BayTSP using crawlers in order to obtain ip's from torrents and to send DMCA....

[mangalowres]

Lucky me, I live in germany and everything i read about DMCA doesen't concern me here

But after reading about DMCA I thought "what a bullshit"...

[Mushi]

German courts seem to be file-sharing friendly.

http://torrentfreak.com/german-court...harers-080320/

[mangalowres]

Originally Posted by Mushi

German courts seem to be file-sharing friendly.

http://torrentfreak.com/german-court...harers-080320/

I wish you guys could read a little bit german .... it would be easier for me
But the link you have posted tells the truth and for those who can read german

http://www.golem.de/0808/61487.html

This new news ... damn what did I want to write ... anyways I am not the big sharer, except animes but I feel relieve that the federal prosecutor don't work for the big industires anymore like the MI.


Ah and another thing, I rather watch an anime with japanese dub and english/german sub than watching an anime with german dub ... it is so awful I can't stand it ... how can some do this to an anime

[Slice of Life]

Well, the consequences of the recent rulings by the constitutional court on data privacy aren't as clear as torrentfreak makes it look like. And what they can't push through on the national level they might try again on the Union level.

I just read somewhere that governments worldwide are only waiting for some Internet-related 9/11 to pull out their control laws at lie already in their drawers. Everything to protect our freedom of course! This sounds much too likely to me to dismiss it as conspiracy theory.

Now, to the case at hand. I think it's rather unlikely that a DMCA letter will reach anybody in Germany (let alone have any legal value). The ISPs won't risk to reveal your identity without a legal basis just because some guys from overseas ask them too. A criminal complaint is needed.

But IANAL.

And if the ISPs really want to get rid of you because you download too much they'll simply end your contract at the next possible date, maybe adding a few hints that they know what you've done with your bandwidth hoping you won't bitch too much in public forums letting other customers change their providers. And at the moment the providers a rather busy to convince you that you need higher speed at almost the same price. So it doesn't seem as if they are worried about congestion.

[lamer_de]

I'd guess that to have a case in a country outside of the USA, they'd need to have an office in that country or given the rights to a company based in that country. See Funimation sending C&D's for d-rights.
While the specific German ruling/advice to the prosecutors will most likely protect people who only share a few files for some while, this will be a vey strong argument for the industry to get a law where they'll get the right to get informed by the ISPs directly, without the loop way over the judges.
And then shit'll hit the fan, as each C&D is not free like in the US or UK, but entitles the company to collect fees which usually range from 200-1000€ and the ability to get approx 10 times the money if you're caught again without even suing.

And yes, German anime companies are known to send out C&D's for the series they licensed (see e.g. "Abmahnkanzlei" Schutt & Waetke, http://www.anwalt24.de/rechtsanwalt/...bmahngeschaeft)

[4tw]

Looks like bayTSP is also doing something in japan:
http://translate.google.com/translat...26as_qdr%3Dall

Scroll down a bit where the guy posts an email. Both the animes are Sekirei.

[Thinker]

Originally Posted by lamer_de

I'd guess that to have a case in a country outside of the USA, they'd need to have an office in that country or given the rights to a company based in that country. See Funimation sending C&D's for d-rights.
While the specific German ruling/advice to the prosecutors will most likely protect people who only share a few files for some while, this will be a vey strong argument for the industry to get a law where they'll get the right to get informed by the ISPs directly, without the loop way over the judges.
And then shit'll hit the fan, as each C&D is not free like in the US or UK, but entitles the company to collect fees which usually range from 200-1000€ and the ability to get approx 10 times the money if you're caught again without even suing.

And yes, German anime companies are known to send out C&D's for the series they licensed (see e.g. "Abmahnkanzlei" Schutt & Waetke, http://www.anwalt24.de/rechtsanwalt/...bmahngeschaeft)

Not always the case. Looks like the folks in Singapore are getting whacked a second time: news broke out that Showgate (japanese co) has been sending letters to downloaders seeking a settlement, while threatening possible fines of up to $200,000.

http://sgcafe.com/showthread.php?t=53253

One guy got the letter for downaloding Devil May Cry. As far as I know, the show isn't available in the region (neither DVD nor broadcast), and Showgate has no office there either.

