# What the provider means by saying NO to Torrents?



## vanarp (Jun 6, 2013)

I see a lot of providers saying NO to torrents in general and specifically to piracy stuff.

Do they mean that the customer should not be running a torrent client hosted on the VPS?

What if the client uses the VPS as a proxy or run a VPN and use the torrent client on his computer?


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## arieonline (Jun 6, 2013)

it's DMCA related


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## Aldryic C'boas (Jun 6, 2013)

vanarp said:


> I see a lot of providers saying NO to torrents in general and specifically to piracy stuff.
> 
> Do they mean that the customer should not be running a torrent client hosted on the VPS?
> 
> What if the client uses the VPS as a proxy or run a VPN and use the torrent client on his computer?


You should ask the provider directly.  Some prohibit torrenting due to improperly configured clients/seedboxes abusing IO and Network.  Some prohibit due to legal reasons.  Some prohibit for moral reasons.


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## Chronic (Jun 6, 2013)

It's a shame that the BitTorrent protocol has such a negative connotation to it. It's not all bad and there are other uses than to pirate software and entertainment.


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## Aldryic C'boas (Jun 6, 2013)

Chronic said:


> It's a shame that the BitTorrent protocol has such a negative connotation to it. It's not all bad and there are other uses than to pirate software and entertainment.


Aye.  Blizzard almost had my respect for using BitTorrent to push out software updates... but let's be honest.  They were all on board for reducing their own bandwidth/hosting costs, not to help legitimize the protocol


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## Magiobiwan (Jun 6, 2013)

Usually it's to prevent issues with DMCA requests (which are a pain), to prevent I/O and network abuse, and to keep nodes from filling up with terabytes of duplicate stuff. If someone could determine a way to make OpenVZ silently symlink to other people's already downloaded torrents, disk usage could go WAY down.


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## xmob (Jun 6, 2013)

Magiobiwan said:


> If someone could determine a way to make OpenVZ silently symlink to other people's already downloaded torrents, disk usage could go WAY down.


(Hmmm, thinking out loud)  Would ZFS deduplication on the host node work here?


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## EarthVPN (Jun 6, 2013)

Use offshore providers for P2P and Torrenting.


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## KuJoe (Jun 6, 2013)

To be brutally honest, I will not be your lawyer for $1/month. If I become a forwarding address for your legal mail (DMCAs) then you're gone. I'm sure other providers are in the same boat so if they have a policy that says "NO", then interpret that policy to mean "NO".


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## shovenose (Jun 6, 2013)

I think there is a misconception here.

The misconception: VPS providers are unconstitutional and are out to take away our freedom of speech.

The truth: VPS hosting, especially budget-priced VPS hosting, is easy to abuse and you could very easily get a provider in a lot of trouble. And a majority of providers on LowEndTalk/Box and here, in fact almost all VPS providers that participate in forums like this, don't have: A. the time to keep an eye on a thousand potentially abuse torrent-using clients. B. the legal resources to defend themselves if the shit hits the fan.


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## TheLinuxBug (Jun 6, 2013)

*I think this is a situation where you need to use your brain a bit and use some of your best judgement.*

Some might ask, "well if i go and download a single torrent and it takes 30 minutes and then I am done, will this be a problem?" In most cases, probably not as you hopefully will not be using up resources for a long period.  However, downloading a torrent and then seeding it, especially for the not so legal torrents, is both abusive to the node and the network. When you purchase a VPS in the low end, you are getting a "Fair Share" of the resources (network and disk io) so anything that is going to thrash these things for long periods is not good.  There is also the legality side of this... If you happen to get 1 DMCA warning and it seems to be an accident, I am sure they will work with you.  If you decide to host the new Star Trek movie and allow a bunch of people to download it from you and get on someones radar and they start getting a bunch of DMCA complaints, are they going to put up with that? No.   In most cases when using OpenVZ another thing to consider is the provider can directly see all your files, with little effort and if they receive a DMCA for something and the files are sitting there in your VPS, then obviously there is a problem and you have violated their TOS.  

Now, the other question was, "What if I use a VPN?" Well, this is defiantly a better option than storing it directly on your server and abusing the io on the server, but you are still using the providers ip addresses and if they get more than 1 DMCA weather they can prove it or not they will most likely not want to keep you as a customer.  If you are using a VPN, which is usually encrypted, the provider will not usually care about what you are doing as it is your business until they get a complaint.  Is it possible to set realistic restrictions on your bit-torrent client and get away with downloading torrents through it, sure it is possible.  Will any provider tell you that they allow this? No. For two reasons, #1 you could be downloading something that isn't legal and #2 Plausible deniability in a case where there is a DMCA or other complaint. 

