Seedbox's & VPN's....?

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188 posts

Master Geek

#458789 14-Apr-2011 16:02

hahaha, well thought that might get a few people talking....

thanks though, didnt think anyone would detail anything about all of that stuff...

So TV shows are ok or not thought torrents?

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richms

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#458793 14-Apr-2011 16:12

jjnz1:

But you are in possession of material which has been illegally obtained.

That in it self is illegal.

I don't follow your reasoning? But I'm sure a lot of people would be happy if you were right.

Just because the act of obtaining something is illegal, does not make what is obtained illegal. If you trespass to pick up a lost ball, the ball is not suddenly illegal.

The possession of a possibly unlicensed file is not something that the police investigate unless it is for profit etc, and even then they have better things to be doing.

Richard rich.ms

StarBlazer

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#458797 14-Apr-2011 16:14

ping182nz: hahaha, well thought that might get a few people talking....

thanks though, didnt think anyone would detail anything about all of that stuff...

So TV shows are ok or not thought torrents?

Technically no. TV shows are a great example. If a TV episode has been broadcast FTA but I missed it. So I download it from the US - I'm breaking the copyright law. The person providing the file does not have distribution rights for NZ and therefore it is pirated. My action would be illegal and possession proves that I have been a participant in an illegal act. Would they chase or prosecute/take you to tribunal - maybe but unlikely.

Problem is, this is an ambulance at the bottom of the hill. Take the virtual wind out of the pirates sails by making it easy and cheap to get legal versions. We are just going through the MP3 debate from the 90's and 00's and yet now iTunes is making huge amounts of money. It worked once, it will work again for TV and movies.

Lending a FTA recording to a friend - probably illegal! If you record it with your HDD PVR and then copy it to a DVD - counts as a format shift! Hold on to that disc for more than a reasonable amount of time and again it's breaking the law.

Procrastination eventually pays off.

StarBlazer

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#458806 14-Apr-2011 16:22

richms:
jjnz1:

But you are in possession of material which has been illegally obtained.

That in it self is illegal.

I don't follow your reasoning? But I'm sure a lot of people would be happy if you were right.

Just because the act of obtaining something is illegal, does not make what is obtained illegal. If you trespass to pick up a lost ball, the ball is not suddenly illegal.

The possession of a possibly unlicensed file is not something that the police investigate unless it is for profit etc, and even then they have better things to be doing.

We have to stop comparing physical and virtual - it's not really the same. Possession of an illegal, pirated copy of a TV show, shows that at some point in the supply chain you participated in an act of file sharing - therefore the law was broken. The law (to the best of my knowledge) does not make distinction between receiving or providing.

Procrastination eventually pays off.

muppet

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#458813 14-Apr-2011 16:27

digitaldivide: Alongside the Torrent client I use, I run "Peer Guardian 2"
Into Peer Guardian, I load the country list of IP addresses in NZ and the same for Australia.
All TCP/UDP connections are dropped, I don't share anything locally, with anyone in Australia/New Zealand.
There's a huge amount of legitimate uses of Peer Guardian, and this is just one of them.

What you don't realise is that a public tracker can still give a list of "active IPs" to another client. That client doesn't then have to connect to you to know your IP address was sharing a file.

Peerguardian is a bit of fluff that lulls people into a false sense of security. Sure it's better than nothing, but just load a ipfilter.dat into your torrent client once a month for the same level of "protection".

More info, in case you think I'm blowing smoke.

That's not even to mention the fact you're still doing torrent traffic in the clear if you're not using a VPN. Sure, there's encryption but it's not hard to see someone with 500 different source addresses hitting a single address is _probably_ doing some form of filesharing. An ISP could flag those users to look at in more detail.

Anyway my point is if you're really worried about this stuff, throw out your silly PeerGuardian's and ZoneAlarms. You want to be at least one-step-removed from what you're doing, by the use of a VPN or similar.

I hate you.

richms

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#458825 14-Apr-2011 16:46

As anyone can inject any peer into the swarm thru peer exchange etc, or putting another IP in their tracker scrapes, there is nothing incriminating about having an IP and port that points to you being provided by the tracker. Infact I believe one of the trackers was getting modified to sent out random IPs and ports as well to specifically make the presense of an IP in the tracker meaninless.

Unless they connect, and retrieve a piece of the alleged infringing work, they dont have any proof. Not that this BS law requires any.

As for possession of the file proving that you broke the law - unlikely. There are files that it is illegal to possess, and that is an illegal file. To call a copy of CSI or the big bang theory illegal is just as incorrect as to call the making of an unlicensed copy stealing or theft. The rights holders like to incorrectly attach those labels to things to cause more fear and make it look like people are in the wrong. Its not correct.

All that has happened is that a very narrow range of tools being used to exchange work is targeted by a very badly thought out law with disproportionate consequences.

Richard rich.ms

muppet

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#458833 14-Apr-2011 16:54

richms: As anyone can inject any peer into the swarm thru peer exchange etc, or putting another IP in their tracker scrapes, there is nothing incriminating about having an IP and port that points to you being provided by the tracker. Infact I believe one of the trackers was getting modified to sent out random IPs and ports as well to specifically make the presense of an IP in the tracker meaninless.

