Those who wish to do so can choose from plenty of great VPN services that are perfectly suited for this, and there are even specialized BitTorrent proxies such as BTguard.

The benefit of the above services is that they allow users to browse and download ‘anonymously,’ but at full speeds. The downside is that users have to cough up a few bucks a month for these premium services.

Perhaps in an attempt to avoid a paid subscription, there is also a certain group of BitTorrent users who use the Tor network to anonymize their traffic. This is a big problem. Although one BitTorrent user taking this option is unlikely to prove problematic, a few thousand can cause some serious damage, in more ways than one.

Aside from crippling the network by transferring massive amounts of data over a system that is set up for web browsing, Tor servers are also being monitored and subsequently notified by copyright holders for facilitating “infringing” transfers. The DMCA notices that copyright holders send out are strictly speaking not a problem, but some ISPs freak out over them, which may lead to servers being disconnected.

One Tor service that has received its fair share of DMCA notices over the last month is Torservers.net. A few days ago the operator posted a collection of 190 recent DMCA notices, and that only represented those received in a 20 day period. Most of the automated notices received were sent by MediaSentry (now Peer Media), on behalf of several major movie studios and other copyright holders.

As the Torservers.net operator Moritz Bartl explains, Tor servers are protected by the DMCA just like major ISPs are, but that doesn’t mean the avalanche of DMCA notices can’t do any harm. The companies where Torservers.net rents its servers may become worried about the large amounts of complaints being received and decide to kick their client nonetheless.

This is exactly what happened to Torservers.net in the past.

“The most frighting example was Softlayer. We had a deal with 100tb.com, a team of friendly and understanding people that use Softlayer as data center. Nonetheless, Softlayer cut us off after one single DMCA complaint that referenced a port we didn’t even allow to exit at that time,” Bartl told TorrentFreak.

“They did not care and didn’t want to hear any explanations, they just forced us off their network. This is an absurd situation similar to the recent Facebook incidents, because anyone could send DMCA complaints, and it is very hard to find ISPs that first ask for proof before taking action,” he added.

Talking to TorrentFreak, Moritz Bartl further said that he encourages the public to take a look at the emails to see if there’s a clear pattern to identify. This will help him and others to control the DMCA spam. Eventually, he might end up blocking the IP-addresses of all major BitTorrent trackers as a last resort.

Hosting companies who are Tor friendly and can take DMCA notices in their stride are being welcomed to get in touch too. The Torservers.net operator tried to contact the senders of the notices to come to a more workable solution, but thus far they seem to be unreachable.

The ultimate setup for Torservers.net is one where the hosting provider reassigns the IP-range to them, so they can handle the abuse emails directly. For ARIN IPs this doesn’t work, but then the provider could simply forward the DMCA notices, automatically or not, so Torservers.net can take care of it.

“We auto-reply to Mediasentry DMCA spam, telling them that we are not allowed to keep customer logs based on the German telecommunications law, and that we are not liable for content transmission. That’s what every ISP in the world should do – unless local laws require them to keep customer logs that is. Only a few countries really force you to keep customer logs though,” Bartl said.

The most important lesson, however, is that those who value anti-censorship tools should not abuse Tor by running their BitTorrent traffic over it. Although the massive amount of DMCA notices shows that it works, it may eventually mean that Tor is no longer available to the people who it was built for.

Source: Tor Servers Bombarded With BitTorrent DMCA Notices

In that consultation the public made it clear that stricter copyright laws are not welcome. However, it seems that this has had very little effect as Canada’s Prime Minister is about to announce a ‘new’, even more draconian law. Michael Geist, prof. E-commerce Law in Ottawa, described the bill as “the most anti-consumer copyright bill in Canadian history.”

The owner of isoHunt, one of the largest BitTorrent sites that will be directly affected by the law, is rallying opposition against the new bill. IsoHunt’s Gary Fung is warning of the effects the bill will have on Canadians.

“The effects of a draconian copyright bill in Canada can be far reaching. Things Canadians take for granted, like copying your music from your computer to your music player and vice versa, can be deemed illegal with this new bill,” Gary told TorrentFreak.

