Torrent download monitoring in India

vivek.krishnan

vivek.krishnan

BLR~ZRS-TX-1-MX
Keymaster
Original discussion here : https://www.techenclave.com/community/threads/how-to-check-if-my-boss-is-spying-on-me.175661/

Lord Nemesis said:
Not necessary at all. Processes can be hidden. Even if it does show up, you will not be allowed/able to kill such processes.

In any case, as others advised, people should assume that activity is always being audited on work laptops.

Some months back, a guy at my company got fired because he happened to download an English movie of torrents using his office laptop while connected to his home internet connection. Apparently he forgot that he was also connected to our company VPN at the time and some of the connections got routed though the company internet gateway though the VPN. As ISP for our public IP get showed up as our company name, The associated movie studio sent a notice to our company. After they tracked and fired this guy, they also conducted an full audit of the logs collected from the office laptops and two more guys got fired for having installed pirated software.
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This happened in India? It would be great to enforce a no torrent policy for the higher ups then.
 
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^^ Yep. This is in India.
I didn't get what you mean by "no torrent policy for higher ups".

The studio had supposedly demanded $1M in damages from my company. So, it was obvious company would take action against the offender.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
^^ Yep. This is in India.
I didn't get what you mean by "no torrent policy for higher ups".

The studio had supposedly demanded $1M in damages from my company. So, it was obvious company would take action against the offender.
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Movie studios monitor torrent downloads?:wideyed:
 
eternoMind said:
Couldn't understand what you meant there. Describe please!
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In the more developed countries, torrent downloads are monitored. I wont go into the nitty gritties of how they monitor, but they send a notice to your ISP. The ISP then forwards the notice/part of the notice/nothing, depending on the ISP, to the user whose IP was caught infringing. They may also reveal your details if a court order is asked for. Then, the extraction part comes in.

In India, this may not be possible for some reasons, such as money, law, etc. But looks like we are next.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
In the more developed countries, torrent downloads are monitored. I wont go into the nitty gritties of how they monitor, but they send a notice to your ISP. The ISP then forwards the notice/part of the notice/nothing, depending on the ISP, to the user whose IP was caught infringing. They may also reveal your details if a court order is asked for. Then, the extraction part comes in.

In India, this may not be possible for some reasons, such as money, law, etc. But looks like we are next.
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Torrent monitoring does not depend on country. It depends on the torrent that they want to track. They get the IP addresses from the swarm list. Filter out the ip addresses coming from countries where the anti piract company has no presence or knows that they will not be able to settle.

The anti piracy companies target educational institutions and big companies especially as they know that they will pay up.
 
Studios don't usually do it themselves. There are companies which provide such services to studios. They track the IPs and if they can identify the source to a known name like in the incident with our company, the studio can act.
 
Lord Nemesis said:
Studios don't usually do it themselves. There are companies which provide such services to studios. They track the IPs and if they can identify the source to a known name like in the incident with our company, the studio can act.
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Yep. Sometimes, they also act on behalf of the studios as well.
 
hotshot05 said:
Torrent monitoring does not depend on country. It depends on the torrent that they want to track. They get the IP addresses from the swarm list. Filter out the ip addresses coming from countries where the anti piract company has no presence or knows that they will not be able to settle.

The anti piracy companies target educational institutions and big companies especially as they know that they will pay up.
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I was talking from the perspective of the studio's country of origin. I dont know of any studio in India which has done the same, or if they have, it's not publicised.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
I was talking from the perspective of the studio's country of origin. I dont know of any studio in India which has done the same, or if they have, it's not publicised.
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They have done something similar for Baahubali and Drishyam. DMCA notices were sent out regularly for both of these movies. If you check in Kickass, you will barely find any version of either of these 2 movies. If you go to Kickass via a link from Google, you will see the error message "File was removed due to complaint".
 
