The second largest torrent site in the world, YTS is reportedly sharing its users' personal information with law firms as part of a legal arrangement. Law firms, in turn, send emails to users threatening to pay to resolve lawsuits against them.
As reported by Freak torrent, in January, YTS was sued by attorney Kerry Culpepper, who would represent the movie owners behind popular titles like Hellboy and Rambo: Last Blood. Owner YTS. To cooperate with the authorities, the owner of YTS, Senthal Vijay Segaran, has started to share the IP addresses and emails of his users.
A copy of a threatening email sent by the law firm to a YTS user was obtained by Torrent Freak. The email contains three pieces of information - the user's email address and IP address and the date that he / she downloaded the torrent file containing the infringing content.
At first, the email states that the law firm obtained the users' personally identifiable users from YTS operators by filing a lawsuit for copyright infringement in Hawaii on behalf of its clients. The email was worded to sound like a "courtesy" before legal action was taken against the users in question.
The email says: "[user] logged into the YTS website using the email address [redacted] from IP address [redacted] and illegally downloaded a torrent file to copy our clients' movie... "
What makes this email interesting is the fact that downloading a torrent file is not illegal as it does not contain any copyrighted content and it does not imply that a user has uploaded the file. torrent in a torrent client to download the actual content. Legally, the email should also contain the IP address of the torrent swarm used to download the content, but this is not the case as the email does not mention any such details.
Since the email is a form of "settlement" and "courtesy", it asks the user to pay almost $ 1000 if they want to release their name from all legal claims, including exempting the user to become a named defendant in the event of a lawsuit. is filed.
In another related incident, the same law firm is now 1337x targeting, another popular torrent website. It is clear that the authorities are tightening their noose on torrent downloaders and those seeking help from torrent sites to download copyrighted content.
