So let 'em sue me. I have neither a credit history nor any assets, and we don't have debtors' prison in the U.S.. I'll deal with the lawsuit the way 89% of Americans deal with their ER bills - by completely ignoring it. (Well, except for making any mandatory court appearances just to say hi to the judge; apparently you can serve jail time for skipping those). Fact is, getting a judgment in an American court is easy bordering on trivial; getting someone to actually pay that judgment is simply not possible if they aren't inclined to pay that judgment. There's no way I'd settle out one of those cases; I'd much rather owe $14.9 trillion than $5,000. It's easier to laugh about owing a service provider $14.9 trillion. Although, you have a point in that all of this would be something of a pain in the ass. Amusing, I think, but kind of irritating, too. Maybe I'll check out BTGuard and see if I get decent speeds off of it.
Here's a doozy for ya: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/woman-pay-filesharing-24-songs/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/11/woma ... -24-songs/</a> WASHINGTON — A US jury has ordered a Minnesota woman to pay $1.5 million for illegally downloading 24 songs in a high-profile digital piracy case.
Lemme just pile on here. First of all getting a judgment in an American court is not easy. In fact, it's surprisingly difficult and expensive. (Unless the defendant doesn't so anything, then the plaintiff wins by default.) Secondly, enforcing a money judgment against a guy who has no assets is, of course, impossible. However, judgments can stay alive forever. That means that your judgment will follow you until it's paid. Want a mortgage sometime in the future? Pay the judgment. Want to lease a car? Pay the judgment. Want to borrow money for anything? Pay the judgment. Have a job? Your wages get garnished. Have a bank account? It's emptied. They can seize your furniture, computer, television, car, pretty much anything you own to sell and satisfy that judgment. Move out of state to get away from it? Have the second state recognize the original judgment and it follows you. You are also responsible for all of the costs and expenses associated with the collection of the judgment. Moron.
It's really something, isn't it? The article doesn't really break that award down into compensatory and punitive damages, but the jury ruled, essentially, that each download was worth $62,500 in damage to the record company. So what does that mean? Well, let's say - conservatively - that Ke$ha's "Tik Tok" has been illegally downloaded 10 million times. Apparently, that means that RCA has suffered $625,000,000,000 in damages as the result of "Tik Tok" being downloaded. Six hundred twenty five billion dollars. Almost the cost of the Iraq War. Who would have thought that "Tik Tok" was so fucking valuable? Apparently, you could raise the money to conquer a whole country by selling the rights to that beautifully crafted piece of musicianship. Anyway, yeah, I'd much rather have a $1.5 million judgment brought against me than a $5,000 settlement. Saying "I owe $5,000 for downloading music" is just kind of embarrassing. It's possible to pay it, so there's kind of an expectation you'll pay it. Whereas saying "I owe $1.5 million for downloading A-ha's new album" is just kind of awesome. Plus, it would mean I can download media with total impunity for the rest of my life. I'm never going to have anything approaching $1.5 million, which means that if anyone ever has a financial problem with me, ever again, all I can do is shrug and say "Well, get in line." Yeah, I'll be renting for the rest of my life, but that's kind of a small price to pay, especially since I can't envision how I could ever scrape together a down payment or pay a mortgage in this economy.
For someone throwing around the term "moron," what you've said is shockingly inaccurate. No, the courts can't seize "pretty much anything you own." In fact, most of the property a working-class individual owns is exempt. Laws vary a little by state, but generally, up to $35,000 worth of equity in your home is exempt; clothing, furniture, appliances, and other "household goods" are exempt; tools of the trade (including, generally, your computer) are exempt; motor vehicles are exempt up to $7,500; wedding rings are exempt up to $5,000; retirement funds and pensions are exempt; even inheritances granted more than a year after the judgment are exempt. Wages can be garnished, but only to a fairly small percentage; and bank accounts can be garnished, but only if they're large enough to begin with. I'm pretty confident in saying that I don't own a single thing that isn't completely exempt under the law. As long as I don't become wealthy, I legitimately do have the option to simply not pay a judgment, with few to no repercussions. Want evidence? Look at O.J. Simpson - the guy got a $33.5 million judgment against him - more than he was worth, by most accounts - and so much of his property was exempt that it didn't even substantially affect his lifestyle.
Just got a Kindle as a gift and was looking for a good (preferably private) ebook tracker. Willing to trade an invite to a general private tracker in exchange. PM me.
