• chagall@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you actually read the article, you see that this problem is 100% solvable if you use a VPN.

        • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          The speeds are as fast (or slow) as the slowest member in the chain. If most people who participate have slow connections, then most of the times it’ll be slow. But if the majority uses fast connections, then most chains/tunnels will be fast.

          Again, it’s a chicken and egg problem: people who want fast downloads (and thus have fast pipes) won’t participate because it’s slow, but in doing so, they miss a chance to be part of the solution.

    • MissJinx@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s what I understood too, but I thought I was wrong since this group can not be that stupid.

  • Skies5394@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    This is for the Netherlands, but it’s about the anti-piracy group not allowing defeats in court on the basis of GDPR and ISP refusal get in the way of a good harassment.

    Good read if you want higher blood pressure.

  • CriticalMiss@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What I don’t understand is how an IP address used as an identity? If you have CG-NAT there’s a good chance you share your IP with 5-6 other people (even more possibly). Alternatively you can say I keep my WiFi open for guests so anyone can walk by my house and torrent on my IP (idk NL law but maybe the court will consider this negligence)

    • redcalcium@lemmy.institute
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      1 year ago

      People behind cgnat is probably less likely to seed and thus less likely to get their IP address logged by these outfits. That’s just my pet theory though, not sure how to confirm it. Anyone ever heard of someone behind cgnat and still got the love letter?

      • mateomaui@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        I’m probably not the best person to ask because we have limited options for speed in Hawaii with how we get our internet. I think the only company with an access point in this state is Private Internet Access, and I use a different one that others probably wouldn’t recommend because it doesn’t have an unblemished history, but I’ve been hoovering up everything for 8+ years with them and haven’t gotten a notice yet.

        But, when my current subscription is almost up, I’m probably going to try Mullvad because I’ve read nothing but unanimous good feedback about them. I think ProtonVPN is another popular one.

        Aside from that, I’m pretty sure if you search lemmy for VPN in the title, a few threads will come back full of recommendations from everyone.

        There’s also this comparison sheet someone on Reddit made and was last updated in October:

        https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ijfqfLrJWLUVBfJZ_YalVpstWsjw-JGzkvMd6u2jqEk/htmlview

  • BluesF@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Many copyright holders believe that if they’re able to communicate with pirates, a proportion will change their behavior.

    Yes, they will probably be more careful next time

  • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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    1 year ago

    One thing I always find curious is these “rights holders” assuming a 100% sales conversion from piracy when, in reality, it’s probably closer to 1-10%

    • Lemmchen@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Plus, there are studies that show piracy can actually be a positive factor for sales in some cases.

    • papertowels
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      1 year ago

      I can see that - if you’re pirating you’ll just take anything because there’s no cost, but if you’re buying something it has to be worth it.

  • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Even if they do make it to court; how do they plan on translating an IP address into the ID of the actual infringer? (not the ISP subscriber, they can’t be assumed to be the same, particularly in court)

    Just because I pay for my families internet connection doesn’t make me responsible, culpable, or even aware of their activities. Even less so now that I’m not going to receive any notice of potentially illicit activity.

    If they could haul people into court based on just an IP and get somewhere useful, they’d have done it hundreds of thousands of times over already.

  • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    I suspect this is not going to go well when they find poor people who torrent for the community and try to squeeze them for blood in the courts, or find that an academic server is used to seed in it’s idle time.

    This figured into the cruel, heartless reputations of the MPA and RIAA that persist to this day.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        They’ve turned away from suing pirates directly for alleged costs, because telling a little girl she owes you thousands for downloading a song is really not a good look.

        So they’ve been trying to convince the ISPs to deny service to people, but the ISPs don’t want to piss off their own customers (any more than they already do with hidden fees and crappy service).

        • Auli@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Music piracy is all but dead. Video was dying but is making a comeback now that streaming is as bad as cable was.

          • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            1 year ago

            It shouldn’t be. I’m noticing that some songs just don’t exist anymore on streaming services. Don Henley’s Boys of Summer for instance, and Play With Me by Thompson Twins (the Cool World version)

            Once again, it’s up to pirates to make sure that all versions of songs are archived.

    • Yglorba@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, it says that they’re all “well we would have rather do it the other way for your sakes” but the fact is that if they thought they could reliably obtain money this way they’d be doing it already. A ton of legal fees are going to be wasted pursuing people they can’t catch for one reason or another, meaning that their desire to make the pirates pay their costs isn’t going to work as reliably as they’d want.

    • Darkassassin07@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      They will skip the notice via proxy (your ISP passing a notice to you without identifying you to the claimant) and go straight to court to have the ISP forced to provide the ID of the subscriber for a specific IP observed to be active torrenting copyrighted materials.

      Then they’ll attempt to recover those court costs from that subscriber as well as sue them for the original copyright infringement.

      I think they’ll have quite an uphill battle with that approach, particularly when trying to prove the subscriber to an internet connection is also responsible for, let alone aware of, the alleged infringement. If it was that easy, they wouldn’t have bothered with notices to begin with.

      • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
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        1 year ago

        Yeah this happened during the Napster era and it was so incredibly unpopular and unsympathetic with the general public that it didn’t continue after a while. Suing a single mom on food stamps for thousands of dollars because her teenage son downloaded a game one time is a truly abominable look for a company.

  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    And that is why I don’t torrent, living in Germany. Even just leeching will put you on the radar of, at best scam law firms, at worst motivated rights-holders.

        • ANIMATEK@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’ve been doing it for almost 10 years. I know what I am doing. I have several layers of security.

          If you however are a tech illiterate then of course you’ll get fined. I have friends who got fined too.

          • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            Would it be possible to reveal what you did to increase security?
            I always (want to) try to improve mine.

            • ANIMATEK@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I have two containers, qBittorrent and the VPN:

              • VPN is fully tunneled and encrypted.
              • qbt only ever sees the VPN as its network. It is logically isolated from my main gateway.
              • there are healthchecks running, so if the VPN fails qbt enters in a restart loop until the VPN is back to a healthy status.
              • I use private trackers for 99% of my torrents.

              You also have to know that these scummy law firms use honey pot attacks, where they advertise themselves as leechers and record your IP if you upload to them. Technically a proxy to another country would just be enough here, but hey, this works too and I sleep better.

              • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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                1 year ago

                Since you use a torrent container and a vpn container I am interested in how you manage to communicate with the torrent container.
                Do you utilize the *arr stack? Also with a docker?
                If the answer is yes, how did you achieve the communication between the containers?

                Reason I am asking is, that I want to connect to my other container but when I bind my container to the service I am unable to let it communicate directly with it.
                By that logic, I’d need to access the container through the vpn container, right? (*arr <-> vpn container <-> downloader container)

                • ANIMATEK@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  You have to expose the qbt http port in your VPN container. All API communication (arrs etc) goes through here.

        • kungen@feddit.nu
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          1 year ago

          You mean they got a shock letter that says “pay us, or we’ll take you to court”? Just throw that junk mail away.

            • kungen@feddit.nu
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              1 year ago

              Do they actually do that in the majority of cases, or just a few to scare people? Germany is really weird on IP law…

              • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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                1 year ago

                It’s really easy for a law firm in Germany to find out who the IP belonged to, if they have proof that the IP infringed on their copyrighted media.

                The law firm looks at torrents and downloads a bit. With the IP, time and media name they can send a cease and desist letter with a fine of hundreds to thousands of euro. Ignoring the letters is not possible.

                This is possible because the law firm has contracts with many big copyright holders (Disney, …).

                But most of the time the fine is too high, so it’s possible to pay half by getting a lawyer. Basically the copyright holder overestimate how much damages they can get for the distribution of copyrighted material. If I understand it correctly. IANAL.