*Tl;DR:*

*Use common sense, if you wouldn't download it directly to your home computer, don't do so on your VPS. *

* Can you get away with it if you are careful? Sure.  Will a provider condone you doing this? Of course not. Is it wise to run a bit-torrent client on a vps server with shared resources? No, especially if you do not how to limit the resources the client is using. Is it smart to store illegal material on an OpenVZ VPS where the provider has direct access to your data in a legal situation? I think not.  Are there ways to secure your data from your provider? With KVM it is possible.  Would I suggest downloading torrents even if your data is secured on their network?  Once again, not if you do not know what you are doing and do not know how to configure your resource usage appropriately.  Can you get away with downloading torrents on VPN? It is possible.  Is it a good idea? Use the above information to make an educated decision.*


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## drmike (Jun 6, 2013)

The DMCA stuff is love/hate sort of thing.  Piracy is a legitimate problem and copyright owners need to control their property or copies thereof.

I've only officially been dealt two DMCA's and my colo provider wasn't very thrilled about the matter.  At the time I ran a Tor exit node.  

Changed to routing Tor traffic only and eons after, another request came in, which made no sense.  So I just discontinued Tor entirely.

DMCA takedowns are just the tip of the figurative spear though.  Any and all activity, browsing, serving, etc. can be a legal request magnet.

I support small businesses because they are ran by humans and cost prohibitive to deal with/made to comply/made to monitor everything by government entities.  Just look at the NSA stuff outed in the media in the past two days and Google, Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook and Verizon all feeding the spooks who knows what... perhaps everything?!?!?!

Someone recommended torrents "offshore". Where is offshore? Laws and treaties pretty much say the whole world is a big corporate agreement to thumb the individual and tighten the virtual choke around your neck.

Yep, I sympathize with providers who have the government come bothering.


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## vanarp (Jun 6, 2013)

Okay, now I understand the main reason to be the *Piracy *triggering DMCA complaints.

I wonder how the big seeders are releasing Movie rips and Software etc. Are there providers that do not care DMCA?


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## WelltodoInformalCattle (Jun 7, 2013)

Certain providers might be more flexible than others in terms of DMCA especially when it's a matter of whether it is even applicable in their own country or not.


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## EarthVPN (Jun 7, 2013)

> Find peace of mind in a DMCA Free Zone
> 
> The Problem: DMCA
> Enforcing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is like killing flies with a shotgun. Few laws are said to be a saving grace and a ball chain within the same industry. But depending on who you talk to DMCA is just that.
> ...


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## Mun (Jun 7, 2013)

xmob said:


> (Hmmm, thinking out loud)  Would ZFS deduplication on the host node work here?



Technically yes, but you would need at min. 24 gigs RAM laying around for the Dedup mapping. It would be cheaper in the long run to just get more drives. Unless, of course you are running a VPS service with torrenting in mind.


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## Abdussamad (Jun 7, 2013)

You can run a torrent client on a VPS for legal stuff and the host probably won't care. I don't think they monitor stuff that closely.


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## KuJoe (Jun 7, 2013)

Abdussamad said:


> You can run a torrent client on a VPS for legal stuff and the host probably won't care. I don't think they monitor stuff that closely.


Let's see how well that suggestion flies when the client asks for a refund because their service was terminated and they don't get one because they violated the Terms of Service.

At the end of the day, "NO TORRENTS ALLOWED" will never mean "SOME TORRENTS ALLOWED".


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## Chronic (Jun 7, 2013)

Voss said:


> Certain providers might be more flexible than others in terms of DMCA especially when it's a matter of whether it is even applicable in their own country or not.


I appreciate it when a provider is reasonable and doesn't complaint as long as there is no hardware abuse or DMCA complaints involved. I try to make sure each provider is okay with what I'm doing before actually going through with it, but if I were to participate, I would hang around communities that have managed to fly well under the radar and are unlikely to ever get a DMCA notice due to the very limited pool of peers. That being said, torrenting is risky business and I think it's absurd of a customer to expect the provider will take a beating for them after receiving a complaint - I make no misconceptions about it and would rather lose a few bucks than argue with a provider who was kind enough to look the other way thus far.


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## Shados (Jun 7, 2013)

Mun said:


> Technically yes, but you would need at min. 24 gigs RAM laying around for the Dedup mapping. It would be cheaper in the long run to just get more drives. Unless, of course you are running a VPS service with torrenting in mind.


Yeah, dedupe is expensive. Even with a large average block size (~100KiB) 24GB of ram will still only let you have 7~8 TiB worth of dedup'd storage (at least, if you want it to have any write performance at all).


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## texteditor (Jun 7, 2013)

Rolling your own dedupe would be a better solution in that situation, since all the torrents and their session data have hashes stored in them already


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## vanarp (Jun 9, 2013)

vanarp said:


> I wonder how the big seeders are releasing Movie rips and Software etc. Are there providers that do not care DMCA?


 
I seem to have found some answer. There are kind of providers offering Seedboxes that are basically VMs with storage/bandwidth/pre-installed torrent software. Probably their clients are immune to DMCA complaints.


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