Has anyone ever gone to jail for downloading torrents

The increased acceptance of illegally downloading media has affected the bottom line of the movie and music industry over the past decade, and that isn't good news for torrent fans. Earlier this month, the BBC reported on a study by computer scientists at Birmingham University designed to find out how risky it is for file-sharers to upload and download files online. When someone downloads a torrent file from an open site like the Pirate Bay or uTorrent , their IP address is linked with other IP addresses around the world that are hosting that file.

Now, those organizations are planting files online that they think people are the most likely to download. The study, which spanned three years, found that IP addresses and other data are being collected for future use. Someone who downloads a single movie will be logged as well," the lead researcher told the BBC.

Someone will notice and it will be recorded. The copyright police are banking on the idea that there are more people illegally sharing major movies like "The Avengers" than stealing music from small, independent record labels. It is still unclear how willing courts will be to prosecute individuals based only on the fact that their IP address was recorded. This month a U. The New Scientist reports that "anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or eBooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within three hours of doing so.

They successfully pressured the Department of Justice to halt Megaupload and managed to prod the Ukrainian government into shutting down Demonoid , the popular private tracker. You'd most likely get in trouble if you're the one ripping and uploading, because that scares the distributors. Duy , Jul 20, Well, the process of torrenting is not illegal but the file content is.

Many video game companies have started using programs based on bit torrent to share large files like patches. And yes, it's possible to get caught. All they have to do is contact the ISP companies and on whim they can get the bandwidth logs, etc.

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