Buying invites from a seller would be the fastest way and no piracy would be required. Getting into PTH via interview requires time and knowledge. From that point you'd still need to commit piracy, spend a lot of time and upload torrents for PU/Invite forum access. Again, buying invites bypasses all of this and is part of why sellers need to be identified and removed quickly. It's easy for you from your perspective, but a copyright org or their vendor would seek to avoid breaking laws and have limited time and knowledge to commit to investigations.
Agreed. Purchasing invites (or accounts) is the simplest method for your basic swarm monitoring activities, the means by which they locate and target specific ISP subscribers. These people are then dispatched C&C and settlement demand notices VIA the ISP. This isn't the smart choice for the long-term industrial espionage type roles we know are currently in operation against probably the majority of the private tracker community (and have been for many years).
These are not paid trolls, these are investigative operations conducted by LEA, they're not going to risk months of work developing a name and reputation, beginning the process of infiltrating staff on various trackers, with an invite tree they know is corrupted and could be used to help detect their presence, or that could be snuffed out with one wrong move. Logic dictates they take the time to learn and participate in the community, and as a recent police report stated regarding the W.CD investigation, there were agents inside the tracker, monitoring activity and searching for weaknesses for several years .
The former type of compromise is minor and relatively easy to defend against. The claims are mostly baseless but they take a few cases to trial when everything lines up well for a win. They do this to scare enough people into believing that such instances with large judgements against the consumer are the norm, are possible (or even probable). The goal is to either stop them from pirating, or to scare them into paying the settlement demand (depending on your current situation).
If you're in the U.S. ignoring the letters from your ISP is not an intelligent plan of action (in Australia you can ignore them all-day-long and nothing will happen). To clarify:
you should ignore all instructions contained within the letters. However, you should take immediate steps to prevent a re-occurrence of this problem, or you run the risk of your internet eventually being disconnected. This means acting proactively:
- Report the occurrence to tracker staff.
- Report the torrent listed in the legal complaint.
- Disable PXT/DHT technologies in your client.
- Purchase a seedbox (or a VPN for your home connection).
- Document new hardware with your trackers.
Additionally, those claiming that the copyright trolls or LEA are legally prevented from uploading/seeding/etc., are profoundly naive.
- Copyright trolls are contracted by the industries themselves, assume they have permission.
- LEA likely has a similar understanding with rights holders. (I'll be surprised if they even bothered formalizing it.)
- The Police don't charge themselves. Nor do rights holders pursue civil claims against their own employees or LEA UC's.
- I would say the CR trolls are limited to sharing content from the industry they represent (if they have any restrictions at all).
- LEA are likely already provided statutory immunity when using these sorts of techniques.
These long-term operations conducted by law enforcement are extremely difficult to detect (if possible at all), and even if you could detect them, there's no real way to defend against them. For all intents and purposes, the activity of the agent is that of a regular tracker operator, they're near impossible to distinguish. This is obviously the pernicious kind of compromise that people either forget, or let their guard down to it, and sometimes that's all it takes.
The first type is a minor inconvenience for a few people. The second type is a significant threat to the community with possible jail time. That's the freedom you'll most miss, beginning with at least a few dozen staffers/uploaders at all the top trackers.
You're on notice. There
is a difference between
assuming these operations are being conducted and with
confirming these operations are being conducted. Action should be taken more aggressively.