Every day, people who download and share pirated content receive DMCA notices via their ISPs, warning them to cease and desist their infringing be

Comcast Subscriber Receives DMCA Notice for Downloading Ubuntu

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2021-05-26 19:30:08

Every day, people who download and share pirated content receive DMCA notices via their ISPs, warning them to cease and desist their infringing behavior. While the majority of these notices are accurate, one Ubuntu user says he has just been targeted by an anti-piracy company alleging that by torrenting an OS ISO released by Ubuntu itself, he breached copyright law.

Two decades ago, the BitTorrent protocol revolutionized peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing. The content-agnostic system allowed people to efficiently share and download even the largest files and soon grew to become the dominant method of transfer for millions of file-sharers.

Over the years, people have shared all kinds of content using torrents and it quickly became associated with mass copyright infringement of movies, TV shows, music and everything in between. However, BitTorrent is also used to distribute large volumes of data with the blessing of rightsholders, with the sharing of Linux distros a prime example.

Indeed, large companies such as Ubuntu owner Canonical actively encourage the distribution of their packages via BitTorrent, even going as far as operating their own tracker. This is effectively a green light for users to obtain Ubuntu using BitTorrent and is universally considered to be entirely safe. However, a development yesterday caused mass confusion when a user was accused of copyright infringement via a notice from his ISP.