Torrents

[Jackie]

Anyone know about these and the risk of being sued in France for downloading material that has a copyright and how would you know anyway?........J

[sid]

[quote user="Jackie"]...and how would you know anyway?........J

[/quote]

I'm sure you'd know well enough [;-)]

I think you already know what Torrents are judging by the second part of your question!

This method of downloading large files seems to work very well and is gaining popularity and there is a lot of copyright material out there just waiting for you. Films, music and so on.

Yes, it's illegal. There has been a lot of discussion on this forum about the rights and wrongs of monitoring our internet access and the right to privacy etc. so it'll probably be stamped on one day.

Sid 

[Jackie]

Thanks for that Sid but I really don't know how you would know as the Torrent sites don't seem to give that information. I have been looking on the web at all sorts of sites, including the BBC, to find up to date info on this and to answer my own question.

There has been a suggestion that French Law has or will be changed to allow P2P torrents to be down and uploaded but with an additional charge on the ISP bill to be handed to the record producers etc. Also there has been a mention of being caught doing this and three strikes and your out, i.e. internet cut off. Not sure which is correct and would like to know if I am going to be a target if I do this.

What I cannot find is what the situation is now in France and when changes to the law have happened or will happen and what those changes will be. Any gen anyone?.........J

[Bob T]

Torrents are not in any way illegal. It is what you download as a torrent that can be though. Many linux providers use torrent to allow people to download their free software, I downloaded 4 GB of SUSE Linux as a torrent and it is completely legal.

[Jackie]

Not sure what Linux is but will find out, thanks for the replies. I understand that torrent handling software is not illegal but the material downloaded or uploaded by it might have a copyright and therefore be illegal in some countries. I gather that uploads may happen automatically when you download and it may be that the uploads could be the illegal bit. There has been much on the web about this like

http://daledietrich.com/imedia/category/big-media/bigmedia-v-p2p-users/

which indicates that a French school teacher was prosecuted, post date Dec 2006 and this from the BBC in March 2006

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4770458.stm

and this again in March 2006

http://torrentfreak.com/record-labels-want-to-kill-french-filesharing-law/.

How does the European parliament decision http://www.boingboing.net/2008/01/22/proposal-to-extend-e.html affect

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7110024.stm posted in Dec 2007

All I want to do is to download some old radio progs/plays/serials not available on OTR sites which remind me of my youth and maybe to download some CD tracks that I have on vinyl in my ancient record collection. I have no intention of mass copying and selling stuff which I would not approve of in any case. Another issue is a suggestion that to copy a CD or DVD may not be legal in France so what to do if you want a copy of a disk you have bought in your car? The bottom line is what is currently legal to do in France and is the current law, whatever it is, going to change and when?..............J

[sid]

Jackie

BobT is correct of course; the method is not illegal but a lot of the material is.

I was being cynical [;-)] but generally films and music and software, and indeed most lot of the torrent stuff are copyright and that's why they're offered in this manner, to avoid payment and the payment of royalties to the originator. The torrent sites don't mention copyright because it's generally accepted that that's why you'd be there in the first place. So if you wanted to download the latest James Bond film for free for example it's DEFINTELY going to be an illegal copy. The same with music, the copyright for a lot of music doesn't expire for 70 years (I think!). Some broadcasters, like the BBC, allow you to view certain programmes on demand upto a week after the initial broadcast and that is obviously OK but you don't download them, you just use their player program.

In order to get caught the ISP would have to monitor the sites you access and also examine whatever it is you download. Big Brother! I don't like the idea that someone has his original work 'stolen' on the internet, but I hate the idea of being monitored.

You take your chance I'm afraid.

As for copying a CD which you already own; if it's for your own use that's generally regarded as acceptable, although strictly I think the law doesn't allow it. If you copy it for someone else, that breaches copyright.

Going slightly off-topic... when we buy sheet music for our band the full set will contain a score for the conductor and a number of individual parts for the players. If we happen to have, for example, 6 trumpets in our band instead of the standard 4, you'd think that you could photocopy 2 additional parts, but that breaches the copyright!!

Sid  

[Jackie]

Right in view of the uncertainty of the situation I have deleted my test download but am running into problems. I am using a Dell Inspiron 531 running the French version of Vista Home premium and have had the following  problems deleting empty music file names. 

