My question is, can you monitor a network like that, that isn’t located necessarily in the United States, and if so, is it monitored?
(IANANE - I Am Not A Network Engineer) - Gnutella is a protocol for a fully peer-to-peer file sharing network. As such, there is no central server, and it’s ‘location’ is ill defined. You can certainly ‘monitor’ such a network by joining a client and sniffing requests, but the amount of network traffic you’d get would be small, as all requests aren’t forwarded to all clients.
This Wikipedia article implies that actual file connections can be made directly, in which case determining the origin of requests is simple, and can be done by spoofing a large available file list in response to any file request. If you google ‘Gnutella network topology’ you’ll get several boring whitepapers that seem to show there’s the ability to forward network traffic between client nodes, meaning that just because packets are going to person Y, doesn’t mean they requested them, as they could be forwarded at that point.
I guess the answer is that it depends on the particular implementation of the protocol you’d be using.
BTW, the location of public networks is immateriel - file sharing programs by necessity must share at least minimal information about their members amongst their members. Anyone connecting can retrieve this information.
If you’re worried about that kind of thing, perhaps you shouldn’t be downloading what you’re thinking of. (Normally I’d recommend purchasing the real-deal, but in light of Sony’s latest DRM efforts, I’d say hold back on that too.)
I know first-hand that the Gnutella network can and is being monitored. Not necessarily as a whole, but for example, if you found a movie that you wanted to download and began downloading it, any one of the sources for that file could be someone from the MPAA logging all requests for that file.
It happened to me, once. I got a pretty certified letter from Columbia Pictures and my ISP with a complete log of my IP address, a timestamp of the download, size of the file, and complete filename, along with a stern warning that I had broken the DMCA laws.
So, if you’re downloading stuff you shouldn’t be, don’t be surprised if you get caught. With today’s internet, all they need is an IP address, it’s just as good as a street address when combined with your ISP’s logs. My advice is: don’t do it.
LiQUiDBuD
Well, if you stuck a monitoring agent on every client in the network, you could do it.
I’ll leave the act of getting a monitoring agent on every client up to the reader’s imagination, but I’ll note there are already tons of bits of spyware and jerkware that violate the snot out of your privacy rights, and some of it is pretty wide-spread.
Likely, they hit you because you were sharing the file, not because you downloaded it. Note that most clients share pieces of files as they are being downloaded, so even if one isn’t sharing files on the hard drive, one is still likely illegally distributing copyrighted material during a download.
I’m not even sure if downloading a copyrighted file is illegal. Sharing it certainly is.
Remember Surbey, don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.
Did YOU get a letter?
LoL. For those who don’t know, The Surb is short for The Surbey (my father)
No I didn’t get a letter. And even if I did, since we share a router, and our ip’s are the same, I’m thinking that they wouldn’t be able to prove which one of us downloaded the item, so we would both be going to court.