Just thought I’d share what happened to me the other day and spread the word around. I’ve been downloading HBO shows…Deadwood and Entourage mostly, via Bittorent for about 2 months now. I got a letter the other day from Comcast saying they were alerted by HBO that my IP address was found downloading copyrighted content and not to do it anymore.
I was a little surprised since I haven’t heard this happening to bittorrent users. Just a heads up, if you use bittorrent to download stuff you shouldn’t you may very well get a letter of reprimand from your ISP.
BTW, if you have an up/down limit on your account, you can expect to receive another notice from your ISP if you’ve violated it. Unbeknownst to me, I had a 5GB/10GB limit on mine. I’d gone over by about 120GB. For which they could charge me $1.00/100MB overage.
I know several people who’ve gotten letters about various activities. I’ve heard that the companies will upload their own products in order to track who is downloading them. What sucks is that they just go for whoever owns the account. One of my friend’s roommates downloaded a bunch of movies but my friend was warned because the internet is in his name. He said that if anyone using his internet is caught downloading anything else, then he will not be able to have the internet in his name for a long period of time.
In that spirit I immediately sent an email to Comcast saying that my wireless network has been unsecured this whole time and it must have been one of my neighbors.
The had some interesting details at the bottom of the letter…exact filesize, time, date, where it was from, all the goodies. I don’t know if they planted it but HBO is certainly watching. I’m just getting back from lunch at home where there was another letter, again from Comcast, this time they’re complaining about Entourage!
For some reason, when I try to imagine this, I get a mental image of the court system exploding. “Get your umbrellas boys, it’s raining lawyers out there.”
Yes, I subscribe to HBO. What I don’t like is having to wait and watch the programming on their schedule. Its not like I was getting the shows early, I waited until they aired on Sunday night and then downloaded them the next day.
To be fair, HBO has no way of knowing if I subscribe or not since all they get is an IP address. If I do wind up getting sued I’ll be going with the unsecured wireless defence though I don’t think its likely.
As far as the free wi-fi/google thing I imagine they’ll have a way to identify everyone who wants to use the service. For instance, they may ask you to sign up (register) whereupon you’ll get an ID/password to log in for access. Could be wrong about that but I’m not sure how they’d handle all the insane things people would do on the internet if it were totally anonmyous.
I’m pretty sure it is pretty close to totally anonymous. All you need is a google account and they aren’t going to require a credit card or something to verify your identity. What personal info you give them is up to you. It’s just like a gmail account.
They can tell which of their nodes you’re using to access the network, but unless HBO is going to hire a fleet of black vans scouring the city with DF equipment, I wouldn’t worry about that.
Google could cancel the account you’re using to file share, but what good would that do? People would just sign up for a new account.
