Got a letter from my ISP about Torrent downloads.......

Question

I downloaded a pretty big movie that is out in theaters right now, and I recieved a letter from my ISP. Apparently the copyright agency of the studio that produced the movie contacted my ISP, and they contacted me. I was wondering if I continue to DL torrents, but I use an encryption what are the chances that I will be caught. Will the moniter my bandwidth usage. And If I am using a encryption how could it be traced back to me?

Answer 1

Yes, and you will be caught. Just wait and see. Don't try and beat the system, give up.

Answer 2

You downloaded a movie and they sent you a letter??

Whoa, i guess i'm going in jail for life....

Anyway, encrypt you torrent connections and you;ll be fine.

All the resoectable programms have the option,

Answer 3

Well they wouldn't know what the content is if it's encrypted. For all they know it could just be a Linux CD ISO's, which in that case they wouldn't be able to do anything.

Interestingly enoguh the process used to find and sue people itself is illegal. Basically it follows the idea that you are guilty unless proven innocent instead of the way our laws are setup to be, which is innocent until proven guilty. It may not necessarily be you, but someone in the same city/town or state using the same ISP who is not using secure and encrypted torrents (or any p2p clients) will get you into trouble. Theoretically, you don't even need to be downloading anything and you would've gotten the same letter (this was the case for someone, she never downloaded anything, and was being sued).

Fighting back isn't all that easy though. They know that what they're doing is illegal and will do anything to keep it out of the courts. So what they do is they are stationed in a state, most likely different from the one that you're in, and they'll file a lawsuit in a different state than either of you are in. What this does is it prevents you from creating a fair case. You won't know the charges or evidence against you or where you're being sued from or how to contact who is suing you. Since you'll be ill prepared, you're pretty much forced to settle outside of a court.

There's a bunch of information detailing the entire process all over the net. You just need to search google. Put in keywords like riaa, mpaa, sue, how and it will turn up some pretty interesting results. You can also read torrentfreak for some information.

But basically, you're screwed, and it may not necessarily be your fault.