What steps to take to prevent a lawsuit from the RIAA or their counterparts !

[ABOU]

Ok as many of us Uk guys and gals know the UK has this week began to sue UK music sharers, it is now finaly hitting home that i may now be faced with a law suit if i do not take all the nessesary precautions to insure i can share without gettign sued.

i wish this topic to inform everyone here of the steps you can take to prevent as much as possible you gettign sued but i also need to knwo alot of this.

i would say the first and most obvious step, if you use Kazaa get rid of it now, you may as well walk around town with a sign saying sue me !

secondly i have heard alot about peer gaurdian and hav installed it a few times on the advice of others but i dont know much about its uses to me

thirdly i wish to compile a list of 'high risk' P2P networks and some of the 'safer' ones.

to begin i would say

KaZaA
I-Mesh
Win Mx
Bit Torrent

these would be the main networks i can think of that are being monitored closely.

please reply with any info and help you have

thanks

[NullsRevenge]

Imesh and Kazaa are very similar, the only difference is that imesh has a small seperate network but it doesnt make that much of a difference.

There is no safe network, it would be wise to assume that they are all being monitored or will be monitored.

If your worried about getting busted for mp3s or anything else then share something else. Its very easy to do especially on bittorrent which is more widely used for perfect legal file sharing like game demos, patches, mods, linux isos, and etc.

[bumbandit]

Hi Abou :)

Thanks for starting this topic. Yup, I think many of us here in the UK are starting to think more carefully about security.

Personally, I could not get Peerguardian to work. I had much better luck with Protowall.

Other than using Protowall, I don't know what else to do?

One thing that I have tried, is to create firewall rules to block info being sent to my ISP.
When browsing through my firewall traffic log, I kept seeing something I didn't like the look of on the"Accepted" (as opposed to "Blocked") list.
It was something about "cache" and it was being sent to my ISP.
Well, a cache is a load of stored info/web pages, isn;t it?
If the web pages are being sent to my ISP, maybe info about p2p traffic is too?
So I created a rule to block this particular form of traffic.

Still have no idea whether it was worth doing, or not?

Anyone know more about cache info being sent to ISPs?

Also, what about using proxies, is that any good? Do they anonymise/fake the pc address your ISP gives you every time you log on?

And that Anonymous Ants p2p prog? What's that all about? Has anyone here actually used it?

Nuff questions.....!

BB

[NullsRevenge]

Peerguardian and others like it will offer limited to zero protection, they only get the list of "hostiles" from user submitted lists and likely will not get many if any of the hosts doing the actual scanning. Blocking some site's web server ip range is not protection..

Anonymous P2P and proxies are both slow, and the overhead involved makes them both not worth using.

You cannot fake your Ip address, its needed to send any info to your PC

[ABOU]

I know exactly what i-mesh is but unlike kazaa imesh made a deal with the RIAA making it even more of a liability.

i dont think the threat of a law suit is gonna make me stop sharing i just want to take any precautionary measures i can to make sure if i get caught ive dun everything to put up a fight.

I think you are very right to assume that all the networks are being monitored but with the amount of file sharers out there i feel some networks are watched less closely although i could be wrong.

It all comes down to ip address in the end until that can be protected we are all open targets but even more so with networks such as bit torrent.

i have also used protowall.

[Project-Buckfast]

Piolet is going to be one of the less focused on apps. Kazaa is full of fake and corrupted files. It's not worth the hassel never mind being sued for using it. I was wondering aswell. If you have sharing disabled can they still sue? because technically your not sharing

When are we going to find out what a substantial amount of music is? It could be an album or 3 songs, even 1 song. They wont say.

As for them cracking down on it here in the uk, there has been very little information about this sent out through the news. You can read all about it on the net, I no, but they havent made the public widely aware of their plans through televison or radio. I have heard very little on the subject.

If you share illegaly then you need to have as much security as possible. This will not bring P2P down, It has been unsucessful in the US. Yes they have cut down the number of people downloading illegaly but its like a pin in a hay stack.

Both parties need to come to a decision that is beneficial to all.

NOTE: I do not share illegaly, or encourage others to do so

[NullsRevenge]

Originally posted by ABOU

i dont think the threat of a law suit is gonna make me stop sharing i just want to take any precautionary measures i can to make sure if i get caught ive dun everything to put up a fight.

I think you are very right to assume that all the networks are being monitored but with the amount of file sharers out there i feel some networks are watched less closely although i could be wrong.

It all comes down to ip address in the end until that can be protected we are all open targets but even more so with networks such as bit torrent.

i have also used protowall.

The best way to prevent you from getting sued if your worried about it is to share perfectly legal files, and yes there is a demand for them especially on bittorrent. Which there is nothing wrong with this, you are still supporting p2p and file sharing.

Ok yeah some networks are less of a threat than others to the trade groups, once everyone starts moving to them, then they will get into focus, meanwhile until they first start sueing people on that network everyone will assume its "safe."

You cannot protect your IP address, its not possible, your ip address is the location of your computer on the internet, if no one knows where to send the data then you will not be able to recieve information from any server and pretty much no different than with no internet at all.

[Mel Smiley XXL]

I have not heard of anyone getting in trouble (in the U.S.) for using WinMx. As for Bittorrent, if you download popular movies sooner or later you will get caught. BT has some strange public perception as being a 'safe' network. How it got that I do not know, but the public needs to do their homework. I got a letter some months ago. I went back to WinMx fulltime and so far, no worries.

[ABOU]

i think it is good that music stores have opened and that prices are becoming reasonable but for the minute it is just to high as far as legal action goes i think it may force alot of ppl to go underground and those who have the knowlage to turn back to older methods this i will b doing.

It is no longer worth the convinience of p2p apps the risk is becoming too high i guess we will just have to wait and see how it all goes but i cant see the sharers loosing.......... there is far too many of us

BT has some strange public perception as being a 'safe' network. How it got that I do not know, but the public needs to do their homework.

if anything BT is the least safe network as it focuses on speed, not security and is very easily monitored

for the benifit of the RIAA and uk counterparts: NOTE: I do not share illegaly, or encourage others to do so

[MilesApart]

I hate to say this becuase my parents got screwed this way. But think of it this way. If you get sued, they have no date on when you have to pay the money (In the U.S., don't know about U.K.), even though they do, do checkup's. The guy hid the money from my parents in his wifes account. So, I guess if any of you get sued, hide the money. This guy has a yacht and everything.

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#2, Peerguardian 1.99 pr14 and up stable versions are not very good right now. They use too much CPU and are sometimes unrelable. In the next few weeks, PG2 is coming out. It will give users the ability to ad plugins. Will have constant updates. As more users come to use the program, more IPS will be found. It also will use 1% to 0% of CPU. I guess is depends on how bad company's want your ass. It will also block all connection types (TCP, ETC.). Can't wait til it comes out. :eek2:

[Carrie]

Welcome to the herd MilesApart:)