How to send spammers “Copyright violation” DMCA notices for BitTorrent piracy

My ISP have gotten quite a lot of spam lately from lawfirms about supposed BitTorrent piracy of movies and television shows I’ve never heard of - which is annoying. I also see quite a lot of crawling done by web spiders who do not obey robots.txt. These spiders look for e-mail addresses and spam them - which is also annoying. Can these annoying things be combined? Yes, they can.
“Copies of the Warner Brothers Movie “300″ are being torrented from your server identified herein”

..said one of the letters my ISP got from Marc Brandon, Vice-President, Anti-Piracy Internet Operations, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc a few weeks ago. The problem with their story is that the movie 300 was not being torrented from the server in question, the references file had never been on the server, and I had never even heard of the movie “300″ until I got this notice.

And more spam with claims of “Copyright violation” of other movies and TV-shows I’d never heard of - nor had on my server - ticked in at my ISP the following weeks.
How BitTorrent works

BitTorrent works like this: You download a torrent file which contains a HASH for a file and a tracker IP and port. Your BitTorrent then connects to the tracker, gets a list of other peers and then connects to these peers to get parts of the file(s) the torrent has hashes for.

It seems clear from the supposed “copyright violation” claims that the DMCA notice spamming corporations such as Warner Bros. hire corporations who just go to trackers, download the list of IPs listed there and then claim every IP listed on that tracker is somehow hosting a copy of their file.

However, trackers are just URL resources, just like other resources on the Internet - and look like this:

http://tpb.tracker.thepiratebay.org/announce
?info_hash=%09%15%2A%5F%90%5Bh%80%84%EA%40p%3Fh%83%27%CE%2F%8C%F4
&peer_id=CeceshdyTiWhakceof
&port=7882
&uploaded=292230758
&downloaded=0
&left=1461153792
&event=started
&numwant=100
&compact=1

If you visit that URL then you’re supposedly sharing the file, according to Anti-Piracy Internet Operations at Warner Bros. It is also interesting to note that tracker URLs can be inserted in HTML image tags () on websites - which means that anyone who visits this sites (including web crawlers) gets their IP listed on the tracker - without sharing - or even having heard of - the file the trackers tracking.

But why are they spamming me?

Why are they spamming me with DMCA notices about files I’m not distributing and never heard of? Short answer: I don’t know.

Maby they just don’t like that I run The TorrentChannel, a legal BitTorrent site which documents Warner Bros. involvement with mass murderer and crimes against humanity and therefore make up that IPs used to seed legal torrents who are available at that site are somehow being used to distribute torrents who are not distributed from that site’s seed servers. They can’t just tell my ISP “This website presents information which goes against our propaganda, please shut it down”, but they can claim “copyright violation” of some random file.

It may also be that they actually visited a load of trackers, pulled down their list of IPs and spammed everyone listed in the trackers - including my servers IPs, if they were indeed on the trackers references in the DMCA-notice spams to my ISP. This could happen for a number of reasons:

1 . Some trackers are now adding random valid IPs among the trackers list of peer IPs. This may sound like a good idea at first blush, but if my ISP is getting spammed with DMCA notices because trackers are mixing in IPs of computers used to seed legal torrents among the tracker results of copyrighted content then those doing this should realize that the movie industry just spams any IP on a tracker, which means that the effect is that random people get spam from MPAA members because of it.

2. Computers used to seed legal torrents for The TorrentChannel are also web crawling for the search engine YacySearch.com. If this web crawler goes through a bittorrent website then it’s suddenly supposedly “violating the copyright” of a whole range of Hollywood propaganda producers. This is how I got the idea on how to make the movie industry send their spam to traditional spammers.

3. I support the Tor anonymity network by running Tor-servers. This helps people in tyrannical regimes like Norway and China use the Internet without fear of being tortured by their government for reading the wrong thing. It is possible to exit from the Tor-network and scrape a tracker. It is also possible to exit to BitTorrent clients from some Tor-servers - and this is covered by DMCA safe harbor. However, Tor exits can set their own exit policy. I want to support people who want to browse the web without fear of being tortured, but don’t see the point in supporting BitTorrent over Tor - so I block the typical BitTorrent ports at my exits. This means that if someone exited from my Tor exit to a tracker then that would be the only thing they were doing from my exit. It is not be possible to connect to other BitTorrent peers using the my exits, and nobody would be able to connect to the user who exited to a tracker through my exit-node.

