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Game Firms Cracking Down on File Sharers - Innocents Being Accused

November 01, 2008 in News comments 3

Game firms have recently started a crack down on illegal downloading/sharing of their virtual property. But in their search to find and prosecute pirates, innocent users are being accused. Elderly who do not even know what bitTorrent is, or have ever played a video game are being accused.

Find out why the ip address is a direct conduit to identify pirates, but in many cases cannot be used as direct evidence.

The illegal sharing of music, movies and games has become a huge headache for copyright owners.

Some six million people are thought to illegally share files each year, and increasingly firms are getting tough on the pirates.

They are monitoring peer-to-peer sharing networks, such as Gnutella, BitTorrent, and eDonkey, that allow games, music and video to be shared.
bobbonew via news.bbc.co.uk »
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  • 0
    chautemoc Nov 2, 08
    Sometimes I wonder if one day we'll all wake up to find out all of this was made up..and the corporations will laugh. Sigh.
  • 0
    bobbonew Nov 2, 08
    Lol, that would definitely be a dream chautemoc.

    But what gets me is the ip address concern. Piratebay is apparently well known for adding bogus ip addresses to the torrent trackers. If this is done, doesn't this basically make downloading and distributing torrents non-stoppable? I mean if the grandma down the street has an ip address of X and it is randomly added to the tracker, that makes it impossible for ip address Y which is spreading the torrent to be id'd due to the granny up the street scenario.[/babble]
  • 0
    Play ISDF Nov 2, 08
    IP addresses by themselves are never proof. Even if you go examine somebody's computer, you still can't be 100% sure about piracy. There's simply too many ways for people to use your computer without you even knowing about it. Spyware, trojans, adware, all this kind of thing is unknowingly installed on the casual user's computer every day. From that, their computer could be configured to act as a server without them even knowing about it. All it would take is one little program to get the ball rolling by having a computer connect automatically to some site, then download and install some peer to peer software while giving no messages at all to the user. Then you have other factors such as people accessing a wireless network that the casual user wouldn't know how to safely configure. Or maybe you let your friends or family use your computer and they could be the ones doing the pirating and such. You can look at it any way you want, the simple fact is that there are too many variables to really say as 100% fact that you are a pirate.

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