So I got an email earlier today notifying me that Comcast had received notice of copyright infringement against me for apparently torrenting what appears to be a season of Black Sails. Now I’ll first point out that I’ve never torrented anything, and am as a general rule not into the whole piracy thing - well, not since my Commodore 64 days at least. But the email is very specific, has the MP4 filename, the time it happened (right after 4pm my time, evidently), everything. Given that I know I didn’t do this, what should I be doing? Is this worth protesting with Comcast, or am I just going to get a “sure, buddy, whatever” response? And what is the most likely cause or vector of this whole thing, is somebody snaking my wi-fi, or should I be scrubbing for malware? I mean, more than normal? How annoying.
Yeah, I’d change my wifi password in case someone is leeching. Do you have any friends who come over and use your wifi on their phone that you could see running a torrent client on their phone?
I am pretty confident nobody’s been in my house lately that had the time or the inclination to use my wifi to torrent stuff. And like I said, they notice actually had the specific time, 4pm, and nobody was in the house. Now I guess someone could have been sitting on my doorstep doing it, if they really wanted to, so yeah I’ll change my passwords. Here are some details from the email:
Infringing Work: Black Sails
Filename: Black Sails - Season 1 (HDTV)/Black.Sails.S01E02.HDTV.x264-KILLERS.mp4
Infringement Date: 2018-12-11 00:19:14.0 UTC
Infringement Type: bittorrent
Infringement Method: bittorrent
A whole season in HD, I would guess that’s a pretty big file and would take some time, especially over wi-fi. Now I’m wondering if someone spoofed my IP address? Maybe I’m getting paranoid.
That’s just one episode of the season, season 1, episode 2. Hopefully you don’t get a lot more letters in the next few days!
Oh I see, E02 is episode 2? Yeah, that would suck.
I found this on Google.
I used the exact title of your thread, heh.
Oh, and I would just call them. Despite all the customer service horror stories you read on the Internet, this usually works fine.
Well, I am not yet a repeat offender, fingers crossed.
I almost lost campus internet access my freshman year when I immediately sprung all three strikes on the Harry Potter series ebooks, each one counting as a separate case, which I thought was bullshit, since they all got downloaded at the same time. . . I mean, you know, still on me for stealing, but still.
Luckily, dad had made buddies with some high-ranking network admin dude at the university, talking about mainframe programming with him while I was considering the school, so he cut me some slack. Whew!
We process these at work. Generally it’s up to the ISP to handle how they want to notify and possibly suspend a customer. You arent being served nor ordered to pay anything at this point. I’m with the others here, change your wifi password and/or turn your router off while not home. Something is fishy. Check your devices on the network as well. If you have anything old, unprotected or out of date, shut it off.
Yeah, that’s a good thought too. No reason to leave it on full time.
A couple of questions here… did Comcast actually threaten to do anything?
Also, I’m kind of surprised that anyone would be able to file a complaint against you specifically, unless you have some static IP from comcast. I mean, I guess comcast could technically check old records to see who had a given IP at some given point in time, but it seems like more work than they’d bother doing.
This is how it almost always works. Maybe just “always” - your ISP gives you a static IP, and you are responsible for the traffic on it.
My guess is someone spoofed that IP (probably randomly) and now it looks like @divedivedive is at fault.
I would be very sure to call this in and profess your innocence, explain the situation to them and ask for suggestions on their end.
On the flipside, most ISPs have a sort of threshold value of copyright strikes. They don’t really do anything except notify you until you hit some invisible threshold, then they cut off the account. You can usually call in to get it corrected, promising to “secure your wifi” and “give your kids a stern talking to” or whatever that particular rep’s script recommends.
Monday at 4 PM, Episode 2. Sounds like a neighbor’s kid got home from school and decided he wanted to watch the rest of the series.
I don’t keep up with vulnerabilities, but if you have WPS you should disable it. You’re of course not using WEP anymore unless your router is 5 years old. How easy is it to bruteforce WPA2 now?
Just got off the phone with Comcast, they went down what I imagine is a fairly standard script. They can see that someone logged through a peer-to-peer network with my Comcast account, did I have knowledge of anyone who might have done this? I replied no, the only people who use my account are my family, and since I know I didn’t do it, and my wife is not especially shall we say, tech savvy, and my kids are 4 and 6 years old, I am reasonably confident that no one in my household was bit torrenting any content.
Next was to ask me to secure my network as well as possible, update my wi-fi and Comcast account passwords, both of which I did last night. Other than that, we keep an eye on things and see if it happens again. They mentioned that there are levels to this sort of follow-up, kind of like what @ArmandoPenblade was talking about I think, and I’m currently at level zero because this is my first complaint. They said we have lots of options that won’t involve penalties since we’re getting in front of this early. So, uh, wait and see I guess?
To answer @wisefool’s question, yeah I don’t use WPS or WEP, and my wi-fi authentication is WPA2. I’m not naïve enough to believe this can’t be broken, but it’s about as secure as I can make it. Maybe whoever did this will decide it’s not worth the effort to keep hacking me or whatever, and move on.
Just about every American ISP keeps a running database for a specific amount of time of which customer holds which IP throughout the record keeping timeline. One reason for that is a large number of record requests due to crimes, etc. DMCA’s are one of those, and while most ISP’s don’t (immediately) send the user information on due to a DMCA request, they can take the time/IP presented on the DMCA and do a quick customer lookup, thus forwarding on the message on to their customer who aligns with their records for that time/IP.
The companies pushing the DMCA’s monitor or even actively fish out files related to the content they are attempting to legally protect. IPs connecting are gathered, and via a mostly automated process, are forwarded on to the requisite ISP with the details involved. Again, they monitor connections to either get or attempt to get the files, via torrent or similar services. This is more than something like caller-id where they see what is presented, it is actively looking at the connecting IPs within the packets as received on the end server.
This is actually a lot harder to do on an ISP than you might think. Spoofing an IP outside of your ISP’s CIDR routes is futile. The return traffic would never get back to you. Spoofing an IP on the same ISP is often also futile, as they (usually) have a form of protection on the MAC/IP database of clients connected within an area. Again, without manipulating that, the traffic would never get back. This DMCA notice is probably generated from a successful transfer of the file, so that would mean someone able to manipulate either that database in order to use someone else’s IP, or someone further up the line able to manipulate and modify traffic to the ISP entirely. Neither of those is a small-time, neighborhood kid kind of thing.
Due to that, it would be a good idea for @divedivedive to check devices on his network for anything suspicious. An old PC with malware that installed a proxy host of some sort could just as well be the culprit versus a neighbor able to hack ISP gear.
Also, though I don’t condone any of you doing it, if you ARE torrenting, use a proxy or VPN to hide your IP.
Forgot to reply to this: first of all, no, there was no threat of anything, no legal action or loss of service, though Comcast reserves the right to the latter if they detect more such downloads. They also did ask me to verify that I couldn’t find the file in question on any of my devices, which I did. Malwarebytes scan hasn’t turned up anything either, so I’m hoping just re-securing my network will do the trick.
As to the second part of the question, Starz, the ones who filed the complaint, didn’t file it against me personally. I don’t believe they have any idea who I am nor how to identify me or I probably would have gotten a much less pleasant notification of infringement. I think what happened was that they could identify that one of their files was taken by someone at such-and-such IP address, and knowing that this IP belonged to Comcast then notified them that hey, one of their users is stealing their crap! And then Comcast turned around and notified me, being the person who currently uses that IP address. I guess in this one particular instance, I can thank my corporate overlords that Comcast sits as a buffer between me and a likely pissed-off content creator.