There is also online safety to consider and whether torrenting will draw attention from the authorities. First of all, the activity of torrenting is not inherently illegal. The technology is simply a way to share content online.
Where you can get into trouble is hosting, downloading or distributing copyright protected files. That includes most popular movies, music and software. Torrenting differs from regular downloading in one critical way. Rather than pulling an entire file from a single server, torrenting — also called bittorrenting — uses a peer-to-peer file sharing approach in which specialized software grabs small pieces of the file from dozens, maybe hundreds, of computers all over the world and assembles them into a full version.
A lack of centralized servers makes it hard to find and shut down any single host computer involved in criminal activity, but there are also legitimate reasons to use the P2P protocol, One is that the process can be faster than direct downloading, without overburdening servers.
Despite it being synonymous with copyright violations, the bottom line is that simply using a P2P network does not make you a criminal. The legislation gave copyright holders, often music labels and film studios, a legal strategy with which to successfully pursue lawsuits against torrent operators, users and, sometimes, innocent bystanders.
Whether engaged in illegal activity or not, the fact that so many lawsuits have targeted torrenting might make you rethink the wisdom of using a P2P network. Copyright holders have been relentless in pursuing actual and perceived violators with varying degrees of success. Sometimes, torrenting operations try to take refuge behind the idea that copyright violation complaints should be targeted at users.
Operators have long claimed to be nothing more than innocent cloud storage providers. One case involved Hotfile , a popular file-sharing website in , against which a group of major film studios filed a lawsuit. At the time of filing, the defendant had received more than 10 million takedown notices for hosted content, but paid little attention. Too much money was at stake. Megaupload and Grooveshark were two more renegade torrent services targeted in the aftermath of the DMCA read our guide to what Megaupload is.
Since IP addresses are recycled from departing to arriving customers, it seems to be a case of simple misfortune, not bad behavior. Can you help clear this up? You're right; we've written a lot of articles about how to protect yourself over the years, but sometimes it can be confusing as to exactly what's happening behind the scenes.
And while it's difficult to know, since every ISP is different, you generally have two different entities to worry about: your ISP, and the media companies looking to quash illegal downloading. Here's what each of them monitors for and how you can keep yourself anonymous. 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. 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 real problem, if you're downloading illegal media, is the company from whom you're stealing. They or lawyers or companies on their behalf actually go online and seek out torrents of their material, whether it be movies, music, TV shows, or anything else, and will download the torrent themselves. From there, they can see a lot of information about the other users connected—including their IP address.
You can even check this for yourself at home. Start downloading a torrent and click on the "More Info" section of your torrent client. You'll see the IP address of everyone you're downloading from and uploading to, plain as day.
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