Torguard Blocks All U.S. BitTorrent Traffic After Entertainment Industry Lawsuit
from the whac-a-mole dept
Over the last few years, the entertainment industry and big copyright have ramped up a war against VPN providers here in the U.S., culminating in a lawsuit against VPN provider Torguard by nearly two-dozen movie studios. The same studios had demanded $10 million in damages from another VPN provider, LiquidVPN, earlier last year.
In both cases the accusations are the same: that the companies are encouraging copyright violations because some users use VPNs to disguise the trading of files over BitTorrent (helping them dodge both ISP and entertainment industry monitoring and DMCA warnings).
Of course not all VPN users are using BitTorrent to seed and distribute copyrighted files, but in fights like these, nuance is generally the first casualty. Giant files, including a significant amount of data being shared by the Internet Archive, are also routinely traded on the network.
Torguard has announced in a statement on its website that it will be blocking all BitTorrent traffic on its servers and network in the U.S. starting immediately. 90 percent of the statement involves trying to assuage consumers about the company’s reputation in the wake of the decision:
Operating a VPN provider requires a great deal of trust from consumers and for that reason TorGuard’s owner and parent company make no effort to hide behind offshore entities. We operate transparently within the USA as it offers our clients the strongest consumer privacy protections with no mandatory data logging requirements. TorGuard’s customer base has never been sold or acquired and after ten years in business we are still managed by the original founder who is willing to stake their personal reputation on every decision the company makes.
VPN Unlimited and VPN.ht also recently agreed to block all BitTorrent traffic on U.S. servers after industry pressure.
Bleeping Computer was the first to notice that the company had struck a settlement with the studios. Given that studios have been demanding that VPN providers log and store user traffic behavior, Torguard’s clearly worried the decision will cause an exodus of customers who specifically use a VPN to avoid being tracked for reasons that often go beyond copyright infringement.
Granted Torguard still operates VPN servers in over 50 countries, so users who were previously using U.S.-based Torguard servers can presumably just connect to any one of those instead, albeit with a likely performance hit. The company had filed a motion to dismiss the case with a Florida court last October.
Filed Under: bittorrent, copyright, lawsuit, movies, network, piracy, vpn
Companies: torguard
Comments on “Torguard Blocks All U.S. BitTorrent Traffic After Entertainment Industry Lawsuit”
Welp, hope no Torguard customers were planning to torrent the new version of Ubuntu next month.
Re:
I was just coming here to say, aren’t many Linux distros downloaded via torrent? Not that copyright maximalists would care much about Linux taking casualties from all this.
Why is the holy copyright being allowed to allow a middleman industry tell all other industries how they will operate, and what they will allow users to do?
Anti-piracy, more like anti-privacy
Guess what, anything that enables and supports anonymity can be used for infringement. Already the dark web introduced by the TOR network has these, so those 2-dozen studios may very well go after that and encryption.
This is another example of attacking something or someone just because their technology or feature enables (but not intend) for people to do illegal acts, along with GettyImages vs the “view image” button (why can’t they use robots.txt?)
Because some bank robbers use cars, we think that the Big 3 car companies owe us 22 trillion dollars.
How is it that it looks silly when you say it this way but courts manage to believe ‘on the internet’ makes it less nonsensical?
“Operating a VPN provider requires a great deal of trust from consumers”
…which is why we’ve taken an anti-consumer approach that calls into question any trust people have in our VPN service, since we just demonstrated that we’ll roll over on any request from a government or corporate entity. After all, if we’re going to dictate the type of traffic protected at their behest, then why would people take our word that we’re not logging everything?
Nice move, guys!
Meanwhile, in the real world, actual pirate traffic was significantly down once people could easily access content through legal means, although there’s suggestions that this is on the rise again after people are being told they have to pay for 10 services instead of 1 to access those things.
“Granted Torguard still operates VPN servers in over 50 countries, so users who were previously using U.S.-based Torguard servers can presumably just connect to any one of those instead, albeit with a likely performance hit”
Well, that really depends on what performance you’re after and whether or not Torguard limited the restrictions to US servers and not network-wide “just in case”. But, when I’ve accessed something like Tubi to watch something that’s not available to me locally, I don’t see much of a difference to local streaming services, so I don’t think it would be a problem for torrents unless people are expecting huge download speeds.
Suddenly the recent anti-VPN studies make sense: if VPN operators are required to log your activity, you might as well go without VPN.
As a customer...
… of TorGuard, I can attest that the VPN still works perfectly well. I just choose to use a server in Vancouver Canada instead of one in the US. Or I can choose a myriad of other servers in other countries. There isn’t any performance hit that I can see, at least not on my 200MB/15MB cable service. Anyone that was using a US server was an idiot, anyway.