Caution - Internet, copyright infringement & rentals

[SGB]

We offer free Wi-Fi at our rental house and have for about two years now. We?ve never had any complaints from our guests or issues with the setup. However, this year we?ve received two letters from Mediacom informing us that someone has downloaded copyrighted material while using our internet connection. Both of these occurrences happened during our spring break season within weeks of each other. We were told exactly when the download took place and what was downloaded (a book and a movie). Our Wi-Fi is set up with a password to hopefully avoid other households or drive bys using our Wi-Fi. (Although this sometimes resets after a power outage.) After the second violation, MediaCom blocked our internet account and we had to fill out a form, sign it and send it back to them to get it reactivated. If it happens a third time, our internet will be discontinued and we won?t be able to get it back. There was also a threat of monetary damages as much as $250,000.

Of course, we asked Mediacom what we could do to prevent a guest from downloading something they shouldn?t and they didn?t have a real answer for us. They suggested that we put specific wording in our rental contract, which we are doing. We are also posting a strongly worded caution in our house. Mediacom also said that some routers allow you to block certain sites or programs, although I can't find anything that says ours does. Both of our violations were done using bittorrent, which I had never heard of, but apparently a lot of people have.

Mediacom tells us that copyright owners are now really starting to crack down on infringements and are tracking these things better and pursuing infringements under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. It was the copyright owners that informed Mediacom of the illegal downloads.

Here are my questions - Is there something more I can do to prevent the downloading of copyrighted material by my guests? What do other places such as hotels and coffee houses that offer use of the internet do to prevent this from happening? What about all those places that don?t even require the use of a password to get on? Aren?t they getting hammered by this? Is anyone else experiencing a similar problem with their rental house and use of the internet?

If you have internet capability in your rental, be aware that there could be trouble ahead and take whatever necessary steps you can to avoid illegal downloads.

 

[Beach Runner]

Thanks for the info. I will check with my IT guy on Monday.

 

[Here4Good]

I'm a little surprised that MediaCom was able to execute a network trace. They must have hired a consultant.

This is an interesting topic, and is an issue that more rental owners will be facing. Large companies install network filtering appliances; this is why you hear of people unable to watch the Final Four while at work . You can do the same thing on the cheap by setting filters on your router.

Most filters which are aimed at the home market are meant to be installed on the computer. This is fine if you are trying to prevent your children from accessing certain sites, but not very helpful when renters are using their own computers on your network.

The only control you have is over the router, and the router will let you manage these filters.

There are two ways to approach controlling what gets through; whitelisting and blacklisting. Whitelisting is implicitly allowing only certain protocols, and blacklisting is implicitly blocking certain protocols. For a home/rental network, whitelisting makes the most sense, and is the easiest to implement. My router, for example, is a DLink AirExpress, and in the Filter section of the Admin Tools, it lists the most common TCP/UDP ports and allows you to restrict/allow access.

There is a fairly comprehensive list of TCP/UDP ports and their use at:

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tcp_ports"]List of TCP and UDP port numbers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

So, for example, the DLink shows:

TCP 20/21 (used for FTP)
TCP 80 (used for http, which is your common browser protocol)
TCP 443 (https, secured browsing)
UDP 53 (DNS, domain name service)
TCP 25 (smtp, which is mail)
TCP 110 (pop3, mail)
TCP 23 (telnet)

These are the most commonly used ports; by allowing only these ports (whitelisting), your guests can browse, get email, etc.

My suggestion is that you contact the tech support for your router, and explain the situation to them. With any luck, they will know more than MediaCom does.

PS: Nothing is foolproof. If you have a real geek in the house, they can override the default ports for BitTorrent and do their download anyway. This will, however, stop MOST of the P2P traffic. It also demonstrates that you actively attempted to stop this activity (which is more than MediaCom does), in the event they do try to slap a big fine on you.

 

[Kurt]

Sounds like you got randomly tagged by "The Man". Embarq DSL is a good choice if needed.

