Is BitTorrent allowed with FREEDOME? Due to requirements placed on us by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) legislation, we are not able to support BitTorrent or other peer-to-peer file sharing applications on many of our gateway sites, which either reside within the United States, or are hosted by a company based in the US.
Given our promises on privacy and anonymity, honoring the DMCA requirements is challenging for us. We have therefore chosen to technically block peer-to-peer file sharing on the affected VPN gateways. When such traffic is detected by our software, the VPN user's network connection is temporarily restricted by a firewall, leaving only web (http/https) services available for that client, and with limited capacity only. Other applications may obviously be affected by the restrictions. The restrictions are automatically lifted after a few hours time.
While BitTorrent is a perfectly good and legal protocol as such, and it is often used for legitimate purposes, it is most commonly used for downloading and sharing copyrighted material, such as movies. We are, however, not technically able to detect between legal and illegal uses of BitTorrent.
Gateway sites currently limited by this restriction:
- Australia
- Canada
- France
- Germany
- Italy
- Japan
- Mexico
- Netherlands
- Poland
- Singapore
- United Kingdom
- United States