... In terms of pedantic qualifiers, that's very true. Reality is that if you do anything on the internet - it's possible that it won't be anonymous. Man in the middle attacks, or compromised peers/servers can always lead to public exposure. Even an anonymous VPN service like TorrentFreedom (arguably the best solution available for anonymizing your torrents) can potentially fail if the servers hosting the service are compromised. In practical terms, nobody using Peerblock or PeerGuardian with updated lists has ended up in court to date. The services do a pretty good job of doing what they're supposed to. There's also a club lock effect, where it's just easier to go after all the people who don't use basic security tools than to bother fucking around with people who do. If you're really concerned - subscribe to 2 unrelated international VPN services and an international seed box, all hosted in separate countries (I'd probably host the Seedbox in Spain given the recent judgments regarding piracy there), run your seed box torrents behind a peer filter and one of those VPN services and use the other VPN service to connect and retrieve your material from the seedbox. Also, pay for everything using prepaid services purchased for cash from a store you don't normally use, outside of the town in which you normally reside, and wear a disguise while in the store. I find that a blind texan (the big square sunglasses that blind people wear, so that facial recognition systems can't get a good measurement of the shape of your nose or the size/spacing of your eyes, and a cowboy hat to prevent the security cameras getting a good look at you). You ideally want a shitty store with cheap security systems so that the security video resolution isn't great. Also, never carry your mobile phone or a GPS navigation unit with you when you go to the town you're buying from. Don't just turn them off, leave them at home all together. There's fuck all actual benefit to all that hassle, but in terms of pedantic theoretical qualification - it is notionally better than just using PeerGuardian.
scootah is right. If you take basic precautions, you should be fine. Download from private torrent sites, use general-search to download from megaupload/rapidshare/uploading/etc., and stay away from public torrents of recent popular movies, music, and especially games, unless you have PeerGuardian or something similar.
So that's it? PeerGuardian and you're set? Assume I'm completely retarded when it comes to internet security and privacy. (Because I am.) Should I just install PG and not worry about a thing? What are other things I should look out for when downloading?
Also, I have a ghetto ass desktop from 2003 with 300Gb on the drive. I use it for nothing more than downloading movies, scanning them for virii and playback. You can get a dirt cheap tower these days, so I would get one for cheap and use it for nothing more.
I'm taking scootah's word (which is money on technical matters) on PeerGuardian; I've never used it myself. Instead, I download from private torrent sites and use <a class="postlink" href="http://www.general-search.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.general-search.com</a> for anything I can't find there. There are a few harmless things I will use <a class="postlink" href="http://www.isohunt.com" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.isohunt.com</a> for, like books and television shows.
This is back to the clublock analogy. If a car thief comes up to your car and sees a club lock, and there's a similar car 6 feet away without a club lock - chances are they're just going to go steal the other car - even though a club lock is in and of itself not really that much protection. PeerGuardian isn't by any means perfect. But it's pretty good. It works by a bunch of people collating lists of known addresses belonging to people like government departments, law firms and security companies who investigate this sort of thing, and some other resources that are unlikely to be genuine torrent peers, and telling your computer to not talk to them. This prevents those detection firms from seeing your computer as part of the swarm (more or less) so they don't know that you're one of the people they want to sue. When you use a private tracker, usually - those same detection groups aren't members of the private tracker, so can't see swarm members. That unfortunately only holds true as long as the private invitation process works. For trackers like Demonoid (very well known and easy to get access to private trackers) - you can bet your ass that all the big detection groups have accounts. I use ThePirateBay and EZTV for most of my torrents - I just read comments/initial seeder ratings and virus scan before I run anything I downloaded. I'm also in Australia, where there's not a big push to chase pirates and using a peer filtering list in my firewall - so I don't have many issues (worst I've had was downloading the occasional encrypted torrent I couldn't access because I wasn't paying attention, it was awful - I had to download another copy). I personally think Peer filtering with well maintained lists is better than private trackers, but using both is a good idea.
Tad off-topic, but this came to mind when i read your club lock analogy: Spoiler Written by Jim Burns: Back in the ’90s, I was working as a design engineer for Chrysler. I had responsibility for key cylinders and door latches. At that time auto theft rates in Europe were increasing and driving the insurers to put pressure on the Euro governments to require increased theft deterrence devices on all new cars. As part of our attempt to figure out where best to invest our design dollars, we hired some professional car thieves to provide a more hands-on perspective than us engineers had (well, maybe not all of us). At some point, the Club was mentioned. The professional thieves laughed and exchanged knowing glances. What we knew was that the Club is a hardened steel device that attaches to the steering wheel and the brake pedal to prevent steering and/or braking. What we found out was that a pro thief would carry a short piece of a hacksaw blade to cut through the plastic steering wheel in a couple seconds. They were then able to release The Club and use it to apply a huge amount of torque to the steering wheel and break the lock on the steering column (which most cars were already equipped with). The pro thieves actually sought out cars with The Club on them because they didn’t want to carry a long pry bar that was too hard to conceal. Point being is that we only got one side of the story here. But for all i know you might just be right Scootah.
A friend of mine just launched a new music distribution website and I'm trying to help him get started. The idea is that you download a song for free, and it will post a status update on your Facebook informing your friends of the song you just downloaded. Think of it as viral music. Disrupt.fm
Does anyone know the best torrent site to get hard to find books? Things I cant find the library and local book stores.