“ISPs can be forced to handover private information of users on a whim without due process. They may be further encouraged to throttle P2P traffic, even for entirely legitimate uses like game files distribution. The new bill also is unlikely to provide fair exceptions for breaking DRM for purposes that doesn’t violate copyright, which unfairly prohibits one’s tinkering with electronics he owns,” Gary added.

Gary’s warnings are justified. Although it is not completely clear what the details of the new bill will be, it is expected that it will be the Canadian equivalent of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This means that copyright takedown request become a censorship tool while consumers lose several ‘fair use’ rights.

IsoHunt is currently hosted in Canada and involved in a lawsuit against the Canadian Recording Industry Assicoation (CRIA). If this new bill is passed, this would mean that isoHunt’s chances of winning that long standing legal battle will decrease significantly.

Gary further told TorrentFreak that he is worried that the new bill will lead to increased censorship by copyright holders. “We need laws that support our neutrality and our ability to operate a search engine free of censorship and unreasonable constraints,” Gary told us, adding that the new bill would provide the opposite.

“We’ve seen record labels sending us takedown notices mixed with links to porn, and the new Canadian bill should provide recourse against rights holders providing false identification information. Unless music companies are really switching to distributing porn,” he added.

Once again, we have to encourage all Canadian readers to speak out against the bill before it’s too late. Although the Government ignored the people’s opinion during the consultation, doing nothing will mean that the war is lost for sure. Michael Geist encourages all Canadians to write a paper letter to their Member of Parliament and provides some further pointers.

Update: Here’s a letter wizard.

Article from: TorrentFreak.

These exchanges often started off politely but later turned into an email fight when it became clear that The Pirate Bay didn’t intend on removing any torrents from their site. However, some rights holders are furious from the start and don’t even have to be triggered by such takedown refusals.

One such copyright holder, Paul Harris from ReverbXL, couldn’t hide his frustration when he harassed several torrent site admins. In his email, Harris holds the admins responsible for the illegal downloading that occurs though their site, and warns them about the consequences of their actions.

“You won’t win this fight. And not because the big mean corporate world will beat you, because you’ll end up as an insignificant foot note in history,” Harris writes.

Harris’ full rant is pasted below, for your consideration.

Paul Harris wrote:

Hi there webmaster. We are a music publisher and your web spiders are linking to songs by TURIN BRAKES, who we publish. We have not given permission to be distributed.

Please remove all links. I would appreciate it if you could monitor your service and ensure that NO copyrighted material is linked in it. If you do not have the technology to ensure this, then I advise you to invest in it before you are closed down or forced to remove all links. May I draw your attention to this recent ruling.

Mininova. Was the biggest, and the most uncooperative, now the humblest, and the most co-operative. You will be the same. Maybe it would be best to remove the links yourself?

From a moral standpoint, you are not only hurting the music industry but also the writers and the artists involved. Think about it, please. There are plenty of legal alternatives now where people who do not want to buy music can listen. But the contributors deserve to be paid.

Think about it. It’s like a company using their fleet of white vans to move other people’s stolen goods around – no you haven’t done the actual stealing, but you are facilitating the crime!

I work my balls off trying to make a living in music – I’m not some jerk off in a suit. Nor are my artists. But you cast us as such whilst knowing nothing of the reality.

If you are so brave, so keen to take a swipe at the corporate world, why don’t you go and picket Shell, Nike, HSBC, any number of industries who actually ARE immoral. But you won’t, because your moral stand point is totally warped. I can’t wait to see you go down. You won’t win this fight. And not because the big mean corporate world will beat you, because you’ll end up as an insignificant foot note in history.

Thanks very much.

P

Although we can sympathize with Harris somewhat, this is definitely not the best way to get links to content removed from a torrent site. In the case of Turin Brakes, a little patience might have gone a very long way since there are only a handful of torrents on public trackers so the job would’ve been pretty easy.

Despite the aggressive approach, most torrent site operators are still willing to cooperate and remove the associated torrent files. After a quick search though, Google turns up as many links as most public search engines. Whether they would respond favorably to an email like this is up for debate.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.