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 ·Shaw
2 edits | Telus is notifying you if you download prohibited content »bit.ly/xy1eth
Entertainment and music industries in the U.S. are hoping that a "notice and notice" program which sends warnings about illegal downloading will deter internet users from sharing copyrighted material.
Telus says it passes on these notices, mainly from movie and software industries, to alert its Canadian customers that their IP addresses have been identified for potential copyright infringement.
Spokesman Shawn Hall says the company simply alerts customers of the allegations and does not provide personal information to the complainant. He maintains that many people are surprised to find out that copyrighted or illegally downloaded material is even on their computer.
"Sometimes we find that there's someone in the household who's maybe doing something that the account holder -- so Mom and Dad -- might not want to be happening," he told CTV's Steele on Your Side.
Sometimes customers learn they have an unprotected Wi-Fi network and one of their neighbours is illegally downloading, Hall said.
It could also be something more sinister: "Maybe they have a computer virus or other malware on there," he added.
A Steele on Your Side viewer named Andrew wrote in after saying that he'd received a notice from Telus alerting him that a copy of the movie ‘Thor' was detected on his laptop. He wondered if Telus was going to take action against him.
Telus maintains that it will not hand over personal information, such as user name, address or other confidential information, without a proper court warrant, but it does warn that producers can take legal action against consumers if they're illegally downloading copyrighted material.
There are also other risks associated with illegal downloading -- it's one of the most common ways to contract a computer virus or spyware.
Earlier this month, Shaw Cable said it would begin sending out notices to its internet customers about their illegal downloading. The move follows a request to the company from Warner Brothers Entertainment asking to remind its customers that copyright infringement is illegal.
Canadian internet users are tracked through their IP address when they download material.
More than 100,000 "notice and notice" alerts have been sent to Canadian internet users over the past five years. The program widely differs from the "notice and take-down" approach used in parts of the U.S., where many internet service providers are forced to remove the illegal content of their users. |
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| Re: letter in the mail from telus if you download illegally Got one a while back ignored it , next one I get i will report it as spam |
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| reply to Bandito
I always ask for permission first before I download so I never have to worry. |
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 JammerMan79Premium,VIP
join:2004-05-13
Prince George, BC
kudos:10 | reply to Bandito
Nothing new... TELUS has been passing them on for years.
The RIAA and MPIA seem for forget that the whole world does not follow the USA's laws
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I may work for, but do not necessarily represent the views and beliefs of TELUS Communications. |
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Reviews:
·Shaw
| Cool, cuz it's in the news this evening on CTV. Another scare tactic? I think there are serious privacy issues here.
What everyone should do is reply back to the email and say, thank you, now I am ditching Telus for your competitor. That should stop the emails, lol. |
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CR123
join:2006-11-04
Vancouver, BC | No privacy issues really, the CTV story kind of misrepresents it I think.
I haven't seen the letter, but does it really say that a copy of the movie 'Thor' was detected on a specific PC? Or does it say that Bittorrent honeypots detected a download of the movie from an IP that TELUS has on record as having been leased to the customer at the time?
It's not like TELUS is providing any information, just passing on info targeted at the customer. I guess they could choose not to, but it's between the industry associations and the customers (minus any CYA reactions from TELUS out of fear of getting sued for millions for enabling theft, but I think they know that wouldn't get far...).
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- The content of this post is my opinion, and does not reflect the opinions of my employer. - |
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| I come across clients with the letters on occasion. The letters do identify the specific movie or file that was downloaded.
@Bandito: Responding to the emails won't benefit you any regardless of what you type in the reply. They go straight to the Abuse team. It most definitely will NOT stop the emails from coming to you.
I'm not sure how many notices have to be sent within a specific timeframe for Telus to actually do anything to the user getting the notices. It's been quite a while since I've seen an account suspended for chronic infringement / ignored warnings. |
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Reviews:
·Shaw
| reply to CR123
said by CR123:No privacy issues really, the CTV story kind of
misrepresents it I think. Of course there is privacy issues. As soon as your ISP identifies the content of what your're downloading that's an invasion of your privacy. You could be downloading confidential material and even though it's not prohibited or illegal material, they obviously have already identified the content of what you're downloading. Releasing the information to a third party is an entirely more serious different matter, imo. And to make matters worse Stephen Harper and the Conservatives want to allow law enforcement to access your computer data from your ISP without a search warrant. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see where this is heading. |
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Mike_C
join:2007-07-19
Vancouver, BC | It's not the ISP that identifies what you are doing. It's the copyright holder that sends that information to ISPs along with an IP address the copyright holder has found to be downloading that information. No information is released in that process to a third party. It's quite the opposite. You may want to read up a bit more how that type of process works.
