A few legal questions.

I'm trying to find out a few things, mostly about what individuals have and haven't been filed lawsuits against for sharing.

1. Have there been any lawsuits against individuals for sharing software, books, or pornography? It seems like I've only heard about lawsuits for movies (non-pornographic) and music.

2. What about those copyright notices people have gotten from ISPs? I know some have gotten them for software sharing (in addition to the common movie/music sharing), but what about books/pornography?

3. Most of the reports of copyright notices have been for newer material. Are there any known cases of someone receiving a notice for sharing older movies or music?

3. Is there any other major category of copyrighted material that I'm leaving out?

4. The way I've heard private BitTorrent trackers spoken about, it would seem as though they were totally safe. What makes them safe (I know you have to register first with the tracker, but do most private tracker sites have terms of service that would prevent anti-piracy groups from signing up)?

5. Has anyone been caught (i.e. sent a notice from his ISP) while using a private tracker?

6. Usenet downloading. I assume that if one uses his own ISP's Usenet service, the worst that would happen would be the user getting his service cancelled due to excessive bandwidth usage (assuming he downloaded more than the ISP liked). Am I correct in assuming that individual has received a copyright notice from their ISP for Usenet downloading?

Thanks for the help.

If you think it's copyrighted, or know that it's copyrighted then the odds are that someone out there is going to enforce that copyright. That goes for music, e-books, movies and software.

Common thinking is that porn is safe ground because rights to the works are loosely enforced. This is true that I do not believe they have attempted to sue file-sharers. But, I know for a fact that major labels such as Vivid and Hustler have issued take down notices to torrent-sites.


It's not your ISP's responsibility to enforce another entity's copyright and they do not actively do so. However, if a copyright holder notifies your ISP that someone on their network is sharing their copyrighted work on their system your ISP may notify you of that notice. It's up to the copyright holder how far they want to take the issue. It is also up to your ISP how co-operative they want to be with the copyright holder. Some will give you up in a second, others may take the issue to court.




The thing about BitTorrent is that it was not intended to be used by pirates. It was a simple idea. Allow the sharing of huge files among many people without the need for a server providing huge amounts of bandwith, instead the load is shared by everyone in the swarm. There is no security in the protocol. It is simple to log onto a swarm and identify every single node without even a connection to that user. Hundreds of people could be compromised in seconds.
It does not matter what anyone tells you. There is no such thing as a safe BitTorrent site to use. Some are Safer than others, but... It only takes one person to fuck everyone on the site. Plus, if you where able to get into some of this "private" sites, how hard do you think it would be for a paid stooge with some skills to do the same thing?




Usenet is a wonderful thing.
You don't connect to any outside forces. It's you connecting to a secure server farm. No records are kept by paid providers of what you download. Only how much bandwidth you use for the purposes of billing.
No one has ever been sued for downloading material from Usenet. And will never.

Scener, you're mistaken.

Recently, the Porn industry launched a successful attack on several P2P sites trading Porn. Sharing any type of media makes you vulnerable. People get caught sharing TV because it is more popular.

If the media still has valid copyright, it makes it no different to a brand new release, regardless of age.

Private trackers aren't untouchable. They do carry a lot less users so that makes them a smaller fish in the sea.

Sure your ISP might confront you about high bandwidth usage, asking you to tone it down. I doubt they would confront you about downloading torrent files, since the BitTorrent protocol is 100% legal.

The chances of anything bad happening after downloading from USENET are very low.

I believe that more private sites such as FTN would be safer than say, TPB, due to the fact it's easier for a company to just hop on TPB and catch some IPs, whereas they would have to spend awhile infiltrating FTN. Not saying it's 100% safe, but just safer.