Torrent and copyright

The only practical means for a copyright holder to enforce its copyright against persons that download copyrighted works through BitTorrent is to obtain an injunction against end users that download the work, and to also seek monetary damages against the end users. These enforcement procedures have been used, on limited occasions, by the producers or distributors of mainstream movies and television shows.

In recent years, the most aggressive enforcer of copyright by these means has been Malibu Media, LLC, which holds registered US copyrights on a number of pornographic films. It has filed thousands of lawsuits in federal court, including over five hundred lawsuits in the US District Court for the District of Maryland.

In each of its lawsuits — all of which are substantively identical to one another — Malibu Media asserts that an unknown John Doe has infringed copyrights that Malibu Media has registered for its pornographic works, by downloading and copying bits of these works through BitTorrent.

Many federal courts have been reluctant to allow Malibu Media or other plaintiffs to serve subpoenas on ISPs early in the litigation process, and have expressed skepticism of the use of IP addresses to identify file sharing defendants in cases involving pornographic films. Some trial-level courts have held that an IP address alone is insufficient to establish the identity of a defendant that can properly be sued.

In this guide we look at the legalities around torrenting around the world and the possible consequences if you get caught. Want to reduce your risk when torrenting?

Check out our guide to torrenting safely for some helpful tips. And, remember you should always use a VPN when torrenting. Yes, torrenting is legal. There is nothing inherently illegal about the BitTorrent protocol itself.

That is to say torrenting legal content is legal, but downloading and sharing any copyrighted material is definetly illegal. The reason torrenting is as popular as its and almost certainly the reason you are reading this article , is that most people want to download copyrighted material without the holders permission.

In other words, copyright infringement. In most countries, copyright infringement for purely personal use such as most torrenting is a civil offense. This means that copyright owners can take offenders to court in order to obtain civil damages against them for loss of income. This can be ruinously expensive for those unfortunate enough to be made an example of in this way but does not result in a criminal conviction.

In some places notably the UK , copyright infringement is a criminal offense. This means that, in addition to being ordered to pay civil damages, offenders may face criminal prosecution. Outside of Europe and North America, most copyright laws are in line with international norms i.

But there is often little political will to uphold such laws, resulting in copyright holders concentrating their enforcement efforts on more lucrative markets where often very expensive legal action is likely to be successful and to be profitable for the copyright holder. In the US, torrenting for personal use is not a criminal act, although offenders are subject to a lawsuit.

The danger of this should not be underestimated, however, as US citizens are more likely to find themselves sued over copyright offenses than just about anywhere else in the world. In recent years, the United States has seen an alarming rise in the practice of speculative invoicing also known as copyright trolling , where copyright holders transfer intellectual property rights to sketchy legal firms.

Successive British governments have been among the world's most enthusiastic supporters of copyright holder rights. Copyright pirates who share infringing material can now be jailed for up to ten years. A person who infringes copyright in a work by communicating the work to the public commits an offense if the person knows or has reason to believe that they are infringing copyright in the work, and knows or has reason to believe that communicating the work to the public will cause loss to the owner of the copyright, or will expose the owner of the copyright to a risk of loss.

The government claims that only large-scale commercial pirates will be targeted, and no-one has yet got into trouble for torrenting for personal use. But the fact it has refused to set a threshold on how the law can be applied remains deeply worrying and means that, according to the letter of the law, you can be jailed for ten years for torrenting a single movie.

Under government instructions, UK ISPs are among the most fervent blockers of torrent sites in the world. And it is thanks to these blocks on copyright grounds that UK citizens are subject to some of the most extensive internet censorship performed by any country. For many years the Netherlands was a renowned hotbed of copyright piracy thanks to the fact that downloading copyrighted material was legal in the country.

In theory, there were strict limits to this freedom — only movies and music could be downloaded not computer software , and only if you already owned it. In practice, copyright laws were not enforced, resulting in something of a pirate free-for-all. This all changed in , however, when the EU Court of justice declared the local legislation unlawful,. The file was then downloaded 70, times in just one week.

It has kept its debut project since then. Using a torrent is absolutely legal. How is copyright protected? We should first know how content protection on the Internet actually works. Take, for example, the illegal download of a movie from a torrent site. Most often, the attorneys of the production company who own the movie send a letter to the Internet service provider whose services were used to download it, that is, the one who provided the Internet to a user. Up until that point, things generally work as they should.

When a letter or notice arrives at the Internet service provider, it should inform the user that what he or she is doing is illegal, and this is precisely where the problem arises. Many web hosts prohibit hosting a torrent site because of legal issues that might emerge from the content, which can be copyrighted material. The problem occurs with the nature of files that are being posted. Many torrent trackers are written in programs that use MySQL as the database backend, so MySQL hosting is the option that you might think of to serve your torrent website.

It is an essential responsibility of a lawyer to represent you rightly and guide you well through the legal proceedings and carry out all paperwork. Do not waste tour valuable time, and find an expert in this niche to efficiently and effectively settle your case. Share on Facebook Tweet this Story. Online downloading and BitTorrent lawsuits is a quite complicated legal area. To some people, a settlement is a better option.

Defense possibilities in copyright infringement lawsuits Suppose you are not the responsible person, but a member of your family or your friend downloaded any file from your system, this may help you in court. After how many days of downloading can a movie production company sue?

Movie Theater; image courtesy of Bru-nO via Pixabay, www.