I am speaking for my self here. Neither Gnutellaforums or any of the software clients listed here may agree with me or had anything to do with this post.

There is a lot of heat lately regaurding bittorrent file shareing.

In a legal case against the Cox Internet Service Provider, Cox was prevented from using the fact that bittorrent has tons of legal traffic on its network.

Cox also lost that case. Bittorrent is not going away and piracy over its network will continue. With that said, ISPs will be taking another look at how they handle notices from Piracy Trolls that piracy is pointing to users of their service.

Additionally, priacy trolls are also getting more aggressive with users of bittorrent that use the network for piracy.

Now I know that it is debatable whether or not digital copies of data is actually piracy. That aside, it does not mean people aren't getting sued or settling outside of court because of it.

If you are here investigating gnutella as an alternative, keep in mind that this sort of thing is what caused Limewire a lot of trouble.

Gnutella needs more users. I don't and won't turn people away regardless of their intentions for the network. Even spam clients are useful to developers. There are 1000's of free PDFs, 100's of legally shareablr videos and movies (countless more if they are homemade like youtube videos), tons of opensource sofware applications, 1000's of free music albums and an unlimited number of wallpapers and other picture files that could be shared over the network. Please overload the network with that content.

I can't condone illegal file-sharing. But if you are going to do it anyway think a little before you act. Don't download anything that is real new. Make sure that you have the most recent hostile IP list for you gnutella client of choice.

If you are more into sharing illegal content and less about downloading, here are somethings to keep in mind.

If you downloaded the content from somewhere else the file can be recognized as illegal content because of its file hash. To change this you must repackage the file either by puting it into a compressed container or encrypting it. This will provide the file with a new hash that will not associate it with known illegal content.

Being close or even relatively close in size to the known illegal file is also not a good idea. While this is less of an issue, it still is not a bad idea to put the file in a compression container of some kind with an extra file or two. Something like snapshots, text files, or anything to add a little to the file size.

A more obvious problem is the file name. If the file is named "Terminator Genisys- HD.mp4" you are looking for trouble. Even "TG2015HDrip.rar" is really only a little better. You should give the file a even more cloaked name like 1040ajr3x.zip. Then share that file name with your friends or peers so they can download it. If you are really serious give them the file magnet link so they can use that to directly find the file.

Even with all of this you are still at risk of a piracy troll finding the file, unzipping it and nailing you to the wall. So you should also password encrypt the file with a really long password. Along with the cloaked filename and magnet link, you can give your friends the really long password.

I want to be clear that I'm not condoning any of the above. But, if you do all of the above you'll keep the network, I am developing for, from getting an even worse name. And if you somehow still get a notice from a piracy troll, then you'll know that someone in your piracy forum(s), or whatever your circle of trust is, has a bad egg in it. And most importantly you keep new, young/old, and inexperienced users from getting themselves in trouble. The last thing I want is some 90 year old lady downloading some trashy bondage movie and getting sued by the porn company that produced it.