Adelphia watching you like a hawk

So I was about to download the latest BSG episode that people are talking about over in books/TV/movies, and found that my connection was down. Ten minutes of failed experimentation later, I called Adelphia tech support, and was told that my account was “under investigation” by the “policy enforcement team” for, you guessed it, copyright violation.

Now, the only copyright violation I’ve engaged in since the grand old days of Napster has been said BSG episodes - I only installed BitTorrent about a month ago, and only after being told about it via Qt3. This says to me that Adelphia at least is being lots more strict about watching what their users do now that the MPAA is doing the lawsuit thing. They turned my connection back on after giving me a warning, but I’m wondering: has this happened to anyone else? For those of you who do use BitTorrent (for whatever purpose), what kind of ISPs do you have? Should I switch to DSL?

There’s always turning honest - god forbid …

i use speakeasy and have never had a problem with anything like that.

Adelphia is pretty much required to say this sort of thing, though I have no idea how serious they really are about enforcing copyright infringement violations like this. I’ve heard stories from various people, but never experienced it myself. Some have had their service cut entirely, others have had repeated warnings that were never followed up on after multiple violations.

It just so happened that someone from the MPAA was looking at the torrent you were downloading and found what you were downloading/uploading. They forwarded a notice to Adelphia that someone using your IP address was partaking in bad behavior and Adelphia had to take it from there.

I’ve also heard a mix of excuses that people have used. If they’re caught downloading, you could potentially blame it on someone stealing your bandwidth on your insecure wireless LAN. If Adelphia notices an inordinate amount of traffic coming into/going out of your connection, then you could potentially blame it on an errant virus or something. I have no idea if any of these sort of excuses actually work, however.

My suggestion would be to find a tracker site that doesn’t have a lot of traffic like Suprnova or TorrentReactor. Or, better yet, a private one that isn’t open to the general public at all.

Interesting. I have the advantage of being my ISP. We don’t keep track of anything users do beyond their IP addresses (and for some, how much traffic they’ve used, not what traffic), so I guess if asked we could tie it some activity back to a user, but there’d have to be a pretty hefty looking legal document in front of me before I’d consider it. Being able to prove the “what” part is pretty much impossible from my side of the fence.

I’ve always subscribed to the car manufacturer model - sure, we’ve built you this nice shiny car that you can a) crash, b) kill yourself in c) kill someone else in d) etc. , but it’s not the car manufacturers issue if you do those things.

I’d say find a new ISP.

I use adelphia and download all the time from suprnova and have never had an issue.

Chet

Do you have alternative for different cable modem providers? We have several here in town (the cable company was forced to let other ISPs play over their cable) so they never pull crap like this because I flip my service to someone else with a quick phone call and a minimal delay.

Jeez, going after tv episodes. Also, that recent suit by the MPAA apparently sued some people who only had one movie on the computer. Comcast is the only game in town here, no other options. Some people have DSL in a nearby town though, but not available here.

Downloading television episodes, particularly from suprnova, seems to be the most common link I’ve seen from posts on other forums about getting service interrupted or letters of warning from broadband ISPs. In fact, scifi television, particularly Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, seems to be the most common show mentioned in those posts.

I suspect that we’ll see more of this as people become more aware of the availability of shows not yet broadcast on their local channels. The Sci Fi Channel does have something to fear in regards to the BG episodes, because they have a real chance of losing profit from commercials when the series finally airs in January because most of us have already seen the episodes by then thanks to bittorrent.

My recomendation, as others have suggested, is to look for non-suprnova torrent sites to go to whenever possible. Also, consider downloading and installing something along the lines of Peerguardian to block incoming requests from community blacklisted IPs. Be aware of which blocklist you’re using, because some of them include regular government IP addresses, which confused the hell out of me when I couldn’t figure out why the America’s Army website wouldn’t come up. Fortunately a quick disable of the software allowed me to use it normally, and I went and found a blacklist that didn’t contain such sites.