Unless they connect, and retrieve a piece of the alleged infringing work, they dont have any proof. Not that this BS law requires any.

Of course. But if they want to find out if you really are sharing, it's about 5 minutes worth of work for them to fire up a VM somewhere and connect to every IP in a swarm to see if you are.

richms: As for possession of the file proving that you broke the law - unlikely. There are files that it is illegal to possess, and that is an illegal file. To call a copy of CSI or the big bang theory illegal is just as incorrect as to call the making of an unlicensed copy stealing or theft. The rights holders like to incorrectly attach those labels to things to cause more fear and make it look like people are in the wrong. Its not correct.

Yea, I bet that defense stands up in court :P
Unless you know law you don't really want to be guessing at it.

I hate you.

tardtasticx

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#458858 14-Apr-2011 17:32

jjnz1:
nate: I also know they are smart enough to not incriminate themselves by documenting what they do.

You would think so. I have noticed a few posts where a flag on top of parliament would be less noticeable though.

That was a comment on a post by Stuff.co.nz about the recent bill passed. Couldn't stop laughing. Don't think you can brag about this kind of stuff. Lol

richms

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#458871 14-Apr-2011 17:58

muppet:
richms: As for possession of the file proving that you broke the law - unlikely. There are files that it is illegal to possess, and that is an illegal file. To call a copy of CSI or the big bang theory illegal is just as incorrect as to call the making of an unlicensed copy stealing or theft. The rights holders like to incorrectly attach those labels to things to cause more fear and make it look like people are in the wrong. Its not correct.

Yea, I bet that defense stands up in court :P
Unless you know law you don't really want to be guessing at it.

On go 3 under this law, you don't get court, or even the right to have representation. Its just going to be a token tribunal that doesn't even have to consider evidence etc.

How does having the file prove that you used the technology that this BS law is trying to prevent? A friend could have put it on a DVD and mailed it to you. Oh no, lets cut off the whole households NZ post services!

Richard rich.ms

tdgeek

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#458887 14-Apr-2011 18:32

---------I've never understood how a copy of a public broadcast TV show is infringing copyright?-----------------

I do not know, but here is my opinion. It may be FTA but its not free. The TV channel broadcasting it FTA pays for it. They garner revenue in the form of advertsing. So IMHO, whether its PPV, Sky, or FTA the content is bought, and sold to the viewers. We pay on a PPV payment, a Sky subscription or seeing Ads. Or you can buy it in a store, same scenario, it is still paid for

nigelj

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Ultimate Geek

#458907 14-Apr-2011 19:28

geekiegeek: I've never understood how a copy of a public broadcast TV show is infringing copyright?

There are a couple of reasons, recently ivi.tv (a US company that set up a bunch of tuners in different cities and transmitted the results via the Internet to paying customers) got an injunction against them, because even though they were paying the correct fees under the US Copyright legislation to license the rights to rebroadcast (just like Cable providers would), they had seemingly broken other parts of the legislation because they let people from say LA, watch a Chicago broadcast.

Of course, that is still to be properly decided, but just because something is broadcast over public airwaves doesn't mean you immediately get rights to use it however you want to.

digitaldivide

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#459018 15-Apr-2011 07:47

What you don't realise is that a public tracker can still give a list of "active IPs" to another client. That client doesn't then have to connect to you to know your IP address was sharing a file.

My understanding is, just like overseas, ASSOCIATION is insufficient for reasonable evidence, they actually need to download xxKb of the file being shared by you - it's a small amount of data of the actual file.

I agree - your IP address appearing in torrent messaging/association is unavoidable (even over the TOR network).

1080p

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#459116 15-Apr-2011 13:24

Well, this has gone a little OT. To answer OP's questions; in a purely intellectual and theoretical manner, of course:

A seedbox is a computer used to (generally seed) participate in torrent swarms in a similar manner to you running a torrent client yourself on your own PC. There are typically some significant differences, however.

A seedbox is generally remote - you could run a seedbox in your own home but then you might as well torrent from your normal PC. The added advantage here is that a seedbox will - if it were used for that purpose - infringe copyright in a country other than the one you reside in.

A seedbox is generally located in a data center and has access to high speed internet - Most commercial seedbox offerings have massive levels of bandwidth available to them. 100Mbit/s dedicated pipes are most common but 1Gbit/s are now widely available.

More general information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedbox

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. These are commonly used by businesses for employees working from home or on the road but have several other applications including getting around government imposed censorship and types of ISP throttling.

With regard to file sharing, the advantage here is that when using a VPN all activities are tunneled to your 'server' and this makes it appear that all internet activities originate from the IP address associated with that server. What your ISP will see is a stream of completely encrypted data to and from the IP address of your server and nothing contained in the packets will be useful (or incriminating) to them.

More general information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network

Anyone with an ounce of intelligence will know that these 'security measures' will never protect you completely. Renting servers as seedboxes or VPN servers or both will cost money. Most likely they will be international so you will have to pay with a credit card or PayPal. There is always a paper trail.

Just like sexually transmitted infections; the only guaranteed safety net is abstinence.

ping182nz

188 posts

Master Geek

#459144 15-Apr-2011 13:56

1080p - Thanks

th3r3turn

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#459249 15-Apr-2011 19:56

im more my tvshows, want to know that im not going to get any letters!

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