There’s no doubt you can run up some seriously huge bills if you try using BitTorrent with a 3G broadband modem, but should you really go and complain about it to a newspaper?
The Herald Sun today has a report about a Geelong teenager, Jack Featherston, who downloaded copies of the movies Freddy Got Fingered and Dumb And Dumber via his 3 mobile dongle on a $29 plan. Because he exceeded the 3GB download limit and paid 10 cents per megabyte for the excess, he ended up with a $602 bill.
That’s annoying and a useful reminder to be cautious with 3G downloads. However, the story skirts around the topic of where the movies actually got sourced from.
Neither flick appears to be available on iTunes or via BigPond Movies’ download option, so it seems likely that they were accessed from (ahem) illegitimate sources. Boasting about your movie downloads in a newspaper would make it quite hard to argue against a copyright violation fine, so we can only hope Jack was using some other more obscure but actually legal source.
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2009/07/boasting-about-movie-downloads-is-a-dumb-idea/
