Filesharing Overview

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There are people that use P2P for illegal purposes. As a result, the RIAA, MPAA, Ranger, OverPeer and others regularly sweep P2P networks for those who are sharing certain material. They then obtain the IP address of these people and contact them via their ISP, something that is happening increasingly regularly. You need to protect yourself. Why, you ask? Isn’t file sharing legal? Well sure! Like so many things, it all depends on how you use it. Technically, it goes like this:

US law states that sharing technologies (along with guides on how to use them) are not inherently illegal, if non-infringing use can be made of them. These non-infringing uses include sending open source software, public domain files and out of copyright works. However, many of the files shared are copies of copyrighted popular music and movies. Sharing of these copies is illegal in most jurisdictions.

As media companies expand efforts to stop copyright infringement, networks have adapted to constantly become both technologically and legally more difficult to dismantle. This has caused the users that are actually breaking the law to become targets, because while the underlying technology may be legal, the abuse of it by individuals redistributing content in a copyright infringing way is clearly not.

What does that mean for you? It means “don’t be stupid.” Don’t be an easy target, and don’t draw unnecessary attention to yourself. So you have 200 downloaded movies and a million songs. That’s great. Are you openly sharing them, with no PC protection? Not so great. Remember Napster? The Napster service was shut down by an RIAA lawsuit. Napster had been deliberately marketed as a way to distribute audio files without permission from the copyright owners.

Keep it low key. If you do have a large stockpile of CDs and their mp3 counterparts, or DVDs and rips (which would make it legal because you own them anyway, right?), then you will probably want a way to mask your PC, just to avoid an unnecessary haggle with the RIAA. Remember: If you like a product, you should purchase the actual media to support the artist. If you don’t like it, why do you have it? You should get rid of it.

Here is something else to consider: P2P software allows any user to access the files you place or move into your “shared” folder. If you’re not careful, files containing your personal and confidential information could inadvertently be uploaded for distribution on the Internet. This could cause a number of problems, including identity theft.

How to protect your identity

Protecting your IP address while simply browsing the web is easy with programs such as Anonymizer which block your IP address. However using p2p programs anonymously is more difficult. P2P relies on people’s ability to connect to your machine, and to do that they generally must know your IP Address.

There are some methods out there that attempt to fix this.

IP Blocking

A simple solution but slight flawed is to block the IP addresses of ‘p2p enemies’ (RIAA, Overpeer etc). Programs such as PeerGuardian do this. They maintain a list of IP addresses of the ‘p2p enemies’ which can be used as an blocklist add-on to a p2p program.

The flaw in blocking IP addresses is that it is easy for one of the ‘p2p enemies’ to change or create new IP addresses. Though not perfect, it’s a safety step that I highly recommend. It too was included for Windows users.

If, after reading all this, you still have issues with paranoia, you may want to consider FileTopia. It has been on the P2P scene for some time and key to their feature is protection of your IP address. In their own words they offer “strong ciphers and public key techniques for all communications and sophisticated techniques to protect your IP and thus make you truly anonymous”. However many view FileTopia as not been feature rich and it does not have as large a community as other P2P programs. You’ll get safer downloading, but a smaller selection.