Cease! Desist!

[thatmariolover]

May I ask, do you use Peerguardian and/or SafePeer?

[Bond]

I could be wrong, but I believe the RIAA specifically goes after universities.

My rule is to never download at university, but home is okay.

[Jason1]

Ive got a few questions for you, Gremelin. First, what school do you go to? Second, roughly how much were you downloading? Im sure that might be hard to estimate, but try to come up with roughly.

[KillerGremlin]

Originally Posted by Bond

I could be wrong, but I believe the RIAA specifically goes after universities.

This is true. For a few reasons.

#1. The government funds a lot of these Universities. The Universities have been told by the government that if they don't comply with the RIAA/MPAA they will lose funding. In the end, it's still all about money.

#2. At least at my University, there is a nifty login method which makes it a lot easier to put an IP Address and a person together. It really removes a lot of the ambiguity that one could argue in court otherwise.

#3. Some of the more noble Internet Service Providers have spoken out against the DMCA's methods. They have made it clear that they will do everything within their power to protect the privacy of their customers. In the end, it's a lot more work to bust a single person at their home (low yield) than bust 50 kids at a college.

You do the math. 50 x 3500 (hypothetical cost of settling with the RIAA if they actively pursue a subpoena).

That's 175,000 in the bank for just sending a couple letters out to some college kids.

Now, this is all going to change, I promise you. With recent controversy (like, none of this "damage" money is actually going to the artists) I expect to see some serious limitations imposed on the DMCA. But we shall see.

[BreakABone]

I got two of these during my tenure in college.

Basically told the school wouldn't go it again and got on my merry ways.

I find IRC also helps as it seems harder to track in my experience. Could just be wrong.

[KillerGremlin]

Originally Posted by thatmariolover

May I ask, do you use Peerguardian and/or SafePeer?

Brace yourself for this: as it stands, Vista only supports PeerGuardian 2, RC1. And I only became aware of this fact the other day. Yes, I do run PeerGuardian, I've had it on my XP machine for as long as I can remember, but I don't have it on Vista. As far as SafePeer, I've never used it. Isn't it a plugin for Azureus? I have always used uTorrent, so maybe that is why it has never come up.

I've heard that PeerGuardian isn't that helpful, but I've always felt better knowing that I have it. It seems to block a lot of "suspect" traffic, so I've always felt a lot better with it installed, but nothing can block 100% of the bad stuff.

But what's really helpful...and this is going to transition nicely into Jason's question:

Originally Posted by Jason1

Second, roughly how much were you downloading? Im sure that might be hard to estimate, but try to come up with roughly.

I download a decent amount of music, maybe a couple albums a week. A lot of the stuff I torrent is mainstream stuff, because it's easy to find. Once you start to look for more obscure music, public trackers become less and less useful. I've found that blogspots are great sources for underground rap and metal. Usually they'll link to a rapidshare link. The only "private" torrent site I use is Demonoid, and they seem to be running a pretty smoothe site. Anyway, I don't think it matters how much you download. I think it's more of what you download. All the people that I know who have been busted have been busted downloading some current, super mainstream album, from a public tracker on a big website like mininova. I was on btjunkie. I'm sure if I downloaded a lot from a private website with strict uploading guidelines, like OINK used to be, that I would have pretty much nothing to worry about.

Originally Posted by Jason1

Ive got a few questions for you, Gremelin. First, what school do you go to?

UIC; University of Illinois at Chicago.

Originally Posted by manasecret

That clued me into the fact that they didn't care that I was downloading stuff (or didn't know what I was downloading), only that I was sharing stuff. So I stopped sharing stuff, but I went along and kept downloading.

I miss the Kazaa days, because back then you could nuke all outbound traffic. It's a little bit harder to not upload when you use torrents. I'm with Bond, it seems like torrenting at the University is just a bad plan. But hindsight is 20/20. My home ISP isn't quite as compliant with the DMCA, because they'd rather respect their customers than fold. There are all sorts of politics on the subject of the governments, colleges, and the DMCA.

As for college, I might check out newsgroups, which appears to be the future of filesharing.

Also, I feel pretty confident/safe when I use rapidshare and all those other hosting websites. But who knows.