If you are so worried / paranoid, go look through your terms of service that you agreed to when you signed up for internet (from ANY ISP) and you'll see each ISP spells out exactly what to expect.
Telus ADSL ToS: »telus.com/content/internet/high-···erms.jsp
Telus Optik TV ToS: »telus.com/content/tv/optik/clien···erms.jsp |
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| reply to nss_tech
said by nss_tech:I come across clients with the letters on occasion. The letters do identify the specific movie or file that was downloaded. Allegedly downloaded, of course  |
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| reply to JammerMan79
said by JammerMan79:Nothing new... TELUS has been passing them on for years.
The RIAA and MPIA seem for forget that the whole world does not follow the USA's laws
The real question is; why is Telus doing this when this is not the USA and there is no legal implication to the Telus customer, whatsoever? |
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JammerMan79Premium,VIP
join:2004-05-13
Prince George, BC
kudos:10 | reply to Bandito
said by Bandito:said by CR123:No privacy issues really, the CTV story kind of
misrepresents it I think. Of course there is privacy issues. As soon as your ISP identifies the content of what your're downloading that's an invasion of your privacy. You could be downloading confidential material and even though it's not prohibited or illegal material, they obviously have already identified the content of what you're downloading. Releasing the information to a third party is an entirely more serious different matter, imo. And to make matters worse Stephen Harper and the Conservatives want to allow law enforcement to access your computer data from your ISP without a search warrant. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to see where this is heading. ... That's not what's happening here... TELUS is not looking at what your doing nor is TELUS releasing any of your personal information.... TELUS is simply passing a message on
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I may work for, but do not necessarily represent the views and beliefs of TELUS Communications. |
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JammerMan79Premium,VIP
join:2004-05-13
Prince George, BC
kudos:10 | reply to Mister M
said by Mister M:said by JammerMan79:Nothing new... TELUS has been passing them on for years.
The RIAA and MPIA seem for forget that the whole world does not follow the USA's laws
The real question is; why is Telus doing this when this is not the USA and there is no legal implication to the Telus customer, whatsoever? Because regardless of whether is a valid complaint... Is probably a good idea to have the information that a complaint has been filled against you (my opinion)
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I may work for, but do not necessarily represent the views and beliefs of TELUS Communications. |
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Reviews:
·Shaw
| reply to JammerMan79
But how can you say that they're not looking? They know where you've been? Tell me how that's not looking? Besides, Bill C-11 may make this a big issue: »ca.news.yahoo.com/blogs/right-cl···243.html |
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| reply to JammerMan79
said by JammerMan79:Because regardless of whether is a valid complaint... That's where you lost me. |
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CR123
join:2006-11-04
Vancouver, BC | reply to Bandito
said by Bandito:But how can you say that they're not looking? They know where you've been? Tell me how that's not looking?
Argh, TELUS isn't the originator of the notices. They receive notices that your IP has been downloading copyrighted material. All they do is look up your IP, then forward that they've recieved a complaint to your email. They put some boilerplate in the email about Terms of Service, I believe.
TELUS doesn't track what you've been downloading / uploading.
It's simple for the RIAA/MPAA to get IP addresses that are downloading or sharing any given file on P2P networks.
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- The content of this post is my opinion, and does not reflect the opinions of my employer. - |
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Kruisey
join:2006-12-30
Vancouver, BC | reply to Mister M
I do not believe that Telus is snooping on everyone.
I personally think just like Hydro(Electricity) when they notice certain accounts have very high downloads they check it out. |
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| reply to Mister M
said by Mister M:That's where you lost me. If I'm interpreting your post correctly then I think you're choosing to be lost. You're looking for controversy or issue where none exists.
Telus is doing its clients a service by receiving notices from content owners and passing them along to clients without revealing any client information back to the content owner. It is important for Telus clients to know that they are being tracked and to know that potentially, if not now but in the future, they could be the target of legal action by the content owner.
If Telus didn't pass along the notices then many of Telus' clients would be living in blissful ignorance until the moment they became the target of a lawsuit. Its naive to believe that these lawsuits will never make their way to Canada.
Content owners are going to monitor traffic on the internet and they are going to send claims to ISPs. That is going to happen no matter what. The only question is whether the ISP should forward those claims on to the impact clients. Why would anyone choose to be unaware?
