<p>Semiregular poster under anonymous account to get some advice from the parents on this board.</p>
<p>I live in a post-college apartment with 3 roommates. We have split up the bills so that electric is under one roommate’s name, heat and water under another, responsibility for assembling the rent checks into another and our cable/internet account is in my name.</p>
<p>I recently got a notice from the cable provider (sent to the email account we received with signup, which I only check when I pay the bill, so it actually arrived about a month ago) saying that our ISP had been identified by a copyright holder as downloading copyrighted material via torrent, gave the name of the movie that was downloaded, and said that further infractions would result in termination or suspension of our account.</p>
<p>I sent that notice out to my roommates asking if anyone knew anything about it. One of my roommates emailed me back, apologizing and saying it was his, and saying he wouldn’t download again. I said thanks, not to be mean but the account is in my name, so if he could refrain from doing illegal stuff through our internet, I would appreciate it.</p>
<p>This letter was from our cable/internet provider and cursory internet research says that sometimes, prosecution of copyright infringement stops there, and sometimes, the subscriber’s name is turned over to the copyright holder for prosecution. We haven’t received any notices from the copyright holder but this was only a month ago, so it’s possible they are coming.</p>
<p>I know technically I am responsible for anything that happens under the account since it is in my name. But practically, I cannot control what my roommates do on the internet except for asking them not to do anything illegal. My question is - if this did lead to prosecution, what is my liability here? Should I consult with an attorney (and if so, should I talk to someone now or wait to see if a letter ever comes from the copyright holder)? Besides asking my roommate, in writing, to stop illegally downloading copyrighted materials, is there anything else I can do to protect myself?</p>
<p>I would wait before talking to a lawyer, because I doubt if anything else will happen if there is only one movie.</p>
<p>As far as protecting yourself in the future, I don’t know how you can do that while providing others full access to your account. I suppose you could add a password to the internet access, and don’t give it to the guy who downloaded illegally.</p>
<p>Can you swap responsibilities with that roommate? It might take a little work to change the names on the accounts, but you would probably feel better.</p>
<p>This is supposed to supersede the approach of lawsuits from the copyright holders as there can be various problems in identifying the offending party such as what happened in your case or the case where a homeowner has an unsecured wireless router (it still happens quite a bit).</p>
<p>Definitely keep the admission from your roommate stored somewhere safe. Perhaps you could see if you can block bittorrent via your router too so that someone else doesn’t use it. I understand that there are legitimate uses for bittorrent but one could always ask you for a temporary pass to use it if they needed to.</p>
<p>You could also get separate broadband connections - it may feel like a waste of money but it might be worth it so that you don’t have to worry about this sort of thing in the future.</p>