Doesn't make any sense for them to claim for damages from a non-existent market. And to argue that the downloader had distributed the show online, they'll need to prove the content he uploaded IS indeed the show itself--and the files are complete. Just a filename alone isn't substantial enough.

The Japanese and Odex are doing this probably because the SIngapore law has often favoured corporations rather than consumers. The government too is trying very hard to lure Japanese animation companies there to kickstart their animation industry.

But it's probably true that Japanese companies are trying to go after fansub downloaders overseas, regardless whether the shows are licensed there or not.

[houkoholic]

Originally Posted by Thinker

Doesn't make any sense for them to claim for damages from a non-existent market.

But the thing is licensors often use the damage of fansubs as a bargaining chip to push down the license prices.

It comes back in full circle.

[Ryusiangel]

where is this happening at o_o?
is this happening in the united states?
if it is er should the ppl who bring out our anime distrube it faster

[wao]

I just got caught up on the scene in Singapore mentioned in an earlier post. Frankly speaking I'm still wondering who the hell is using BitTorrent in Singapore to download anime... I've gone entirely streaming-only for one year and I'd rather stick with relatively shitty video quality than deal with a letter like that in my mailbox. Not that that's the safest option either, of course.

I get a feeling some people have this thing against having compromises because of all the "compromises" we are forced to take living here, but I think there's nothing wrong with using one's brains and... you know, not making yourself so exposed on BitTorrent. I thought the previous fiasco should have made it very very clear that the ISPs aren't going to help us out and can't anyway - I mean it was all over the papers and anything; anyone remotely interested in anime must have heard about it...
Even if in the end things settled down because Odex was not the rights holder, it's rather unfortunate that people really think the Japanese companies weren't going to purposely go out and file letters to people in other countries.
And like someone mentioned Singapore is a very good choice (a lot better than our neighbours, whom I've not heard any news of letters so far).


Everybody wonders why they don't go after the raw uploaders, the Japanese themselves - well they have already, and also I get the feeling people there who illegally download media there are much more conscious about keeping themselves hidden... I don't think I'd disagree with Quarkboy's suggestion to move the fansub scene to something like PD (although maybe a parallel network might be better, I don't know, would the Japanese feel uncomfortable with all those foreign files passing around? Never used the program...)

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by wao

Everybody wonders why they don't go after the raw uploaders, the Japanese themselves - well they have already, and also I get the feeling people there who illegally download media there are much more conscious about keeping themselves hidden... I don't think I'd disagree with Quarkboy's suggestion to move the fansub scene to something like PD (although maybe a parallel network might be better, I don't know, would the Japanese feel uncomfortable with all those foreign files passing around? Never used the program...)

I was thinking about this more, and actually I think the "best" solution for fansubs from a legal perspective is something similar to PD, but with streaming built in.

One of the tricky legal issues is that partial files are in a more complex grey area: So what then if no one peer outside of the initial uploader ever has a complete copy of the file? Basically the show is downloaded in chunks and streamed real time as each successive chunk finishes, and after that section is view only parts of it remain in the cache (perhaps a show is segmented into 5 minute chunks and each of those chunk's data is split into XX interleaved blocks, and any one peer only contains some % of the blocks for each chunk)

I suppose the people who want to keep all their fansubs for eternity might have issues but if you were to design a basically un-prosecutable fansub distro system that would be the way .

[Avatar_notADV]

Quark, you miss the point. These guys aren't getting nailed because the file is being found intact on their hard drives; they're getting nailed because someone logged on to the torrent they were downloading from and wrote down the IP address of anyone who sent them a packet. The court is, to put it bluntly, uninterested in the technical details of how the file is being split up. They'll just note that you were participating and rule against you.

