Then get ready for the knock on the door

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/tees/7057812.stm

Yeah mate, the police are really going to knock on the doors of over 100,000 people.

They may well go after the leaders and the people who have downloaded huge amounts, but the police really dont care about illegal downloading, however much the media may want you to believe they do.

i think - from how the article reads - they are going to go after the high uploaders (one of whom is mate of mine :( :() and those who leaked the recordings.

my main forum is currently going ape**** thinking they are all going to be prosecuted.

btw just saw this for those looking for some info for those on whats happening:

http://enjoys.it/2007/10/23/some-facts-and-some-rumors-about-the-oink-takedown/
Some people spread stuff like “all members with more than 40GB downloaded will be investigated”. Ignore them.

http://www.ohax.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=173#173
<kraut> oink has already been released from questioning or whatever, and is back home, online

source from a previous friend/mod on OiNK

<odyss3y> heh, the police have his computer and his last.fm update shows they are listening to his emiliana torrini albums

I've been following this story in the reg, does anyone know what the guy has actually been charged with (if anything) as they seemed to be using trumped up fraud charges of some sort that sound like they will never stick.

<odyss3y> heh, the police have his computer and his last.fm update shows they are listening to his emiliana torrini albums

I don't know why but I found that so funny.

i think - from how the article reads - they are going to go after the high uploaders

High upload ratio means nothing, it's just a number in a database which doesn't prove a thing. It's incredibly easy to fake upload on any bit torrent tracker, you can instantly increase your upload amount on any tracker by sending a single command to the tracker . You can also download one of the open source clients and change a single line of code so the client sends incorrect amounts of uploaded data back to the tracker (and hacked clients are available for download). Many people DO cheat their upload amounts/ratios on these kind of trackers (the ratio trackers based on the old torrentbits site).

If any of these cases reached court based purely on somebody's upload/download ratio any halfwit with a laptop, a packet sniffer and a telnet client can prove to the court that the upload figure in the database is completely unreliable and can be changed in under a minute. You could have a 900gb upload figure and not have uploaded a single byte. None of this information is a secret btw, search for bit torrent ratio spoofing. It's was once headline news on most of the big tech sites such as digg and slashdot so I think it's fair to say that millions of people know about this.

Having said that, it's a different story if you were the original seed on a torrent (responsible for uploading the original file and torrent). That's much easier to prove because the file can't have become seeded by anybody else if you were faking the upload. This still doesn't prove absolute guilt though, there's any number of defences against it (trojans, unsecured wireless, etc). The cost, time and complexity of tracing thousands of people based purely on IP address's, all based in different countries with different laws, makes it unlikely they'd go after anybody except maybe the top few uploaders (if anybody at all) imho.

I've been following this story in the reg, does anyone know what the guy has actually been charged with (if anything) as they seemed to be using trumped up fraud charges of some sort that sound like they will never stick.

http://www.out-law.com/page-8571

"the police said that they had made the arrest on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and copyright infringement."

It will be interesting to see where they go with that because I was under the impression that copyright infringement was a civil offence and therefore not a matter for the police. Still, torrent files contain no copyright material, it's just a text file and at present we have no law against facilitation of copyright infringement. I've no idea how the conspiracy to defraud works either, the only thing I can think of is conspiracy to defraud the sites users?

High upload ratio means nothing, it's just a number in a database which doesn't prove a thing. It's incredibly easy to fake upload on any bit torrent tracker, you can instantly increase your upload amount on any tracker by sending a single command to the tracker . You can also download one of the open source clients and change a single line of code so the client sends incorrect amounts of uploaded data back to the tracker (and hacked clients are available for download). Many people DO cheat their upload amounts/ratios on these kind of trackers (the ratio trackers based on the old torrentbits site).

Yeah, but oink were freaking nazis about it. the moment you were found out you were cheating you were banned and the person who invited you was given a warning.

I read today that he's currently been released without charge, pending ongoing enquiries.
Which presumably means that they've actually got nothing.