers blue ray torrent' You download..
bang.. your IP is logged, your download time is logged. You've probably also already had your PC investigated for GMAIL/HOTMAIL and banking sites so they can verify your identity.
Then its a case of save thus file into storage and when the day comes bring it up.

seriously, if someone knocked on your door with a subpheona stating you were being find X millions of Dollars for several years of copyright downloading what would you do?

Now im not saying I download or dont download.. but im pretty worried about the possibilites here.

Perhaps one day these leeches in the "entertainment" industry will die off and nothing will become of this mountain of data.

A crime requires a victim. Who is the victim? The entertainment industry? The movie studios? The artists? How can you be fined outrageous amounts of money in "damages" PER offense when the amount you didn't spend on buying a movie is roughly $15 per film and about $10 per music album?

You didn't pay us our $15 for Avengers. Okay, now give us $60,000 or go to jail. Huh? What a skewed argument!

I've downloaded thousands of movies and albums since 2007. They must have a terabyte size file on me

Good find

For a long while I've had a mindset that everything I do regarding the net can be monitored. I'm not saying everything I do is monitored (I don't think I'm that important ) but I'm saying it could be. So the idea that downloads are monitored to a greater degree than most people thought isn't surprising to me.

The idea that there's this huge vault of information that *whoever* is just sitting on is, well it's scary.

simple hide your ip address i use ix quick for searching / ghostery for trackers

Originally posted by geobro
simple hide your ip address i use ix quick for searching / ghostery for trackers

The worlds most private search engine...

www.ixquick.com...

Oh wait, no, this is the worlds most private search engine...

www.startpage.com...

lol actually startpage is based on ixquick. Both are good.

reply to post by ANOK


got them both

reply to post by Agit8dChop


What your saying is not out of the realm of possibility. Here in the US, it has already happened. There has been a case ongoing since 2007 in Minnesota. The original verdict in this case (in 2009), the women who had downloaded music was fined 1.9 million dollars for illegally downloading and sharing 24 songs.

Source

Of course the case has continued on and the fine has been reduced in many cases. Last I had heard, the amount was reduced to $55,000

Source

Anyone who continues to download now is foolish. Going after the user with huge fines is the old way of doing things. Today they have gotten much more creative, and put it on the ISP to monitor things. As of July, your ISP can shut off your internet access or limit your Web access speed for the "crime" of "illegally" downloading copyrighted material.

Source

The “gradual response” program works like this: ISPs will automatically monitor the Web activity of their customers. If a subscriber is found to be downloading copyrighted content illegally, their ISP will send them an “educational” notice saying such activity has been detected from IP addresses linked to their account. If that customer continues to download content illegally, the ISP will send “confirmation notices” to make sure they received the original notices. If copyright infringing activity continues still, the ISP then reserves the right to throttle Web access speeds, or cut off a subscriber’s Internet access altogether, at least until that user agrees to stop pirating copyrighted material. According to CNet, the ISPs have the option to skip these “mitigation measures,” and none have yet committed to completely cutting Internet access.

Now before anyone points out how the article says, "No ISP has committed to cutting internet access", I am aware of what the article says. That being said, I know for a fact my local ISP sends out letters and has cut off people's internet for downloading copyrighted music. They were left off, it was more just a suspension of service, but they have the option and I am sure we all know what the record companies are pushing for.

What about everybody who used Demonoid? The data of the userbase was handed over as like a present to a US minister, after the site was shut down. The site could have been shut down much before this time, but they wanted to hang on to it, I guess saving it for a "rainy day" or when the information would be politically useful. Either way I don't like my infa being in hands of US government.

I wonder why are they storing this information, when already ISP companies and the like, could force torrenting further underground, so it's not so easy for just anybody to torrent something. But they seem to be allowing it to happen. Excuse to collect data on people or something?

Majority of file-sharers also use google to search for things using the word "torrent" and they don't do anything to cover their tracks.

Private trackers + PeerBlock = nearly certain anonymity. Never 100%, but for basic users it's pretty standard stuff.

I mean really, googling any torrent is akin to stealing on video camera. It's just dumb. Using any torrent site that can be indexed by google is also quite dumb.