This is How We Catch You Downloading
Written by enigmax on April 14, 2007All over Europe thousands of people are being threatened with court action for allegedly sharing games like Dream Pinball 3D on P2P networks. Now, documents obtained by TorrentFreak show details of the anti-piracy company’s techniques for identifying alleged file-sharers on the internet and the gathering of claimed ‘forensic quality’ evidence for use in court cases.
In March we reported in some detail about the case of 500 UK file-sharers being legally pursued following claims that they uploaded games from the German publisher ‘Zuxxez’ onto file-sharing networks.
Since then, many people have been in touch with the law firm who sent the threatening letters, demanding evidence that they actually did something. TorrentFreak has obtained copies of the latest letters and within the claimed evidence is a description of how the anti-piracy system used by Logistep AG (the company hired to track the alleged pirates) is supposed to work.
The cleverly named “File Sharing Monitor” is the system being used by Logistep to gather evidence against file-sharers. It is actually just a modified version of the Shareaza P2P application that is configured to search for infringing files, and collect the information from the hosts that share these files.
The “File Sharing Monitor” only targets Gnutella and eDonkey users, so it is still unclear how they track down BitTorrent users. Here is how it works:
1. The client connects to the P2P network, searches for sources of the infringing file, and collects the IP addresses that were gathered through the search.
2. The client requests to download (a piece of) the file from the host that was found through the search.
3. The filename, file size, IP-address, P2P protocol, P2P application, time, and the username are automatically inserted into a database, if the host permits the download.
4. This is the “best” part. The application does a WHOIS search for the ISP information and automatically sends an infringement letter to the ISP if needed.
The claim is that the “File Sharing Monitor” is totally foolproof and that it can provide forensic-quality information to a court in order that file-sharers be punished. The question remains whether an IP-address is sufficient evidence to sue a person for downloading copyrighted material. Recent cases suggest that the RIAA and the MPAA will need more evidence than that.
Here is the ‘evidence’ for the functioning of the Logistep system. You decide.
-Link to PDF.
Previously: Automatically Transcode and Import Downloaded Videos to iTunes
Next: Do P2P Blocklists Keep you Safe?
142 Responses
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[quote comment="85351"]i”ve always wonderd, how does sharing a useless piece of 1 rar file amount to copyright violation? Seriously, if you take that little bit you grabbed from whatever rar you downloaded off of, it’s completly useless. [/quote]
If you sample music or significantly quote a text, and redistribute those samples and quotes, it’s copyright infringement. So too with a bit-for-bit segment of a copyrighted file.
That’s the argument the enemy would use. It would work, too.
I like how they ‘ptented’ the monitoring software so now it’s corporate IP so they dont even have to show a court how it works. A tactic that’s been used elsewhere in the past and closes of the openess of the whole process. SOunds like a good scam, I mod and open-source product to log IP addresses sharing data that ‘appear’ to be my owned content and then threaten to sue them for it. AT least when I get a speeding fine I get the chance to ‘nominate’ another driver of the car!
I was just going to post a response, but the deeper I got, the more this became a blog for me. If you’re interested, see here: http://cygdev.blogspot.com/
I am such a geek. The first thing I realized when I looked at your article (before I read it) is that your photograph (of the evidence stamper) cannot produce the stamp shown. If you actually stamped that, the V and the N would be upside down… or looked at another way, the whole thing would be backwards.
Figs, look again, it isn’t the rubber part of the stamp but the frontside that shows what the rubber part on the not visible bottom will print!
:P
Most miss the legal points of all this…
Everyone is guilty and everyone must pay the piper…
Everyone is guilty until proved innocent…
However, If you are old and dealing with end of life issues, as am i,
you don’t care what “they” can or will do to you because it’s still a good day to die…
Did anyone notice that they claim this “Monitoring Program” is *patented*?
Hashing is pointless, I could modify the metadata and the hash changes.
Original Title = “3D Pinball Deluxe Super Premium Limited Edition”
Modified Title = 3D Pinball Deluxe Super Premium Limited Edition ”
See? The users won’t notice anything with an extra space. Then of course the program might have a digital signature, but to verify that you would have to download the file first. Which means they would waste a lot of bandwidth… Plus, there isn’t any kind of digital signature verification in BitTorrent I don’t think…
Shareaza is licenced under GPL.
That means anyone can ask for the source code of this anti-piracy tool.
What if I’m running Windows? That retarded OS periodically trashes my hard drive, wiping my data, without any help from me! Keep a small partition for your downloads, and thsoe bits will soon be re-used.
The answer is Tor.
This is how it works.
https://tor.eff.org/overview.html.en
Roger and Nick are really smart guys they sort out small issues very fast and reliably for they care a great deal about privacy on the net.
Tor only got 1 major issue and that’s available bandwidth say ‘tor exit nodes’. There are lots and lots of those however I think it should be popular amongst normal users to run such a node, be it an exit node or an internal node. So in the end we should have much more bandwidth available so this thing sort of gets democratized and we can actually help each other in a way that is convenient for us.
So try it for the things you thin should be private.
…and by the way of you run a Tor exit node you actually have proof that other people who you *cannot* know will use your internet connection. So you *cannot* be hold liable for anything that happens through your i-net link, unless of course there is trace that you actually did it on *your* computer.
Of course it’s the 21th century clever people can easily have their discs encrypted.
http://www.truecrypt.org/
http://www.google.com/search?q=netbsd+cgd
(tor by default does not log anything that could be used against you)
@73
sure you can ask them for the source, but they will not give it to you.
and since they do not distribute their modification to the pirating public for “peer review” they have every right to refuse.
Oh, and as mentioned above the time zone issue is a possible response, but the open wireless router seems better. The problem with the time zone issue is that if the ISP state that the DHCP lease was granted more than 12 hours ago and had more than 12 hours to go then the time zone issue is provably mute.
The open wireless router issue is more difficult to disprove, and the issue of discovery becomes impossible as the cynical defendant may give up the hard disk of the machine that they don’t download on for discovery. You *certainly* can’t identify the machine from behind the router.
@ 76
But the GPL derived code makes it illegal to sign a contract that prevents redistribution. They *must* own all the rights and thus can be subpoenaed for the code. If they have signed a contract that restricts release of source then the Shareaza author gets to sue whichever code shop actually did the coding.
If they did it themselves, then naturally they can choose to release the code or be compelled to do so by the court.
meeeeh… The rubber stamp on the picture won’t work :P
Seems this anti-piracy software is a modification of the open source Shareaza client. Does this mean that the company who made it (Logistep) has violated the GPL licence by not revealing the source code? Does this mean that this (patented!!!) software is actually illegal?
Please help, people fighting this need every angle they can!
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