Got busted for downloading movie via bittorrent
In keeping with nihil's "one interesting post a day for twenty-eight days" challenge, I thought I'd share an interesting experience.
I'm a big fan of downloading movies for free off the web. I try to justify the legality of it all by saying "well, I wouldn't pay to see this anyway, but if it's free, why not" or "I've already bought and lost/traded/sold to Hastings that movie so many times, I ought to be able to download it for free."
Anyway, it's illegal, we all know that. But I thought no one really cared so long as you weren't sharing hundreds of movies or profiting off of it somehow.
Well, about two months ago, I found a torrent off of torrentz.com for the movie "Lost in Translation." I downloaded it like normal - I use the standard port, don't go through any proxies or anything fancy. I've never tried to hide what I was doing.
Two days later my Ma (yes - I'm living with my parents ATM) gets a message from our ISP saying that they've disabled our modem because NBC has called them and said that the movie "Lost in Translation" was downloaded illegally to our IP address.
And sure enough, the modem was disabled. My Ma called the ISP and played dumb, and they asked that she check her wireless security settings and that they would re-enable her modem, but if it happened again, they would have to cancel her service permanently.
They also said that we may get a letter from NBC threatening legal action. We haven't got a letter, and I doubt we will. But wow.
I've downloaded dozens, perhaps hundreds of movies before. I've never had anything like this happen. The movie worked fine (unfortunately - that's 102 minutes of my life that would have been better spent, I don't know, rearranging my sock drawer?). Definitely one that made the "I wouldn't have paid to see it anyway" list. The only reason I downloaded it was that it was on some 100 Greatest Movies of All Time list I found on the web.
So some questions:
1.) Do you think they "booby-trapped" me - like maybe the NBC anti-piracy folks seed their own torrents and track the IPs of leechers? Or do you think they just download torrents at random, seed and then track leechers?
2.) The whole mess could have been avoided if I would have configured my torrent client to download through a proxy, right?
3.) Could NBC really sue me? Are you responsible for locking down your wireless router? Everywhere I go, I see more open routers than not.
4.) Is this just a fluke? Or does this happen pretty often? I did a little Googling but I couldn't find anything that really said one way or the other.
5.) Where do you stand on the legality of file-sharing?
How's that for the first post of the challenge, nihil? ;)