vivek.krishnan said:
In India, this may not be possible for some reasons, such as money, law, etc. But looks like we are next.
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We are already there. Last month's case, where a blockbuster movie was leaked by the Censor board officials and 3 12th Std. kids arrested.
Premam piracy row: Kerala police arrest three teenagers
The anti-piracy wing of Kerala police on Tuesday arrested three youngsters, all plus-two students, for allegedly uploading a copy of the newly-released Malayalam movie ’Premam’ on the net.
The police said a ‘censor copy’ of the movie was uploaded on a Torrent website on June 25. It is not immediately known how they got the copy submitted to the censor board for mandatory clearance.
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Three Censor Board employees arrested in ‘Premam’ piracy case | The Indian Express
Three temporary employees at the regional office of the Censor Board were arrested in connection with the piracy of recent Malayalam blockbuster movie ‘Premam’.
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hotshot05 said:
They have done something similar for Baahubali and Drishyam. DMCA notices were sent out regularly for both of these movies. If you check in Kickass, you will barely find any version of either of these 2 movies. If you go to Kickass via a link from Google, you will see the error message "File was removed due to complaint".
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This is getting OT quickly. I was talking about notices being sent to the ISP, not DMCA. That has been done for quite sometime now, with Reliance obtaining stay orders.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
In the more developed countries, torrent downloads are monitored. I wont go into the nitty gritties of how they monitor, but they send a notice to your ISP. The ISP then forwards the notice/part of the notice/nothing, depending on the ISP, to the user whose IP was caught infringing. They may also reveal your details if a court order is asked for. Then, the extraction part comes in.

In India, this may not be possible for some reasons, such as money, law, etc. But looks like we are next.
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This applies to only downloads from public trackers, right?

Thanks for the explanation.

tommy_vercetti said:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=six+strikes
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Nice but the way Vivek posted about it in a single sentence, it came across as an urban/internet slang phrase.

:shifty:
 
eternoMind said:
This applies to only downloads from public trackers, right?
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Here is the issue - what is legal. Supposing, the anti piracy outfit, opens a account in a private tracker and tracks the torrent then? Will the act of downloading the torrent file from a site offering illegal downloads (never mind that torrents are not the same as pirated files) mean that the anti piracy outfit is breaking the law? Ditto for the public trackers. All these are not clear, so you cannot say anything.

@Crazy_Eddy [and the other mods - I cant remember the handles] Can you split the thread and add link so that the torrent related posts are put in a seperate thread - If you feel the thread is going OT?
 
Came across this comment yesterday on KickAss for a Hindi Dual Audio Movie
KickAss Torrent.JPG
 
vivek.krishnan said:
Here is the issue - what is legal. Supposing, the anti piracy outfit, opens a account in a private tracker and tracks the torrent then? Will the act of downloading the torrent file from a site offering illegal downloads (never mind that torrents are not the same as pirated files) mean that the anti piracy outfit is breaking the law? Ditto for the public trackers. All these are not clear, so you cannot say anything.
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So it is a grey area basically.

@Lord Nemesis There is no question of the legality of the whole thing. It is illegal.
I was curious if this monitoring extended to private trackers as well/or was it possible.
 
eternoMind said:
So it is a grey area basically.
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It is not exactly a grey area for the companies. They let these monitoring agencies have their way.. and since they are the ones calling the shots, they ofc wont define what these agencies or their own people (again the monitoring officials) are doing as piracy.

A few months earlier, one of the popular pvt tracker members started getting notices from 2-3 music record companies. The pvt tracker's staff got down to crunching the numbers and stats and got hold of the ip and membership details about the 'mole' they had in their ranks and banned him.
That was one, but they def have several of such officials sitting within their ranks. That is why the top trackers are darn strict about the membership tree/invite system.

The public tracker peers are the ones who get the maximum notices, cuz the agencies go for the easily accessible/low hanging fruits- The Public trackers.
A layman will google these public trackers first thing up. Even then, there are the real grey areas which the 'pirates' can exploit. Till the time the users feign ignorance about who downloaded the stuff, they get away with it. The moment they panic/confess via email etc that they 'mistakenly' did so, the agencies swoop down and use that confession in a court of law as a proof of their wrongdoing.
 
Spacescreamer said:
A few months earlier, one of the popular pvt tracker members started getting notices from 2-3 music record companies. The pvt tracker's staff got down to crunching the numbers and stats and got hold of the ip and membership details about the 'mole' they had in their ranks and banned him.
That was one, but they def have several of such officials sitting within their ranks. That is why the top trackers are darn strict about the membership tree/invite system.

The public tracker peers are the ones who get the maximum notices, cuz the agencies go for the easily accessible/low hanging fruits- The Public trackers.
A layman will google these public trackers first thing up. Even then, there are the real grey areas which the 'pirates' can exploit. Till the time the users feign ignorance about who downloaded the stuff, they get away with it. The moment they panic/confess via email etc that they 'mistakenly' did so, the agencies swoop down and use that confession in a court of law as a proof of their wrongdoing.
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The second para above is what I believed was the norm but the instance you talk about in the first para shows even private trackers are not beyond reach now. More so considering many of these are the first sources for new 'releases' by individual encoders/teams.

It also indicates how nascent the torrent monitoring scene is around the world, let alone in India.
 
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