BrokenLogic

So today, I woke up to this email:

As the UC Davis Designated Agent for Digital Millennium Copyright Act notifications, I have received a valid notification alleging, under penalty of perjury, that one of our computer users has infringed copyrights to:

Heroes (TV)

by copying or making it available for copying on the Internet through our network without permission of the copyright owner.

NBC Universal states that the material was available through IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx on December 3, 2006, at 18:09 GMT via peer-to-peer service BitTorrent.

Pretty much scared the shit out of me when I read it. It went on to say that my internet connection would be disconnected to prevent the copyrighted material from being accessible any further, blah blah blah.

A follow-up email notified me that I would have to meet with my “Student Housing Judicial Affairs Conduct Coordinator” either Thursday (today), Friday, or Monday. The appointment time on Friday conflicted with one of my classes, and I didn’t want to wait until Monday (I was afraid I’d be without internet over the weekend, and what with finals coming up… well, that wouldn’t be good). So I opted to just go today, even though that would mean only an hour or so to finish an assignment due later in the afternoon. (Yay for procrastination.)

I ended up in a conference room with a half dozen other kids in my situation, and listened as a lady explained that there had been so many violations in such a short period of time (something like 30 over the past week) that they decided to have group meetings, rather than the one-on-one talks that they normally did.

The lady (who worked for the university) was actually very friendly. Great sense of humor, too. You wouldn’t even have known we had done anything wrong had you been there; in fact, she never did say that we had done anything wrong. What little lecturing she did was delivered in that “I’m only saying this because it’s my job, not because I really believe in it” sort of tone. And rather than implying that we had done something we shouldn’t be doing, she simply advised us on how not to get caught.

Needless to say, I learned a lot.

Turns out that organizations RIAA actually hire people whose only job is to hang out on P2P networks and BitTorrent sites, checking for their copyrighted content. EDIT: Actually, I already knew this, but let’s pretend I didn’t for the sake of explanation. If they find something, they’ll download it themselves, and record the IP addresses of all the people they were able to download it from (or the “seeders” in BitTorrent terminology). They can then subpeona the ISPs to turn over the customers who were assigned to those IP addresses at that time, and sue those people for copyright infringement.

In this case, however, the ISP is actually UC Davis, and apparently, universities tend to be more cooperative with copyright holders than regular ol’ ISPs. Accordingly, the copyright holder (NBC Universal, in my case) will simply inform the university of the illegal activity, and request that it be stopped. In other words, they won’t sue… yet.

In order to show that they’re “taking it seriously,” the university will take some disciplinary action, which on the first offense is usually disconnecting the offender’s internet for a week. Luckily for me, however, we were spared the punishment, since cutting off internet access right before finals was deemed too harsh. (She informed us that if our internet had already been shut down, it would be restored later today. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my internet had been shut down, but only after I had left my dorm.)

However, on the second offense, the university will ban you from their network for the rest of the school year. The reason for this is that while NBC Universal will play it nice the first two times, if it happens a third time, they will sue the university, on the basis that they’re allowing the violations to continue. Obviously, the university doesn’t want this to happen, and so will cut off internet access on the second offense to ensure that it doesn’t happen.

Ultimately, though, what I received really amounted to a slap on the wrist—less than that, even—since the normal one-week internet suspension was spared in light of Finals Week. Not that I’m complaining.

But wait. Rewind.

If you were paying any attention to the description of how copyright holders track down violators, you may have noticed that the method they use only works if the violator is uploading the content. After all, how can they determine that copyrighted material is on your computer if you’re not uploading it to them?

According to the nice lady, while the big media conglomerates also used to track the downloading of copyrighted material, they’ve all but stopped doing so, simply because tracking uploads is so much easier, and there’s no shortage of violators to be found. She pretty much stated flat-out that as long as we “disabled sharing” (in other words, stopped uploading), we would be (reasonably) safe.

The moral of the story?

LEECH.

ADDENDUM1: According to Kass, the IP addresses of downloaders as well as uploaders should show up in a BT client. So there must be some other reason they don’t go after downloaders. (See comment for a possible reason.) In any case, I’m just repeating what the lady told us.

ADDENDUM2: Spark has informed me that the “stop uploading” advice is only applicable to P2P networks like Limewire, and not BitTorrent. So if you use BT and only download… you’re still not safe. Joy!