However, copyright enforcement against anime fans is really friggin' tough. The costs of filing a civil suit in the US federal court system are not trivial, and the chance of meaningful recovery is approximately 0% - what kind of anime fan has money left over, after all?

So no anime company can afford to go around ACTUALLY suing people on speculation. But writing a letter to the ISP is cheap, so they do that. However, what people don't generally know about DMCA notices is that the ISP is only obliged to suspend access so long as the complaint is unanswered; if you provide them with a (written, generally) statement that you do not believe that you are infringing on the named copyright, then they can turn you back on without putting themselves in danger of legal liability.

Two downsides, though. First is that filing such a statement when, in fact, you're totally guilty, will pretty much shoot down any "innocent infringement" defense you might have offered in the (very unlikely) event that the case proceeds to trial. Also, your ISP is not OBLIGED to restore your service, or they can restore it and then just drop you on their own initiative; if you're a heavy user of torrents, they may look at your usage statistics and say "screw it, this guy's gone" anyway.

I don't suggest this kind of response if you're actually a fansubber, though. Any legal paperwork headed your way is going to be a little more targeted than "the user at this IP address", and thus telling the copyright holder to sit and spin is probably not a wise idea. ;p

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by Avatar_notADV

Quark, you miss the point. These guys aren't getting nailed because the file is being found intact on their hard drives; they're getting nailed because someone logged on to the torrent they were downloading from and wrote down the IP address of anyone who sent them a packet. The court is, to put it bluntly, uninterested in the technical details of how the file is being split up. They'll just note that you were participating and rule against you.

Ah, then you don't know how perfect dark works to begin with. In the share/perfect dark type p2p network, IP addresses are completely obfuscated.
All packets are sent through multiple machines and there is no centralized tracker... i.e. every machine acts as a tracker and a client. When you search or download you do so THROUGH machines connected to you, but the actual source of the packet is stored using a RSA type encryption scheme.
It should be (unless there's an exploitable weakness like with share) completely impossible to tell what machine is actually the origin of sending the data: all you can see if your local group, and those machines simply pass information on to you as needed.

So anyway, there is no way to get actual IP addresses of any nodes on a network like perfect dark because all IP addresses are heavily encrypted.

[lamer_de]

The problem with onion routing for filesharing is that the client with the slowest uploadspeed dictates the overall speed. In Japan with its symmetric 10/100Mbit lines that is not a big problem, but internationally it is. Which is why you see the modem-like speeds on tor, even if you have exit nodes with 100Mbit/Gbit-connections. Additionally, BT is so popular because it focuses the peers: everybody on a torrent can only download the specified files. So even if you would add onion-routing to BT, it still wouldn't be a problem for companies to send letters, because you can always get the IPs of your next peer. So even if the actual content is encrypted, it's clear what the content is, if it's only 1 file that is shared. So the security in DN/Share comes especially from the fact that you get a lot of data passed to you that you don't want/need and therefore making it harder/impossible to say what exactly was transmitted when it's encrypted. This leads to clogging the upload with popular files, which again is a severe problem if you want to download/upload something unpopular and suddenly 100.000 people join the network to download Bleach or Naruto.
Yes, the method is probably rather secure, but it relies heavily on all peers having approx the same up/down-speed. Which is the case in Japan, but not worldwide.

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by lamer_de

The problem with onion routing for filesharing is that the client with the slowest uploadspeed dictates the overall speed. In Japan with its symmetric 10/100Mbit lines that is not a big problem, but internationally it is. Which is why you see the modem-like speeds on tor, even if you have exit nodes with 100Mbit/Gbit-connections. Additionally, BT is so popular because it focuses the peers: everybody on a torrent can only download the specified files. So even if you would add onion-routing to BT, it still wouldn't be a problem for companies to send letters, because you can always get the IPs of your next peer. So even if the actual content is encrypted, it's clear what the content is, if it's only 1 file that is shared. So the security in DN/Share comes especially from the fact that you get a lot of data passed to you that you don't want/need and therefore making it harder/impossible to say what exactly was transmitted when it's encrypted. This leads to clogging the upload with popular files, which again is a severe problem if you want to download/upload something unpopular and suddenly 100.000 people join the network to download Bleach or Naruto.
Yes, the method is probably rather secure, but it relies heavily on all peers having approx the same up/down-speed. Which is the case in Japan, but not worldwide.

