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Comment by pingyong | Hacker News Reader

Is it really the first byte? I am from Germany so I've always wondered how this is actually handled. Like 1 byte isn't really unique or identifiable information, there are only 256 different bytes after all. People send this byte value all the time. Do you really just have to send one byte?

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I reckon "the first byte you upload" is being used as a turn-of-phrase here, and is not meant not to refer to the specific bit-sequence of each (or the first) byte of the upload. Rather the idea that the (eventual) metadata of the whole upload, (which I suppose actually begins before the first byte of the payload), is what would trigger the letter.

Actually there is a Russian short story by writer Bayan Shiryanov (Баян Ширянов) titled "Пробел" (space character), which has length of exactly one character.

Here is its illegal copy (between quotes): " "

I got one of these mails when my vpn dropped for something like 6 seconds (they even send your the timestamps). I wouldn't be surprised if they are seeding their own copyrighted work to figure out who's uploading. Once they get the IPs they simply have to ask the ISP for the name/address of the IP owner at that time.

Anyway, however they are doing it they seem to be very good at it.

Did you pay? How much?

900 reduced to 400 after I mailed them. I only paid because I was in a foreign country and didn't want to take any risk. Apparently they'd take any amount because going further in the process end up costing more to them (and potentially much more for you too).

Also, in the meantime it was pretty well established that they can't hold you responsible for the actions of others.

"I'm sharing WiFi access with several neighbors. In accordance with privacy laws, I don't retain any router logs because they're not necessary for this. I've reminded them again not to do illegal shit, as I've already done when I set this up. My router does not provide support for filtering traffic, and it would be unreasonable for me to go buy a different one just because of this. Kthxbye."

They don’t need to seed, they just need to join the swarms to gobble up IP addresses. They don’t have to send a single byte of actual content.

But there’s the occasional content owner who would go so far as to poison a swarm by sending bad chunks.

Torrents are nearly universally transferred in 16KB blocks. In pretty much any circumstance, you're either put on a list at 0 bytes or at a multiple of 16KB.

A byte that is truly by itself would be fine, but as part of a coordinated effort to send all the bytes you're not going to get away with much. The courts aren't stupid.

I honestly just wonder if this was ever discussed in any court, because I've never heard of it. Like how much data has to be sent before it's distribution of copyrighted material. You could really go either way with this. Either 0 bytes (just metadata), or 1 byte (that would be reasonably expected to be taken from the copyrighted work, even if the byte is not unique in any way), or a byte sequence that is fairly certainly unique to this specific .mp3 (probably like 32-512? bytes), or enough data that you can reconstruct some sort of sound from it that you can play and that is long enough to be grounds for a copyright infringement.

I'm confident that the threshold is not whether you can reconstruct anything. Because it's easy to have a system where each uploader provides only even or odd bytes and it's impossible to get anything but noise out of a single source.

I guess if you are in a torrent swarm, any upload action is suspicious. Moreover, if you are talking about transmitting bytes in the file, you are probably including the offset of that byte in the file. That is a lot more unique (though it requires sending many more bytes).

It’s who you're sending it to that matters.

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