DMCA and VPN: Whose Rights?

What is your position on using torrent downloads or P2P to watch your favorite TV shows or movies? Do you know that you may be violating the DMCA (Digital Copyright Act), do you care? Do you feel it is your right to do so because the copyright owners of TV and movies make millions and what you do is not worth their effort?

DMCA

The Digital Copyright Act is to prevent fraud from unfair use of copyrighted material, like music, TV shows, movies, and other related original material. In a nutshell, if you are one of the 300 million users downloading copyrighted material with P2P or torrents, you are probably violating the law. When this happens and you are caught because you failed to use VPN or your IP address was exposed to the ISP (such as, Comcast), the ISP may send you an official "takedown" notice. The notice has to specifically ID you, your IP address, etc. The ISP can discontinue your Internet service after repeated warnings. The ISP can also slow down your connection speed making it useless.

The law is gray when cases have been taken to court regarding using a link that takes you to a website with copyrighted material and you know the material is protected. Recently, many of the major players with copyrighted material have seemed to have surrendered. With so many people downloading material for free, the problem is almost an impossible task to regulate. ISP's have it easy if you do this without using VPN (Virtual Private Network).

VPN

Just because you use VPN, it does not mean you are doing something illegal. You are entitled to privacy from all. Of course, ISP's get suspicious of VPN use and can try to force disconnects or try to penetrate the VPN protected tunnel for your Internet. If you are having disconnect issues with your VPN, try the following:

• Attempt to connect to the closest server to your present location; servers further away are subject to more hops which include more chances for packet loss.
• Try to use a TCP-based connection (PPTP/OpenVPN-TCP) as UDP connections do not have the same error-correction and can be less stable.
• Verify that your security software is not causing a bottleneck when scanning inbound and outbound traffic for trojans/viruses. If necessary, exclude the relevant ports.
• OpenVPN = TCP and UDPports 443 and 1194
• PPTP = ports TCP/1723 & GRE
• L2TP = ports UDP/500, UDP/1701 & UDP/4500 & ESP
• Use OpenVPN =TCP instead of OpenVPN = UDP. TCP is a much more secure and stable connection.
• Use a dedicated SOCKS5 proxy server that supports web (HTTP) traffic and P2P BitTorrent clients, such as uTorrent, Vuze, and Deluge. This is a very secure tunnel but the speed may be slower because of higher encryption.
• Use a killswitch that shuts down all Internet traffic when your current VPN connection stops working. This feature comes with some VPN's to enable if you want to maximize your anonymity because having a kill switch kills your internet if you are not being protected by the VPN!