So in summary: The only one of the above possible reasons for the numerous spam messages my ISP have recieved over the last few weeks about “DMCA Copyright Violation” which could even remotely have something to do with my servers would be that someone exited from the Tor-network and scraped a tracker.

Someone exiting from the Tor-network to scrape a BitTorrent tracker is not even remotely the same as “distributing content” - and that’s only one of the many possible reasons why the movie industry are spamming my ISP.

None of the claimed “pirated” files mentioned in movie industry spam my ISP has recieved the last few weeks were ever on my server. I had actually never even heard of the movie “300″ or HBO’s TV-show “Rome” before I got “copyright violation” spam which said I was “distributing” that content.

This clearly shows that the movie industry have no idea if those they send “copyrigth violation” spam to are actually distributing their content, and it seems perfectly clear that they don’t try to connect to any of the IPs they claim are distributing their content to see if they are actually running a BitTorrent client which is seeding the file in question, and so on. I use the term spam here because that’s how I view these claims now: It’s redicilous how many I’ve gotten the last two weeks and again: NONE of these claims were valid.

Now for the “gold”:
How to make DMCA notice spammers spam traditional spammers

A web crawler is a program which crawls the web and indexes websites content. Most crawlers are run by search-engines in order to make interesting pages appear among their search-results. The first thing a legitimate web crawler does when it visits a site is to download a copy of the Robots Exclution Standard instruction file robots.txt.

There are also quite a few web crawlers who are run by spammers. These crawlers look e-mail addresses listed in web pages and produce a list which is later used to mass-mail junk like viagra advertisements. Such crawlers generally do not obey robots.txt, most of them don’t even read it.

The trick that can be used to expose such crawlers is to make a hidden link to /trap/ in a web page and deny /trap/ in robots.txt. Human visitors don’t see the link and well-behaved web crawlers ignore the link because it’s disallowed. Nothing but misbehaved web crawlers, most of which are used by spammers, will attempt to access your /trap/.

What you should put inside /trap/ is a plain .html file with a bunch of links to popular BitTorrent tracker’s announce.php? URLs. This will make spam-harvesting web-crawlers visit your /trap/, find learn the links and then add themselves to various BitTorrent trackers when they attempt to harvest e-mail addresses using those links. “Piracy”-hunters for the movie industry will then see the spam-harvesting crawlers as BitTorrent users and then pass their IPs on to the movie industry’s various law firms - who will then spam the spammers with DMCA “copyright violation” notices!
One last thing…

Just a little note on piracy: Television shows like 24 are pure propaganda designed to promote the lie that the completely fake “war on terror” is real, that “Al-Qaida” is more than a myth and that torture is alright. Most Hollywood-produced movies and TV-shows are nothing but fascist propaganda. If you download copyrighted material produced by the mostly complicit-in-mass-murderer and highly criminal movie industry then you are indirectly supporting it. They can say “Oh, look, people are pirating our shows!” and claim that is why they spam those legally distributing content which goes against everything they would have people believe.

If everybody, including you, would just boycott the church of Hollywood and nobody viewed or downloaded their propaganda then they’d have to admit that their distribution model is a farse and that their lack of paying customers is due to their own stupidity. Suing the person who made it possible for me to view DVDs I bought and paid for on my own Linux-based computer?? DRM “protected” content, which you can’t even use on Linux?? Come on! The movie and music industries have loosing customers because they made it so hard to legally buy and use their products that it doesn’t seem to be worth it even if you really want to purchase their products, not because people are foolishly helping them spread their propaganda on the Internet using P2P software such as BitTorrent.. “Piracy” does provide a way to explain away their own mistakes, reasons to force new tyrannical laws upon the people and it even serves as a means to claim a higher number of viewers when negotiating “product placement” deals. Be aware that you are supporting the evil movie industry if you pirate their crappy propaganda content, even though the industry itself don’t realize - or won’t admit - that this is the case. Also, as explained above: If you’re supporting the movie industry then you’re supporting spammers.