Well, both of those problems can be solved (or at least, alleviated) by smart network design. For slow-peers you can have nodes naturally arrange themselves into clusters of similar speeds, by making nodes with similar upload/download speed preferable to connect to. Then all those people on modems basically get stuck together, etc... You can combine this with tracert mapping that helps connect peers that are "close" to each other on the internet.
As long as you have a mechanism in your network for dynamical graph rearrangement the issues with slow peers can be minimized.
And for retention, I think that with a streaming solution that would be more easily managable. Cache retention could be weighted towards older material, plus you could interleave packets for the most popular stuff with old material that needs to be spread around more.
PD actually does many of these things (I think), but they are problems that can be solved by smart programming. There is nothing fundamentally flawed about the concept.

[Power2All]

AniRena is now using the PeerGuardian database to block IP's.
There have been nummerous people that couldn't connect to my tracker at all since they we're in a range of anti-piracy companies.
For more information, look at: http://forum.anirena.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=472

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by Power2All

AniRena is now using the PeerGuardian database to block IP's.
There have been nummerous people that couldn't connect to my tracker at all since they we're in a range of anti-piracy companies.
For more information, look at: http://forum.anirena.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=472

I'm curious, but do you have any evidence that BayTSP is stupid enough not to mask their IP addresses when connecting to your tracker?

What's to prevent them from connecting through the Tor network, or even simply of buying a bunch of Virtual private servers around the country and connecting from there outside of their local network?

I don't see why peerguardian provides any measure of safety at all unless BayTSP is filled with a bunch of technical neophytes (and I actually think they do know what they are doing, unfortunately).

[Mushi]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

I'm curious, but do you have any evidence that BayTSP is stupid enough not to mask their IP addresses when connecting to your tracker?

They've got the backing of big name companies. I'm sure they get their hands on, or create, every snooping technology they can... along with the resources to effectively use it.

I'm thinking that the days of downloading fansubs with impunity is slowly coming to an end. As the popularity of them has increased the licensing entities have gotten more serious.

I'm still using PeerGaurdian, though. A little protection is better than no protection.

Is there a way for anyone, other than your ISP, to monitor files from direct download sites?

[Avatar_notADV]

Quark, the problem with a "Perfect Dark" network is that your computer becomes a big traffic station for files you don't want. It has to, for the network to work - if files can't travel through a node that's not associated with that file transfer, then one peer can sit there and just note the IP addresses they receive packets from. You've got to have that relay point. However, for the network to work as a whole, you've got to have a TON of relay points, and doing that is going to slow down the connections of the people who are doing it. That kind of transfer is much slower than BT, and let's face it, we're talking big video files here, not mp3s.

In addition, there's a significant legal risk to being a node in that kind of network. If someone's distributing child porn on your network, and the feds note a packet came from you, they're not going to be very receptive to the "I've configured my computer to allow other people to use it as a transient point for anonymous traffic"; even if they buy that argument, it will be months after they've confiscated every computer in your house. ;p

[bayoab]

Originally Posted by Quarkboy

It should be (unless there's an exploitable weakness like with share) completely impossible to tell what machine is actually the origin of sending the data: all you can see if your local group, and those machines simply pass information on to you as needed.

So anyway, there is no way to get actual IP addresses of any nodes on a network like perfect dark because all IP addresses are heavily encrypted.

I would give Perfect Dark less than a year until it has been cracked since it suffers from all of the same technical vulnerabilities as Tor and Share: Weakest link (node lists are public), predictable transfer route (find known source/destinations easily), etc. Adding more encryption and more in between nodes isn't going to make things any safer. It just slows the good guys down.