For a while now, the RIAA and the MPAA — America’s answer to the Spanish Inquisition (except with music and movies… hey, sounds like a great idea for a musical!) — have been using less than moral activities to find people downloading what they consider is part of their jurisdiction, the download of movies, music, tv shows, etc.
The method they’re using lately is to create a fake torrent file and get people to download it. The fake torrent file doesn’t contain what it actually advertises and really serves as its own form of entrapment to snare the users’ IP address so they can track it and then send a nasty little letter to that person’s ISP claiming they have been trying to download a file which is otherwise considered illegal and that… whatever and ever… yadda yadda quack quack lesbian.
More than likely if this happens, you’ll either have to deal with the organisation targeting you either with a court case or with a settlement (which should surely go to the parties who lost money if you downloaded from them, not to the MPAA’s or RIAA’s pockets). Further, you could lose your Internet service with your ISP.
However, what these so-called reputable media representation organisations are doing should technically be illegal in its own right. By sending information that is fake, they’re doing very little different to what a spammer or a virus maker does, and we have laws around the world for each of those activities.
Regardless, as a means of helping you not grab these Internet bear-traps, a group called Fenopy have come up with a site [url=http://fenopy.com/fakefinder/]you can visit called Fake Finder[/url] which will list the fake torrents out there complete with hash keys so you can match them to the possible ones — if you were considering downloading content that the RIAA and MPAA might want to grab you for — and not use them.
Together with applications like [url=http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/]Peer Guardian[/url] and [url=http://www.utorrent.com/]uTorrent with its forced encryption[/url] you can help make your downloads — if you’re going this path — just that much more anonymous. It’s note fireproof from anything, but whatever you can do to help secure yourself is better in the long term.