As to whether the claims are valid or not, don't fool yourself. The claims by the content owners are valid and almost always accurate. There are sometimes corner cases of changed IPs etc, but those are so rare. If you get a notice that your connection was downloading/uploading Thor then your connection was almost certainly being used, which is your responsibility as the account holder.
N.B. Please don't interpret this post as suggesting that I support the methods used by content owners in the US court system. I don't. I firmly believe that content owners should avoid piracy by increasing the availability of legal distribution methods that consumers crave rather than attempting to preserve existing methods that are clearly outdated. |
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| reply to Bandito
Re: Telus is notifying you if you download prohibited content for the scared people, check out the links below to see how a users IP address can be known to others..
Otherwise users need to be aware of a phishing scam where some Lawyer(who wants his license to practice revoked), or digital criminal, will send out random notices to random email address's, to extort money out of people without any real evidence(fraud). Panicky people pay up with a credit card and then the phisher steals that cards numbers for all sorts of theft.
A notice sent to an ISP to 'forward' to the registered user for the infringement would need a warrant to name the user and the warrant can be challenged(like most warrants) before the registered users name can be released. Do not deal direct with the copyright holder and just use a middleman to avoid future nightmares of harassment by the copyright mafiaa.
For an ISP to see into your computer, it is called 'hacking'. Some dip sh*t is a bit confused in the article quoted, as an ISP should never hack their way through the router into a clients computer to see whats in there. Punishment depends on how much money is in the hackers bank account. Rogers does a 'man in the middle attack'(inserts system notices into the users data stream and displays in their browser), which is illegal for random people to do, based on bank account amount. DPI by the other big ISP's in Canada is a nightmare for client security. Telus does not DPI.
In some cases in the U.S., Shakedown notices may be marked as "pay $1500 in court or just pay $700 now, to avoid court", as a quick way to frighten people to pay up quick without asking for detailed evidence of whatever crime that was committed for a court of law.
Some shady Lawyers send out notices to ISP's in some countries(and they have been kicked to the curb by Judges) in a quick money making scheme and they try to avoid the courts, since they would have to present actual evidence of the actual user and actual full download, along with time codes. Some producers in the pr0n industry shame illegal downloaders with notices of publishing their names for instant payments. Germany is a $60 fine for having an open router.
Canadian government caught committing copyright piracy. Some corrupt countries, under orders by the music and movie industry, might say the 'registered bill paying user of that IP address' must be punished with massive fines and disconnection(without federal courts and instead by a biased ten minute trial at a tribunal). But the IP could be an infected computer(Bot) or an open router(default settings) or that friend of your kid with his laptop.
»torrentfreak.com/busted-canadian···-120101/
Copyright Mafiaa says that an IP Address can't convict,,, if you are a billionaire and own politicians...
»torrentfreak.com/riaa-someone-el···entfreak
Another way the copyright mafiaa gets an IP address is via a 'honey pot'. A website, or P2P uploading computer, that offers shady looking downloads of brand new movies and music and then the IP address's downloading that data will be sent a notice to pay up. The frightened people do not question how the copyright mafiaa got their IP address for the download. Something for the courts to decide and you can even ask for a Judge(via a retrial) who understands the Internet and how data can be fudged or manipulated.
Part of the Canadian governments unconstitutional crime bill want to store all users data for 2 years worth of time, which is the government/police 'committing an unlawful search and seizure, without any evidence of a crime having or going to be committed'.
Michael Geist digital law blog for more information.
»www.michaelgeist.ca/
An article showing that digital locks on music is dumb. If the music is good, people will buy it. If an artist sells his own works/albums for $5 or $10 online with or without locks and makes one million dollars profit? That is a success story, since the artist didn't need the recording industry to take a 70% cut of his works while selling the album at $30.
»www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6268/125/ |
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| reply to Bandito
I agree that Telus isn't doing anything wrong here. The RIAA/MPAA/etc continues to crank out these notices, justified or not, and sends them to ISPs. There are legal precedents (although I am not sure about in Canada) for courts compelling ISPs to disclose the accused customers. So if a big corporation is sending warning letters intended for the holder of your ISP account, that is something you will want to know about sooner rather than later, and Telus is just acting as a forwarding service. In general if it gets to the point of becoming a lawsuit, most ethical ISPs (including Telus, I hope) will fight to keep their customers' identities private. |
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