James Delahunty
30 Aug 2004 20:09
It seems that Cogeco, a Canadian ISP has begun sending its users warnings about their activities on P2P networks. The strange fact is, the warnings appear to be under DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) laws, which are U.S. laws, not Canadian laws. The BT tracker that seems to be gaining attention is the Swedish suprnova.org tracker. The emails also encourage the ISP's to limit users from accessing suprnova.org.
These actions can be compared to those taken in European countries for about the past year. Basically, someone affiliated with the MPAA or other anti-piracy organizations would begin a download on a P2P network, then record all the IP's it downloads from. After recording all the data it needs, it would continue to send the information the ISP, hoping that they will deal with the issue. However, there are some complications too. For example, some networks like the donkey network, trade files in small parts and in no particular order. In other words, you may be downloading the end of the file first. Whether you have the full file or not, as long as you have just one part, your client will be able to upload to other users. So would the MPAA ever take you to court for sharing a part of a movie, that is only a couple of MB's and pretty much completely useless without all the other parts?
The MPAA hasn't been taking the same road as the RIAA in its fight against piracy and even stated they had no plans to sue P2P users. However, it is understandable that the P2P networks themselves are a major target. These letters of warning are another attempt to reduce the numbers of P2P users. Whether or not it will actually have any effect will depend on the actions taken by the ISP's. It seems that in past cases, ISP's just preferred to forward the email to the user, with maybe a small warning. Some ISP's however, have kicked users off their service for receiving these letters or emails.
Source:
P2PNet