There are groups that log IP addresses they connect too, and send threatening letters to ISPs of the IP address, and the torrent containing illegal content.
Some ISPs pass these notices on to their customers, and “if” the customer calls the company that sent it, this will be the first time the company has identified the person, because he just surrendered his identity.
Normally they sweet talk the person, tell them to say they are sorry for breaking the law, in other words to “incriminate” themselves, then legal threats come directed to a person, not an IP address, and if the person surrendered not only his name, but also his IP address, then they look back at the history of that IP address, and all this info “may” be enough to get a court order to make the ISP produce records of the IP/IPs the customer has used, and the charges pile on, until the person gets a lawyer, and ends up paying a blackmail fee to stop the threats.
Peer Guardian if used properly will keep you all the bulk of these databases, but if you go installing every block list you can find, your going to suddenly lose a lot of speed, because some of the best seeders are on commercial servers and college LANs that are usually on these lists. The ONLY lists worthy of blocking are the anti P2P, spyware, adware, and government. The rest won’t do any good, and surely will do harm.
Also, these lists are maintained by bluetack, who will remove an ip range if you submit all the required data and demonstrate that the IPs are not hostile to p2p users. I have successfully had an IP range removed that was used by a completely legal bittorrent tracker that was hosted on a company that was known to be hostile to ILLEGAL bittorrent use, but when I presented the info, they removed it from the list.
I’m also going to be submitting a list of IPs to them that bitcomet uses. I’m currently awaiting a “complete” list, because they will only give us one “shot” at requesting the ranges be removed, so I don’t want to go back and ask for more to be removed. When I get the complete list, I will submit it. I can’t say if they will remove them or not, it depends on how good my explanation is, and how willing they are to listen, so we will see.
To sum this up, both sides of this debate have their merit, but I use peer guardian, and will continue to do so. Besides staying off the top of these databases, one point that was barely touched on is the groups that poison torrents, like “ziptorrent”, that sends out corrupt data to use up a persons bandwidth. I often get hundreds of ziptorrent blocks a minute, and they rent very fast commercial servers to send you corrupt data, and it will easily use all your bandwidth until your client blocks the peer, if it does at all, and they have thousands of IPs to flood you with bad “corrupt” data, and peer guardian IS quite good at blocking this form of harassment.
