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Copyright Infringement Problems


sidewayspenguin

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Well i'm not talking 'bout privacy, of course everything is tracked and saved and may backstab you in the future but a provider that contacts you directly after a download would be something new to me, it's 1983 not 1984 yet :biggrin:

 

Actually, if his provider DID contact him, it would be after they were contacted by a copyright holder that a suspect infringement has occured from one of their customers IP addresses. It's pretty standard practice (in the US) for the ISP to send a notification to the customer on record that a copyright violation has been reported using an IP assigned to them at the time.

 

^^ This is what happened. But so far I can't find anything on any of the computers so I hope it's nothing.

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Well i'm not talking 'bout privacy, of course everything is tracked and saved and may backstab you in the future but a provider that contacts you directly after a download would be something new to me, it's 1983 not 1984 yet :biggrin:

 

Actually, if his provider DID contact him, it would be after they were contacted by a copyright holder that a suspect infringement has occured from one of their customers IP addresses. It's pretty standard practice (in the US) for the ISP to send a notification to the customer on record that a copyright violation has been reported using an IP assigned to them at the time.

Well in Europe many internet provides check for torrent downloads and disconnect you on their own account. I'm not sure about America but here in Ireland I know a tonne of people that of that have been warned for downloading of YouTube by the internet provider themselves and not the copyright owner!!

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Torrents are not illegal. If your ISP is cutting you off because you are torrenting, that's completely ridiculous. I hope you have alternatives because ISP's that do that deserve to crash and burn horribly.

 

I can see we're all soon going to have to start using heavy data encryption if things like this keep happening... then they can have fun decrypting stuff until their heads or their computers explode, whichever happens first...

 

Of course, this could be one of those cases where the media company that owns the material complained to the ISP. They can find out your IP address if they want.

 

But the bottom line is, torrenting is not illegal, contents of those torrents may be.

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Well in Europe many internet provides check for torrent downloads and disconnect you on their own account. I'm not sure about America but here in Ireland I know a tonne of people that of that have been warned for downloading of YouTube by the internet provider themselves and not the copyright owner!!

 

Jeez. I know companies sometimes throttle your traffic if they see you are using torrents, but that's not because it's illegal, but because they're dishonest, cheating bastards who want to be competitive but without spending anything on it. I didn't know some actually go so far to cut people off completely.

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Comcast will check what you are doing if you are using more bandwidth than normal, if they see you uploading and downloading many game mods they wont say anything to you but if you are using torrents constantly and some of it is illegal content then they will give out a warning notification. In the OP's case yeah it was Bethesda that was watching the torrent and notified his ISP. Don't pirate and you wont have that problem lol.
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I didn't pirate anything. The only things I have downloaded the past few days are NMM and a few mods here on the Nexus. That's why I'm confused about this notification. I don't pirate and why would I pirate something Steam gives out for free? I searched my computer for the thing i "downloaded" but couldn't find anything. Soooooo I hope nothing happens
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  • 2 weeks later...

Just stumbled upon this thread and there is a bit of misinformation here. I'm a CSR supervisor for a major ISP and the OP got that notification because either Bethesda filed a copyright infringement complaint against the OPs IP address with his ISP. ISP's don't have the ability to declare what is and what isn't copyrighted material. It only took about 2min of investigation to discover the file that the OP received notice about is a torrent with multiple trackers from the most popular torrent sites. The only way for a complaint to be registered is to have downloaded the torrent and then loaded it with a torrent client thus your IP address sending/receiving requests and data.

 

People think that providers have the ability to track what anyone downloads, which is true to an extent however it is a very lengthy and extremely expensive process to track on the individual level. 99% of the tracking we do to a "Flagged" individual IP is volume usage, not detailed. I bring that up because as an example, if someone was to download a file from a file shareing host site(think megaupload, rapidshare, etc) it's very difficult to find what was downloaded unless the IP was already being tracked in detail. There are several companies for hire to major corporations that specialize in tracking torrents by sniffing out the IPs who are using illegal torrents. Torrents are the easiest way to get caught downloading copyrighted material. The majority of the time when I field a complaint from a customer who received these notifications, the volume caused from file sharing will drop tremendously.

 

Basically to get contacted by your IP for this there are 2 possibilities. One is someone leeching off your internet and downloaded and the other is the OP actually downloaded it. The ironic part is it's the Skyrim DLC and not some random other copyrighted file. Usually if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.......

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It also depends if your IP is static or dynamic. I had the same problem but I got the message shortly after an IP switch. I got someones IP who did download something and they notified me because I currently had the IP that was downloading. If the files are not on your computer then it's nothing and go about your business,
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I haven't seen yet where the OP mentions that his wireless is secured. I have no internet access at home (I don't watch TV and refuse to pay cable-tv prices for an internet connection - no, there is no cheaper way where I live). So I go out on the porch and log on to my neighbor's wi-fi (with her permission, using her password that I set up for just this reason). Even just out and about, I can find unsecured networks all over town. I really have no guilt about it as I am not eating up hardly any bandwidth (I keep Steam offline and do my updates/downloading at my friends' houses, and I don't do torrents), I'm not doing anything illegal, I'm not trying to hide. But it would be ridiculously easy to get a neighbor in trouble by using their ISP to download illegal stuff. It's not hard to put a password on your wi-fi. Do it. Now.

 

P.S. One of the first cases of folks getting in trouble for torrenting that I heard about was a couple in Washington, D.C. (I believe) whose unsecured wi-fi was used by a neighbor to torrent tons of music. The couple was sued by the music companies, and last I heard, they were still in court.

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