C3 Patent and Intellectual Property Law

Aug222011 | Steve O'Donnell

Who doesn’t like free porn?

Who doesn’t like free porn? No one, that’s who. Who likes paying an absurd amount to settle a lawsuit alleging that they committed copyright infringement by downloading porn over BitTorrent? No one, that’s who.

Over the past year or so there have been a number of mass copyright infringements filed across the country against “John Does” for downloading movies. Over 200,000 “Does” have been targeted so far, and that number is almost certainly going to increase. I don’t have a breakdown of how many have been targeted in porn, versus non-porn cases, but based on the calls I get, the porn cases are the busiest now.

Although I’m not sure exactly how people are being targeted since no one has taken discovery yet, I have a guess pieced together from various sources: basically, someone jumps into a torrent and takes screen shots of the IP addresses of everyone in that torrent; the copyright owner takes a look at how many people are sharing their property and gets in contact with a lawyer to see what can be done. At least that’s one possible relationship, I’ve heard of some lawyers receiving offers to sell lists of timestamped IP addresses and some lawyers are actively soliciting clients for these cases. In any situation, the exact relationship might be different, but the basic idea is the same.

Of those 200,000 people, I’m sure some of them were targeted because someone jacked their wireless connection and used it to download. Many people don’t secure their connection, either out of some sense to community, because they just don’t know how, or just don’t want to go through the bother. Other people are using a WEP secured connection and don’t realize that WEP can be cracked in a couple minutes.

Since the best way of avoiding the expense and bother of getting caught up in one of these matters is to shut it down before it happens, there are a few things you can do to make sure unauthorized people aren’t using your connection to download movies, or even worse like what happened to this guy or this one.

First, change your wireless security to WPA2. WEP can be broken into in a few minutes if the person has the right equipment and motivation (we’ll assume they do).

Pick a good password. There are different suggestions about what makes good passwords, and to some extent the password strength needed depends on what you’re protecting. Generally, avoid single words, “password” and “1234” and you’ve probably done enough to keep someone from breaking into your wifi. Adding a number and a capital letter or two is even better. At that point, it’s probably easier for them to pick someone else than to bother trying to crack your password.

You can also hide your SSID so your neighbor won’t even see your network name when they are looking for a connection. Of course, it’s easy to find hidden networks, but it’s an extra step that many won’t bother taking.

Turn on MAC address filtering. This way, each new piece of hardware that connects has to be approved by you. This is a little more annoying in use, since you can’t just type in a password into a new device you want on your network, but it’s very secure.

Doing those things will keep out most unwanted guests, but what if the problem is inside your house? What if it’s your kid that discovered he can get “free” music/games/movies and doesn’t realize that you might be hit with a nasty and expensive lawsuit?

One thing you can do is uninstall any torrent programs on your computers and revoke administrative privileges so they can’t be installed again.

You can also install OpenDNS on your network, which will let you (mostly) shut off access to sites where the torrent files can be downloaded. OpenDNS won’t shut of torrent traffic though, so it’s still important to make sure that your computers don’t have a torrent downloading program. OpenDNS will also let you take a look at what network activity has been going on, so you could detect traffic that you didn’t authorize.

The trouble with the “the downloader is in my house” solutions is that there is always a way around if someone is motivated enough. The best way to keep your son or daughter from downloading and exposing you to liability is probably to talk to them and explain the potential problems.

I’m no computer security professional, so if anyone has other suggestions on how to prevent such unauthorized uses, I’d be happy to hear them.