Beware the torments of sharing torrents
By Devon McReynolds
May 5, 2010 9:00 p.m.
I am not a crook.
But on Monday, April 12 at 8:32 a.m., I felt like one. I hadn’t even had my coffee and Nasonex yet when I received an e-mail from the Dean of Students Office saying that they had “recently been made aware of conduct that may be a potential violation of University policy.”
My initial thought was, “Who’s Dean?” My second thought was, “Wow, the MyUCLA senior survey is really getting aggressive.” And my third thought was, “Oh, (expletive).”
I read further: UCLA had “received a complaint alleging copyrighted material owned by Home Box Office, Inc. was made available online to others without proper copyright permission. The allegedly infringing material has been identified as coming from the UCLA Network.” Embedded in this paragraph was a link to view the original complaint, and I saw that I had shared an episode of “Ricky Gervais Show, The” via BitTorrent on April 6.
The complaint was addressed not to me but to “University of California ““ Los Angeles,” and said that Home Box Office, Inc. had “information leading us to believe that an individual (that would be me) has utilized the below-referenced IP address at the noted date and time to offer downloads of copyrighted television program(s) through a “˜peer-to-peer’ service.”
This was baffling on a number of levels. I know I tend toward self-deprecation in this column, but I truly am so behind the times these days I didn’t even know what a BitTorrent was. I just recently learned how to update my iTunes, which was a huge step for me technology-wise. I also had never seen “The Ricky Gervais Show.”
I know that some people sleepwalk, but had I sleep-torrented?
I racked my brain for a blurry Thursday night past in which the notion of “torrenting” could actually be somehow entertained but couldn’t come up with anything. For that to have happened, I would have actually needed to know what BitTorrent was exactly, download the program and share an episode of a television show I had never heard of ““ a pretty ambitious thing for me to do even while sober. But this immediately did not make sense because any and all remnants of a real Thursday night would be found in the form of an empty Italian Express box anyway. I searched for the file on my computer and found nothing relating to “Ricky Gervais Show, The.”
That day, I called Kenn Heller, assistant dean for the Center for Student Programming who is in charge of dealing with issues of this nature, to confirm that there surely had been a mistake, and that I could just take the MyUCLA senior survey and be on with my day.
It wasn’t that easy. Since I doubt I’m the first person to play innocent, I was still required to attend a mandated workshop led by Heller. If you don’t attend, a hold will be placed on your academic records, which will, among other things, prevent you from graduating. Despite the scheming ways in which I’ve tried to stave off graduating in June, I was not about to mess with the powers that be at HBO.
In the workshop, Heller told us how the companies catch offenders and link them to the UCLA network through tracing the computer’s IP address. It’s not as scary as it sounds though, since the companies will never know the identities of the offenders ““ each is just a generic UCLA network user to them.
“They have no knowledge of who you are,” Heller told me this week. “At no time do they know.”
Heller said that 98.9 percent of the people who receive e-mails about illegal file sharing actually do ‘fess up to doing it. I was still convinced that I was part of that 1.1 percent who, for some reason or another, are so tragically framed, and took my computer to the Student Technology Center to check for anything remotely incriminating.
I was clean! One hundred percent Ricky Gervais-free. This must be how Jenna Jameson felt last week when she tested negative for OxyContin: “Chillin’,” according to her lawyer.
The moral of the story is: Big Brother is always watching, even when all you’re doing is legally ordering Italian Express at 3 a.m., and to punish you for that gluttonous act, he will deviously connect you to “Ricky Gervais Show, The” just for laughs.
But remember: if the torrent don’t exist, you must acquit. Amen!
“Tuned In” runs every other Thursday. E-mail McReynolds at
