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Thread: First ever torrent uploader arrested in South Africa.

  1. #1
    Diamond Member AndyD's Avatar
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    First ever torrent uploader arrested in South Africa.

    A Capetonian has just made history this week by being the first South African person ever arrested for sharing a movie using bittorrent. At this stage it's not general knowledge which movie it was but he appeared in court this morning.

    Before everyone starts taking sledgehammers to hard drives or deleting large swathes of media files it looks like this guy was probably the ripper and primary seeder of a very recent movie that's possibly not available for retail yet. I'm not sure if he part of a release group or just a casual uploader but the guys who share material before it's available in the shops are the guys that give the copyright industry the biggest hard-on when it comes to wanting to catch them. Looking at his general MO I suspect this guy might have made things unnecessarily easy for them to catch him. Using bittorrent as your protocol of choice and releasing on The Pirate Bay is asking for trouble especially if you're not using an anonymous VPN and seedbox and the fact he chose TPB makes me think he's not a pro or part of a larger group.

    This and other early cases are very important for the copyright industry, the results and decisions recorded in this type of pioneering court action will help form the legal framework and case law that will define the landscape for future prosecutions across the entire country. Because of their great importance they'll tend to cherrypick the cases accordingly and they'll certainly want to have their ducks in a row because their future financing will largely depend on it. If they prove themselves to be inept and ineffective then future funding from the big copyright industry heavyweights and players with vested interests in copyright monopolies won't be so forthcoming.

    One of the many important issues in these cases is that they'll want to get it recognised legally that the person who owns the ipaddress is the person that is legally responsible for anything that is uploaded or downloaded from that point even if it wasn't actually them. They'll want owning an ipaddress to be the same as owning a firearm whereby it's the registered owners responsibility to prevent it from being borrowed, stolen or misused by a third party. For firearms this is all well and good but firearms are exceptional items for very obvious reasons whereas an ipaddresses certainly don't fall into the same category.

    The problem the copyright monopolies have is that it’s not financially rewarding to have to individually chase and prosecute people they consider are abusers. This is especially true in SA where many people who fileshare do so out of economic necessity so there will inevitably a desire to head for a point where owner of an ipaddress is automatically responsible because he’s more likely to be able to pay. Paving the way for the ever popular pay-up-or-else letters and three strikes system will be high on the agenda.

    I’ll be following this and future actions with great interest.
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  2. Thank given for this post:

    Citizen X (15-Dec-13), tec0 (13-Dec-13)

  3. #2
    Diamond Member tec0's Avatar
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    Sadly I think this is only the beginning... Well I am now thinking why do we have internet? It is useless now...
    peace is a state of mind
    Disclaimer: everything written by me can be considered as fictional.

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    Diamond Member tec0's Avatar
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    So what does the law say?
    peace is a state of mind
    Disclaimer: everything written by me can be considered as fictional.

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    andy -I think its very difficult to prove who did the uploading unless they find evidence on the property. This is why, I get one ip adress from mweb, my router assigns dummy ip addresses to the various machines on my network via dhcp. Lets assume I know nothing about networks and the guy whoinstalled the router didnt put a password on the wifi and set the router to stay connected. How are they going to prove who did what behind my router, it could have been my neighbour or his dog for all I know. Without a machine that is stiiting on his desk seeding the file they ain.t got diiddly.

    Tec - stop whining.

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    Silver Member league_of_ordinary_men's Avatar
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    One word guy's VPN

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    Diamond Member AndyD's Avatar
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    Bittorrent generally requires you set the PC on a static ipaddy on your LAN and make a firewall exception for the torrent client you're using otherwise it runs so slow it's painful.

    Proving which particular computer on a network was responsible is difficult without getting a warrant and seizing the hardware. In many other countries the copyright monopolists have been lobbying for laws that make the person who owns the internet ipaddress the legally responsible person for any copyright infringements that take place. This is far easier for them because this info is available from the ISP's logs.

    Quote Originally Posted by tec0 View Post
    So what does the law say?
    Not sure what you're asking, what does the law say about what?


    A VPN is certainly a good option for privacy but some VPN's keep records and you'll probably want to go with a paid option rather than the free ones with speed and bandwith limits. For occasional usage you could use onion routing although the nice people at TOR don't encourage bittorrent traffic.
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    Citizen X (16-Dec-13)

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    Diamond Member tec0's Avatar
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    Was wondering about our laws and downloading?

    But I am not worried at all I use i-tunes and DVD’s go for R50 a pop at your local Supermarket so everything I got I own. See internet on 3G remains expensive so downloading massive amounts of files is not only slow it is costly.

    I also got wifi and hacking into it is stupid easy... Right now I am using a sixty character password at the moment... but again I had to change it a number of times.
    peace is a state of mind
    Disclaimer: everything written by me can be considered as fictional.

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    I use BiT Torrent on my laptop and my tablet without static IP addresses. Although it looks as if DHCP keeps them the same.

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    A good way to tell that the broadband connectivity in an area is crap if there's still a video shop!

  12. Thank given for this post:

    tec0 (17-Dec-13)

  13. #10
    Platinum Member sterne.law@gmail.com's Avatar
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    Intriguing stuff and times.
    The internet and IP is going to be a great new arena.
    Who is responsible, where did it originate from when is it in the public domain etc, are all questions that need answering.
    Anthony Sterne

    www.acumenholdings.co.za
    DISCLAIMER The above is merely a comment in discussion form and an open public arena. It does not constitute a legal opinion or professional advice in any manner or form.

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