%title So, the big deal.
%date 2008-12-03 17:46:57
:diary:livejournal:fossils:

Over break, I watched a bunch of TEDTalks and finally got around to watching the one by Al Gore on climate change.  On a whim, I decided to see what all the hype was about with <em>An Inconvenient Truth</em> and found a torrent of it.  With the school's connection, such things usually finish in a few hours, overnight at the longest.  However, I forgot to turn the torrent off.

Come Monday, my network admin gets an email from the head ACNS guy, a forwarded cease-and-desist letter from BayTSP, the company that researches infringements for copyright holders, including Paramount, who produced <em>An Inconvenient Truth</em>.  Now, due to the fact that just about everyone has been screwing up with scheduling this semester for the next, I took the day off work to make my rounds and berate people into getting me the classes I need.  Unfortunately, this email came at about three in the afternoon, and I was in choir, where I didn't get any wi-fi reception.  After choir was a cello lesson, and after that, dinner with John.  So I didn't get the email from my boss ("Matt, get your ass in here right now.  I've unplugged both your computers.  Is it your windows or linux box?") until I was just getting to bed.

I freaked out.  I ran to work at eleven since the building closes at midnight, turned both computers off, plugged in the network cables, then turned the Windows box back on so that I could reimage the linux box, effectively replacing most everything on the hard-drive with the bloated staff image.

I was worried because a copyright infringement suit would be a good reason for composers not to trust me to publish their copyrighted works.  Not only that, but it would also be good reason for me to get fired, me to get dismissed from the university, and for me to lose a whole lot of money.  At least this wasn't a lawsuit, just a take-down notification.

Anyway, I got back into work the next day, planning on what I would do if I got fired.  My boss pulled me aside and told me that everything would be okay, that I wasn't getting fired, but that if I did it again, not only would I be fired, but he would personally kick my ass.  The network admin told me just about the same thing.  I was told that it was technically untraceable to me and that no litigation would be filed because it was fairly untraceable.  And then we got to work as normal.

This was the first thing I had downloaded in months, almost a year.  I think the last thing I got was BSG season 3.  And you know?  This was a pretty effective deterrent - I think it'll be the last thing I download, too.

Moral: be careful.  They really are keeping an eye on this, and they really will contact you, if nothing else.