Student house & downloading files via torrents

[Andehh]

Next year im moving into a house with 4 other guys. A couple of them are fairly heavy downloaders via torrents & the like.

Say one of them downloads a movie & gets caught for it. Do they (RIAA, UK equivilent etc) go after him or the whole house?
We will all connect via a router & sky BB connection.


cheers guys

[Agent]

They will go after the person who has the internet registered in their name first.

Thats putting aside the fact that torrenting on a network like that will kill most things including browsing. We had to block torrents in the end due to one out of 4 of us taking the pee.

[Clunk]

[Andehh]

Then it would be up to the register'd to convince his mate to do the right thing & cough up the money?

Is there any way to block torrents via router? Do torrents all use similar ports?

[Main]

Unless you set everything up properly and limit each user (regardless of whether they're downloading all at the same time or not) so as not to max out the line your router is going to like to die a lot under the stress. Not nice having to reset the thing just to drop all the connections long enough check your emails.

In my experience the heaviest downloaders are usually also the hardest to get the phonebill cut out of....


EDIT: To answer your question, you can set different computers running torrent clients to use different ports, throttle connections, download, upload etc. to make them all work, they just won't all work fast. Your ISP will probably be running some sort of traffic shaping during peak hours (6pm-12am) that will cripple torrents and the like.

[TAKTAK]

Originally Posted by Clunk

no,no, no, torrents not tarrents

[Disturbedguy]

You could block the ports on the router of the programs they use.

[Andehh]

ok then, Ill probably wait till we move in and see if it gets out of hand then act on that if it does. Thanks for all the replies!

[TooNice]

If I am not mistaken, some 'Gaming' routers prioritise packets so that to minimise browsing/gaming distruption, don't they?

[G4Z]

Meh, wouldn't put much stock in gaming routers.

imo the only way round it is to agree acceptable times to torrent, so maybe you agree to ban it between 6pm and 2am so you can browse and game on an evening. No harm in torrenting when your all at uni or in bed.

As far as legal threats go all you have to do is deny everything, how are they gonna prove who did it? likelihood is if it's not you then you won't know who did it anyway.

[Whiternoise]

In the event that they catch you, or your household, they will catch you via your IP address. You can probably respond to them that it's a shared household and that they're more than welcome to check your computer. The way that they operate is by latching onto torrents that they have the rights to, they then watch who is sharing it, get the IP's and then use that as evidence against you by contacting your ISP, etc. It's pretty good evidence since it's quite clear what you were doing.

If your mate doesn't simply pay up, then it would have to be settled in court i imagine. That way they would search your computers for traces of the files, and you would be able to prove it wasn't you.

Agreeing for a time to torrent/download is probably a good idea, since you've got very good arguments for them not doing it at your "peak" times. Oh and watch out for them downloading new releases of albums/films, that's just asking for it.

http://www.engadget.com/2007/08/31/k...comes-calling/ is an interesting read.

[Stringent]

There are some routers which have program control in which they can be allowed or not. I think in Netgear ones its under services/

[Betty_Swallocks]

Originally Posted by Agent

Thats putting aside the fact that torrenting on a network like that will kill most things including browsing. We had to block torrents in the end due to one out of 4 of us taking the pee.

I've found that. Why is that? I have a 20Mb connection. A torrent coming in at about 20k can slow the entire network down to unuseable levels sometimes.

[Steve]

Torrents cause problems not because of the bandwidth used, but the sheer number of connections they open.

[Mblaster]

I had the same problem living with 4 other people a couple years back, 2 of them heavy torrent users, setup QoS on the router to de-proiritize torrent traffic and prioritize my IP (I was the only IT knowledgable one ), and limited the upload/download bandwidth for any one IP so one person couldn't take all the bandwidth.

Worked OK most of the time, although when multiple people downloaded I lagged sometimes. If you don't mind annoying them I guess you could just block all torrent traffic by only opening the required ports, unless torrents can run through port 80/25/etc ... never tried it.

[mikerr]

Torrents mess my network up, so I sometimes use next doors wifi for that