TorGuard Settles Piracy Lawsuit, Agrees To Block Torrent Traffic On US Servers

TorGuard has settled a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by several movie companies last year. The VPN provider stood accused of failing to take action against subscribers who were pirating films. As part of the settlement, TorGuard agrees to block BitTorrent traffic on U.S. servers; however, it stresses that user privacy is in no way affected by this decision. TorrentFreak reports: "Pursuant to a confidential settlement agreement, Plaintiffs have requested, and Defendant has agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States using firewall technology," a joint statement reads. This is quite a far-reaching measure as a broad BitTorrent blockade will also affect legal traffic, which includes software updates from Twitter and Facebook. That said, people can still use BitTorrent on servers in other regions. [...] The company confirms that it's blocking torrent traffic on U.S. servers, but that doesn't change anything for the privacy of users. "TorGuard has not been forced to log network usage data. Due to the nature of shared IP's and related hardware technicalities of how TorGuard's network was built it is impossible for us to do so," the VPN provider writes. "We have a responsibility to provide high quality uninterrupted VPN and proxy services to our client base at large while mitigating any related network abuse that should arise. This commitment to user privacy and service reliability is the reason we have taken measures to block Bittorrent traffic on servers within the United States."

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