 

[wrobert]

The RIAA must be selling even less during these tough economic times.


AT&T: We Won't Boot P2P Users - Comcast, AT&T go into damage control mode... - dslreports.com

 

[Smiling JOe]

It may be easier to remove the password from your access, opening it to everyone, and tell MediaCON to go ef themselves, because it wasn't you.

I read a story a few years ago about someone being convicted on child porn, sentenced to prison, yada, yada, yada. Later, he won on appeal, because no porn ever showed on his computer, and they were able to prove that the wi-fi internet in his home was open (not password protected), so it could have been anyone who drove by or lived in the area who was downloading the kiddie porn. The authorities had traced it back only to the IP address which is directly linked to the wi-fi system.

BTW, I think it would be highly unlikely that you could place filters on your router to prevent downloading all copyrighted material, but I'm no computer tech geek. For example, though my blog isn't officially copyrighted, I can prove that it is mine, and I do have rights to it, and in reality, it is copyrighted, though I haven't filed for copyright. Anyone could copy and paste the text, so MediaCON needs to get an enima because that is an end user problem, and MediaCON isn't liable for individuals stealing things from the internet.

 

[SGB]

Thanks for the replies. Note that it wasn't Mediacom that was monitoring the activity. It is the copyright holders or their agents. The copyright holders inform Mediacom of the infraction and Mediacom notifies us. Apparently Mediacom is enforcing the 3 strikes rule.

Mediacom told us that having the password on our network at least assured us that we could trace back to who really did the download (our guest that week). It also shows that we're doing what we can to combat this problem.

This is all very frustrating to us since we don't do any illegal downloads ourselves, (much to our teenagers' disgust) and we have no control over our renters' behavior. Surely coffee shops or other businesses have run into this and do something to control it?

 

[Here4Good]

Coffee shops and businesses enforce the filters via hardware and firewalls.

SJ, you may not be able to prevent cutting and pasting via filtering, but you can block most p2p downloads, which is what the complaint was about in the first place. You can't cut and paste a movie.

 

[Beach Runner]

It may be easier to remove the password from your access, opening it to everyone, and tell MediaCON to go ef themselves, because it wasn't you.

I read a story a few years ago about someone being convicted on child porn, sentenced to prison, yada, yada, yada. Later, he won on appeal, because no porn ever showed on his computer, and they were able to prove that the wi-fi internet in his home was open (not password protected), so it could have been anyone who drove by or lived in the area who was downloading the kiddie porn. The authorities had traced it back only to the IP address which is directly linked to the wi-fi system.

BTW, I think it would be highly unlikely that you could place filters on your router to prevent downloading all copyrighted material, but I'm no computer tech geek. For example, though my blog isn't officially copyrighted, I can prove that it is mine, and I do have rights to it, and in reality, it is copyrighted, though I haven't filed for copyright. Anyone could copy and paste the text, so MediaCON needs to get an enima because that is an end user problem, and MediaCON isn't liable for individuals stealing things from the internet.

I'll ask future son-in-law. He's a double major in CS and EE at Georgia Tech and has been accepted for grad school at Georgia Tech, MIT, and Stanford, so my guess is that he'll know the answer.

 

[Smiling JOe]

Somewhere in all of that legal crap you sign with MediaCON when you register for service, I'm sure it says that you won't do anything illegal via their connection, so unless you scratched that part, you just take your blows, I guess. Just as crazy is the story I heard on our public radio station (I think), which I verified by going to the site. Slightly different, but just shows us that we should maybe consider reading all that legal crap. The new food stamps program has an online registration. However, at the bottom of the registration page is a warning that states by completing the form online, the gov't has the right to access and monitor your computer. (WTF?) I guess it is like the Feds giving TARP money to a business, then having access to all of the ins and outs of the company.

Personally, I don't think companies should be regulating and govening the actions of individuals. By the terms of the US Constitution, not even the US Gov't should be doing that. However, if someone is violating a law, that should be a gov't matter, not a MediaCON matter.