                It’s simple to avoid by binding the torrent client to the network interface of a VPN, but not everyone knows that.

                • Neshura@bookwormstory.social
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                  1 year ago

                  It’s also very easy to avoid this little problem by not being the only adult in the household. Unless one of the at least two adults snitches they can’t sue because there is reasonable doubt about the actual infringer (not legal advice, better option is to just get a VPN)

                • WallEx@feddit.de
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                  1 year ago

                  Not if you use a VPN though. Also, modifying the letter, so it doesn’t include you admitting to the crime has proven effective for me (I was young once and didn’t use a VPN)

        • plague-sapiens@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Freaking slow, exactly like Tor imo. The last torified torrenting test was many years ago. Speeds were at 100kb/s. Nope. With double VPN I’m at ~150 Mbit/s during torrent downloading.

          And time is more expensive than anything else :)

          • Chewy@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            If more people would torrent over i2p with great internet connections the experience would get better, since all i2p users are part of the network of servers. The slowest connection in the multiple hops decides the connection speed.

            Because all traffic is encrypted and doesn’t leave the i2p network, forwarding traffic from unknown systems is not an issue, similar to Tor middle nodes (Tor Exit nodes shouldn’t be hosted at home).

    • Grimpen@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Seed box or VPN should be options.


      This comment sponsored by NordVPN :)

        • plague-sapiens@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          NordVPN being trash xD Not only because of that. Complying with the law is a ok. I just hate their whole vpn and security propaganda. Like, you will be hacked without us… And they have been hacked, if I remember correctly it was twice…

          There are better commercial VPN providers.

          Sadly ovpn.to went down some time ago. Cheap, secure and Mr. Nice was really nice and helpful. He probably died -.-

        • snooggums@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          A company admitting they comply with the law when ordered to by the court is a positive to me as it means that they don’t do it unless they don’t do it on a whim and they are complying with the law, which would most likely also include privacy laws. Any company that would refuse a court order is going to be shut down and probably have all of their records turned over instead of the narrow subset that would be ordered by a court.

          • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            What you want is for them to demonstrate incapacity to comply. “We’d love to help your honor, but as we sell a privacy service we don’t log user activity”

            • snooggums@kbin.social
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              1 year ago

              https://www.pcmag.com/news/nordvpn-actually-we-do-comply-with-law-enforcement-data-requests

              “From day one of our operations, we have never provided any customer data to law enforcement, nor have we ever received a binding court order to log user data. We never, for a second, logged user VPN traffic, and the results of multiple audits prove that we are true to our policies,” the company said.

              In the event the company does receive information requests from a law enforcement agency, NordVPN says it “would do everything to legally challenge them.”

              “However, if a court order were issued according to laws and regulations, if it were legally binding under the jurisdiction that we operate in, and if the court were to reject our appeal, then there would be no other option but to comply. The same applies to all existing VPN companies if they operate legally. In fact, the same applies to all companies in the world,” NordVPN said.

              So they don’t log and are just admitting that they might need to if they were forced to. That is extremely reasonable.

              • kungen@feddit.nu
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                1 year ago

                admitting that they might need to if they were forced to. That is extremely reasonable.

                It’s not though? The reasonable result would be to simply shut down in that jurisdiction.

          • kungen@feddit.nu
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            1 year ago

            You can comply with the law whilst not having anything to provide the law. Such as Mullvad does.

          • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            You do you but it also means that if they suspect you of illegal downloads or streams and get that court order, that they’ll log that shit and then you’ll receive those lovely letters eventually, making the whole point of the VPN pointless.

      • GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        You better watch out.
        You better not try
        To pirate movies I’m telling you why
        Motivated rights holder’s coming to town

        He sees what you’ve been viewing
        He knows when you’re online
        He knows if you’ve been sharing movies
        So use a vpn for goodness sake!

  • Flax@feddit.uk
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    1 year ago

    Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN

    How sad do you have to be