Spinning off from another thread.....is peer to peer sharing legal here?

If so, how does that work with regard to copyright law?

No seeding, ya leech. Downloading ok.

I'm sure this has been discussed elsewhere...

I searched for a few things, but don't know all the geek terms ....if you can point me in the right direction, I'll be out of your hair

I remember seeing an old thread bout it although I think the trhead may have been about movies and then went onto the DL issue.

But essentially as far as I know, you can download but not share.


try this.
Casual Piracy And You (or your mate): Filesharing, Streaming, and Torrents

It has. See here for starters...

Once you've downloaded, move the file to an appropriate folder then remove from your bit torrent programme - the funnel which connects you to other people sharing the files or 'seeders' as they're known. Delete the file from the torrent programme! Otherwise, as soon as you've downloaded something (leeched) you become a 'peer' sharing the info / file you've just downloaded and thus exposed to the law.

You'll get away with it though.

It all may sound geekspeak, but once you've done it it's easy. Make sure you have decent security as you may be vulnerable to intrusion. Best to always have an Admin account and then use a second user account so nothing can change your settings without your say-so as well as optimised internet security software. A determined hacker / maggot will eat it's way in, but keep your walls up. Peer2Peer sites are murky.

So says my mate.

if you are talking about bittorrent then it's extremly difficult not to share.
the overall policy on people sharing is to do so with those who share back. So in that sense, in order to share you have to be sharing.

Mind you that in torrents, you can be sharing only a part of the file, so you might not be on the safe side thinking: " oh well I downloaded it and removed it, so I'm not sharing".

look at your upload rate for examples

Thanks

For the record, you typically start sharing as soon as you download the first chunk, not when you've finished downloading the whole thing. So you'd be infringing almost immediately.

Do as you like with that info.

Aren't newsgroups leech only?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet_newsgroup

Cough binary newsgroups...Amateurs eh those who use p2p. Although ISP's hate it as it eats their bandwidth.

Some more reading for the uneducated....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Check your programme to see if you can turn off seeding. Says my mate.

The whole concept of bittorent is based on users downloading from users. Most bittorent clients will severely limit your download rate if you lower the upload rate. You can not totally disable upload in most of the clients I know, but you can lower them to 1kbps or so.

I dunno which clients you're using, but there are ways to solve both problems.

Says my mate.

Peer to peer sharing per se is legal. Using the technology to upload copyrighted material, broadly speaking, isn't.

But how will anyone know as in most cases you will have d/l a movie (let's say 2.5Gb) and only uploaded 5-10Mb in chunks that doesn't makes head or tail unless full u/l'd?

I mean the whole file sharing is based on bits and bobs picked up at different locations and then combined to a full working file. If I u/l 5Mb worth of data to a file that combined is 2.5Gb the data in itself is useless right?

I'm not trying to find a hole or an excuse to file share vs the local law but I'm just trying to understand the concept

Each of those "chunks" can be identified, using the right tech, as being part of an individual file which is being shared. Plus when you join the swarm (the group of people uploading and downloading the file) you broadcast your IP address, which can be tracked back to your router via your ISP.

In the States, and probably elsewhere as well, the authorities will commonly join a swarm for a particular file, get the IP addresses of everyone else in the swarm, and then force the ISPs to hand over the addresses of the people whose IP address they have found. However, I'm not an expert on this, I'm sure someone can jump in with a better explanation than that.

As with everything else, given the right knowledge their are ways around it. The point I was really trying to make above, is that p2p sharing, be it via BitTorrent or whatever, isn't actually illegal, although many people these days think it is. I could use it to share something with you or anyone else perfectly legally. It's using it to upload copyrighted material (even just a 5MB chuck) that is the illegal part.

Thanks Ed Pummelon for clarifying

I could imagine it would be a hell of a job to collect all the IP addresses so a little d/l here and there should be ok (still illegal though) as long as it is not over the top.

I read somewhere that a company was asked to produce all the data in some case and they decided to print it out which turned out to be hundreds of truck loads of paper The case was pulled for some reason, as it never was stated in what media the data had to be produced on

Don't be too sure, a lot of clients (BitTorrent software) will display all the IP addresses in a swarm automatically. Of course, linking those to an individual is another step entirely.

I guess as with any illegal activity it's up to the individual to make his or her own decision on it. The interesting difference in CH to other countries I've lived is that as far as I've been able to make out, downloading copyrighted material for yourself is actually allowed, it's uploading it that isn't.

Again, don't take my word for that, I'm just going off what I've read on here and elsewhere. If you want a qualified legal opinion, best to go to a lawyer

Music and movies:
- download ok
- upload illegal

Software:
- both download and upload illegal

If you need to get something "for free", try to find that file on file-hosting websites like Rapidshare, Megaupload, Uploaded etc. You'll only be downloading it then for yourself without sharing.

...and until then downloading is free and not criminalised. The authorities - not Cablecom for sure - won't bother to look in unless you're a massive user and clearly up to no good. Taking a few albums off the net before deciding to go to a record store - remember those? - and actually buying the album and supporting the artist who created it - you wouldn't think of not buying the album, right? - is so far not naughty in Switzerland.

Do purchase the albums you like so Robbie Williams isn't all we have left though. Or better still, support the artists in live performances.