# Torrent Trouble So What Are People Using?

Category: Geeks r Us

## Post 1 by changedheart421 (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 14:24:19

Hey all. If you think downloading torrents are safe think again. I am now in mad trouble for downloading them and the law might be involved. I guess I never thought it would happen to me. So am ready to make the change to something that is legal or that I have to pay for. I am wondering what people use and how good it is with Jaws 11. Thanks a lot and all be warned, get rid of the illegal stuff it is scary when they find you.

## Post 2 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 15:07:28

To jsears1986,
Most of the stuff that is out there that is legal has DRM (Digital Rights Management) associated with it, and is not accessible. The only one that I know that is accessible to an extent is ITunes and possibly the associated store. Why do you say that the law might be involved when it comes to what you may or may not have done illegally? Was your house searched, if so did they have a warrant?
Or was it a letter from the RIAA/MPAA? Are you 100% sure that it was you and your IP address they were after? Did they tell you exactly what they were looking for? And did you varify that you had everything? Why did you delete your stuff? Are you not aware that if they were to search your stuff, they'll consider that getting rid of evidence? If you did indeed delete stuff, please tell me you erased it with at least 7 passes, and not simpley deleted it? Deleting stuff does not get rid of it at all, it is still technically on the hard drive. So it is recoverable.

## Post 3 by changedheart421 (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 17:39:24

Hey
I received a letter from NBC forwarded from my internet provider. They had my mom's IP address because I am using her wireless and had what I downloaded with the date, time, and so on. I have no idea what 7 passes is so I am sure I did not do that. The lady from NBC called me back today telling me that as long as I do not do this downloading again I am ok. Things are back to normal I just am confused and sort of scared to download anything else.

## Post 4 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 18:13:31

When spike says passes, he's talking about how the files are deleted. If you use CCleaner, in the options you can set how many passes it will do when cleaning your system. I have mine set to secure file deletion, and set to 35 passes, the max.

## Post 5 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 18:20:52

Ok, fear, interesting reaction. I would have told NBC or whoever to take their letter and shove it. But that's just me. And yes, I've got CCleaner set to 35 passes as well. I've also got Eraser which cleans stuff that CCleaner won't, also set to 35 passes. jsears1986, make your decision based on what you feel is right, not what is dictated to you by NBC or your ISP. If you feel that you don't want to do any sharing of anything illegal anymore, that's fine.

## Post 6 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 18:26:19

Only reason I have mine set so high is because I am a nut about keeping my system as clean as possible.

## Post 7 by purple penguin (Don't you hate it when someone answers their own questions? I do.) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 19:07:13

Amazon MP3 has some good deals, and sometimes they have free songs. I've seen albums starting at $1.99 to $11.00. The $ 11 are actually few and far between.
I don't trust those torrents despite what everyone says about them.
I have C cleaner, but only used it for deleting temp and log files. I have bad luck when deleting stuff off my computer.

## Post 8 by louiano (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 19:22:32

1. Torrents are not illegal themselves, its the content that's found on some of them that is.
2. Its a battle wasted by the riaa and the stupid ISPS that sent you that letter, if you can, change it to verizon or some ISP that will stand up for you in court! we don't need the music industry (with its rather limited knowledge on internet) try to control the world or other companies this way. Ditch your ISP 'cause they didn't stand up for the rights you got.
3. Next time, please please, use encryption on your bit torrent client. Stay up to the circus the industry has been making by reading news from sources like torrentfreak.com
4. Torrents are not quite needed anymore, (see news source above).
5. This is why everyone pirates. Drm is quite.. annoying, plus the quality from the stuff you're going to purchase isn't ... that good really. Downloading beats drm and the quality, its not anyone's fault but the industry for getting in digital sales so late!.

## Post 9 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 19:36:58

I agree with what juan said about torrents not being illegal, its what's inside them that is questionable. I also like that amazon mp3 deal, not bad at all. Better then itunes charging you $8 for an album and $2 for a song.

## Post 10 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 19:38:55

I agree, the stuff available on torrents is usually 640x352 ripped from either a dvd or 1900/1200 from a blue ray disk. The reason that consumers aren't flocking to the legal stuff is because the services are insanely expensive, and the drm sucks, as post 8 said. All the RIAA/MPAA had to do is embrace bit torrent, dc++ etc and role with it. They could have built a good industry around it. They could've beaten the pirates at their own game. They actually still can, but won't. They'd rather use their lawyers and world governments to get the ACTA (Anticounterfitting Trade Agreement) passed. Read up on it, it makes 1984 or China/North Korea look really nice, to an extent. O yeah, and our DMCA sucks and is being abused way too much.

## Post 11 by louiano (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 19:48:13

well the availability of the music is practically at our fingertips. As a working musician, I truly feel that the industry's being abusive. I earn much more from live performing (which is much more exciting too) than from trying to sale cds--those sell more at live events than at a store.

## Post 12 by GreenTurtle (Music is life. Love. Vitality.) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 20:19:35

I agree with that. How much of the money spent on cd's goes to the artists anyway? I don't know exact statistics, but my guess would be not a hell of a lot. The store selling the cd gets the majority of the profit, then some goes to the record company, then what remains goes to the artist...doesn't seem fair to me. There will always be a music industry though because people are always going to go and see concerts, and with tickets sometimes being quite pricey I would imagine a bit more of that money goes to the artists. Besides I would think that the artist would rather have their music heard, I don't really think they would care where as long as they had a strong fan base. Of course you have some musicians who oppose file sharing like Metallica did, I think they were actually partially responsible for starting this whole crazy mess. Some people are going to go out and buy the albums anyway if they're really die hard fans, if they want to collect them. I've also heard vinyl is making somewhat of a comeback, which I totally respect, and I think other people will too. Anyway, what I really want to know is, when does an ISP start detecting suspicious activity, and how is it determined?