The contents of the files seem to have gone but when I type the name of the artist into the search box just above the start button several tracks are listed still. If I right click and then delete I get a message saying the MP3 file does not exist and do I want to create it. If I say yes it is then possible to delete it from the list. The file appears in the waste bin and I can empty it but when I go back and search again it reappears in the list.

If I try to delete it again the message says it does not exist and I should verify the location of the file and retry again. If I right click on the file and go to the location of the file I can delete it from there and from the waste bin but on searching again I get the same results as above. I really want to delete these names of empty files, any suggestions folks?

I admit that I am not very clever when it comes to computers and my version of Vista being in French does not help but I would really appreciate any advice or pointers……….J

[Danny]

two suggestions - but I am not sure what applications( programs) you have been using to download any torrents...

1

download and run CCleaner from www.ccleaner.com it should clear out lots of temporary files and things on your computer. Read the online help (click bottom left corner of window) if you need help. Your computer keep things in memory, like names of recent files etc for your convenience but the references remain unless they are cleared.

2

uninstall any programs that you were using to download files.

Even if you do delete the files and names etc, most things are recoverable unless they are overwritten by more data. It might be a good idea to learn a bit more about how thing work so that you understand better. Have a look online here for example

Danny

[AnOther]

The true name is not simply Torrent but Bittorrent and if you Google it you'll find any number of explainations of what it is and how it works. It's commonly referred to as P2P (Peer-2-Peer) also.

In a nutshell when you download something, via eMule say, you are not getting it from any one central server but from other eMule users PC's and indeed, other eMule users may be simultaneously getting parts of it from your own PC as you yourself are downloading it and if your download is illegal then the resultant upload is as well. You will in effect become a supplier of copyrighted material !

As others have pointed out Bittorrent or P2P client programmes such as eMule and Kazza etc. are not illegal in themselves but their overwhelming raison d'etre is that of facilitating the sharing of copyrighted software, music and films which is.

That said the technology is quite clever and as a very efficient means of distributing material is increasingly being employed legitimately, in fact from what I can understand the BBC iPlayer seems to be nothing more than a Bittorrent/P2P client so if Mr Sarkozy is seeking to regard use of P2P as evidence of illegal activity then he (or rather the ISP's who will be policing it) will have a great deal of work to do deciding what is legitimate and what is not. I wonder who's going to be paying for that ? 

[Jackie]

Thanks for the info. I was using Miro BitZip which has been deleted though search still finds references to it. I have ccleaner and run it several times having read the help file but to no avail I am afraid. Tried several times starting the box in safe mode. The first time I did this it found the files and appeared to let them be deleted but they just appeared again on doing a search. Now when trying this search does not find the file names but there they are when restarted in normal mode and search tried again, weird!

[Mr Coeur de Lion]

I heard a rumour that Sarkovzki (or whatever his name is) is looking at increasing the cost of internet use and using that money to pay royaltes. I guess if he does this, then it will become legal to download material that is currently illegal to download. Otherwise, people will be paying extra for nothing, which must also be theft?

[AnOther]

I'd heard this also but I cannot fathom how it could possibly work.

Even working under the dubious assumption that it would "legitimise" the downloading of copyright material, and I don't for one second accept that such a scheme would, without a complete and thorough analysis of all downloaded material how would legal/illegal downloads be identified and how would the tax (for that is what it would be) be distributed to the rightful copyright holders ?

Any money raised by a tax on Internet use would likely be swallowed up in it's own administration anyway.

[Jackie]

Update: Thanks for the information folks. In fact I have found that rebuilding the search index has removed the unwanted titles. All other related software has also been deleted and ccleaner and file shredder (mid range algorithm what ever that is!) run again so now, I hope, this is a clean machine. Thanks to all for the help. As to what the law is currently in France it looks rather too complex for me to understand just now so I will have none of it until it is more clear.......................J

[AnOther]

Somebody actually USING Search Indexing good grief [:-))] [:D]

Glad you're sorted anyway and your new abstinence policy is maybe not the worst [;-)]

[Jackie]

Just a thought! Does Vista put copies of all files on recovery drive D (Dell Inspiron 531) or just the O.S and programmes?...................J

[AnOther]

Not 100% sure what you mean but I think you're maybe confusing the purpose of the D drive.

If I'm correct then D is a recovery partition which can be used to recover the working partition C in case of corruption or damage which prevents Vista running properly. It's usually an option of last resort.

I don't think Vista will "put" anything on D by itself although it's possible that Vista's builtin backup programme might write stuff to it. I'm not familair enough with Dell laptops to say how they are configured.