Posted by Colin Wilson on 04/29/07 00:31

> > What is the likely hood of someone being sued ? (out of curiosity)
> Very low if you are just occasionally downloading stuff overlooked by Peer
> Guardian.

I'll agree with that, but nothing is perfect. I suspect Davenport
Lyons are trying to make a name for themselves, but their "evidence"
is fairly unlikely to stand up in court as it stands - the problem
being that it's only a civil matter, and they're decided on the
balance of probabilities - if you get a judge willing to side with the
hotshot legal firm as against a quite possibly perfectly innocent
citizen who can't account for the "evidence"...

> Providing you don't have thousands of files available for up-load you should
> be OK.

Bittorrent only shares the one specific file you have the torrent file
open for - bittorrent works by sharing bandwidth, so while you
download from someone with part of a file you need, you'll upload
something you've got to someone else who needs it.

One thing to bear in mind is that depending on which bittorrent client
you use, you can also set an "encrypted" flag which may help further
obscure the traffic, although in this instance it's primarily from
your own ISP (many "shape" traffic - aka, heavily restrict connection
speeds) - not from anyone who might want to sue you :-}

As Phil said, ideally bittorrent relies on the co-operation of the
users, and if you stop "seeding" as soon as you get the file yourself,
the system won't work - so if you allow for a little over-run, as he
suggests, a ratio of 1.5 means for every 1Mb you download, you upload
1.5Mb

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