## Post 13 by louiano (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 21:07:43

an ISp detects suspicious activity as soon as they eat up the riaa propaganda in the form of a letter to someone.

## Post 14 by KC8PNL (The best criticism of the bad is the practice of the better.) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 22:02:08

I've found that Amazon is the easiest way to buy legal music. Even with encryption enabled, the RIAA has peers on several public trackers which have the same encryption tools found in many torrent clients, so in my opinion, unless you are running behind a vpm with an SHH tunnel, don't use them for illegal activities. I have gotten a lot of OTR from torrents though, so they can be a good resource.

## Post 15 by Shadow_Cat (I've now got the silver prolific poster award! wahoo!) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 22:05:22

I use Amazon to get music. Cheap, accessible, and good quality, with no DRM.

## Post 16 by wildebrew (We promised the world we'd tame it, what were we hoping for?) on Tuesday, 17-Nov-2009 23:14:40

Contracts may very between musicians and major labels, but the standard contract, as I understand it, goes like this:
The artist gets an advance from the record company of sufficient money to record their album in a good studio, say, 30000 dollars for a relatively unknown artist.
Once CDs start selling the label will generally get 90% of the profit of the cd and the artist will get around 10% or around dollar to dollar nd 20 cents. However, out of that money the artist has to pay back the advance sum he/she got in the first place, so given a dollar an album and advancement of 30000 dollars the artist will get nothing unless more than 30000 albums are sold (not from record sales, other rules may apply to downloading and live shows).
The major label does a lot, marketting, they take risk giving artists money to record albums. The successful artists, today, try to get out of a contract, finance the recording themselves and sell albums directly, getting 100% of the profits.
I hope we will switch to a future where the record labels are more of an advertizing or promotion agency the artist hires for getting their material heard and the artist can draw up terms, giving a fair share to the industry, perhaps even have separate companies or banks loan them money to record an album. Price of quality recording has come down tremendously due to computer recording. A work station with Sonar or Pro Tools can record 32 or 64 or 128 tracks, use midi and a/d convertion. We've had minimal trouble woth sonar and 64 channels of music with a 4gb ram and dual AMD processor, a computer that costs less than $1000. It is not quite top quality but it could be with more work, and some bands don't like over produced albums, White Stripes are a good example.
So I think part of the record label panic is they are losing profit shares and, in many cases, their biggest artist profit makers and, in many cases, exclusive rights to the music itself.
The landscape is changing and there is still animportant role for the major labels to play, but it has to change from owning and controlling everything to more of a marketting/consulting capacity.

## Post 17 by changedheart421 (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Wednesday, 18-Nov-2009 8:35:32

Hey guys. I will set my c cleaner to that. I really appreciate this feedback. Will try amazon but my thing is TV shows ha. I will miss getting those the most. My friend told me something about Peer Guardian for some protection? Has anyone heard of that?

## Post 18 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Wednesday, 18-Nov-2009 10:42:01

To jsears1986,
Peer Guardian and all IP blockers aredn't worth it. They don't do what they're supposed to, hell they do the opposit. After all UTorrent, etc block IPs if they send corrupted data, on their own. Yes, music is DRM free, but tvshows and movies aren't.

## Post 19 by blindndangerous (the blind and dangerous one) on Wednesday, 18-Nov-2009 16:58:41

Hang on spike. I have used Hot Spot Shield, and that seems to do the job quite nicely. Its for windows and mac I'm not sure about linux though.

## Post 20 by louiano (I'm going for the prolific poster awards!) on Thursday, 19-Nov-2009 12:16:39

use a proxy, or some service like itshidden . Despite what kc8pnl said I find it hard to track someone all over the world.. who is downloading content. Besides, the indsutry's byting its own foot when they hire those incompetent tracking companies. A friend got the same kind of letter but it so happens he lives close to a library which uses wireless printers (these are allocated an IP too) and therefore its pointless, totally pointless for the ISPS to forward these letters. Switch ISP or get a seedbox, or switch filesharing applications and use a proxy.

## Post 21 by changedheart421 (I've now got the bronze prolific poster award! now going for the silver award!) on Sunday, 22-Nov-2009 8:34:39

what is a seedbox? Sorry I am sort of slow haha.

## Post 22 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Sunday, 22-Nov-2009 22:09:37

Here're 2 links that have a good explaination as to what a seedbox is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seedbox
http://www.slyck.com/story1577.html

## Post 23 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Monday, 23-Nov-2009 0:08:24

The links that I posted above are for informational purposes only. I'm not telling you to use them, if you decide to do so, you do so of your own free will.

## Post 24 by ¤§¤spike¤§¤ (This site is so "educational") on Sunday, 29-Nov-2009 20:17:50

Here's another link, it deals with how the RIAA et/al other groups gather information, and why that information isn't accurate. http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/mfreed/inaccurate-copyright-enforcement-questionable-best-practices-and-bittorrent-specificatio