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Anyone who has downloaded pirated music, video or ebooks using a BitTorrent client has probably had their IP address logged by copyright-enforcement authorities within three hours of doing so. So say computer scientists who placed a fake pirate server online — and very quickly found monitoring systems checking out who was taking what from the servers.
The news comes from this week’s SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy, where computer security researcher Tom Chothia and his colleagues at the University of Birmingham, UK, revealed they have discovered “massive monitoring” of BitTorrent download sites, such as the PirateBay, has been taking place for at least three years.
BitTorrent is a data distribution protocol that splits an uploaded digital media file into many parts and shares it around a swarm of co-operating servers. Birmingham’s fake server acted like a part of a file-sharing swarm and the connections made to it quickly revealed the presence of file-sharing monitors run by “copyright enforcement organisations, security companies and even government research labs”.
“We only detected monitors in Top 100 torrents; this implies that copyright enforcement agencies are monitoring only the most popular content music and movie on public trackers,” the team says in its presentation paper. “Almost everyone that shares popular films and music illegally will be connected to by a monitor and will have their IP address logged,” says Chothia.
Given the vast numbers of people whose IP addresses will have now been logged, the finding raises the question over what enforcement outfits now plan to do with their harvested data. Have they gathered a war chest of targets for future copyright infringement lawsuits? Or are they simply assessing the scale of the problem to make governments act?
If it is for lawsuits, the standard of evidence may not be enough, says Chothia. “All the monitors connected to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content. However, they did not actually collect any of the files being shared. So it is questionable whether the observed evidence of file-sharing would stand up in court.”
Image: Yasuhide Fumoto/Getty Images
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The sceptic in me says this is exactly the sort of story that the copyright agencies love to see doing the rounds – “We know who you are etc, etc…”
Yeah, spot on I reckon. It’s really a story about how easy it is to electronically collect data to distract people from how hard it is to prosecute pirates.
I always wondered with torrents:
You know how you are allowed to photocopy a few pages from a book under fair use or whatever, isn’t torrents basically the same as photocopying a few pages from a book at every library in the country?
It is if you’ve got a BT Broadband.
They can suck my dick. I torrent software and yet I bet I put more money into the software and media industries than most people out there who don’t.
I can now buy my games from a great service and feel safe with Valve’s service to the point where I don’t want to torrent. It’s really saved the PC platform and changed the way I play games, it’s amazing that they made a service better than torrents.
However for TV, Movies and Music I cannot say the same thing. Half the time I cannot get TV shows here in the UK because they seem to lag like 2 years behind and are full of ads. With torrents I can get them day one without half an hour of ads pissing me off.
Sorry but if you don’t want me to torrent TV Shows then give me a good service. I’d be happy with Netflix, only here in the UK at least everything on it is again 2 years old lol.
Torrents are just better than what is offered out there, it isn’t about pirating and not wanting to pay. It’s purely because there isn’t a service offered that is any better, why pay legit to be controlled by all this DRM that makes watching stuff so much effort?
I paid for Sky go to watch F1 this year and now I watch illegal live streams of each race that isn’t live on the BBC. Why? It’s meant to be Sky go but you can only watch it on two devices a month and you aren’t allowed to change until the next month. So basically I wanted to walk the dog and carry on watching it, I cannot because it’s tied to my 360 and my Desktop. What if I’m at a friends and want to watch it on the iPad or if I’m in bed and watch to watch it on my Laptop? I cannot!
Sorry but if you’re going to offer and inferior service to someone live streaming it where I can watch it on any device I want, then why would I pay?
Fully agree with you. It is still illegal though..
I agree too, but with football not F1, I pay for the full Virgin package yet I can’t watch all UK football, even though I could if I lived abroad. Even with Sky go on my phone I have to access it in “other ways”. The same with TV shows, I don’t want to wait a year to catch up with TV shows that people are discussing on the WWW now.
The other thing that always get me is the way the publishing companies always complain about loosing billions in revenue. If you think about it they will actually be loosing no where near the ridiculous numbers they proclaim to be. If torrents weren’t available they seem to think that the same people that are pirating their films etc will go out and buy them when in most cases they wouldn’t bother. People only download because they can and wouldn’t if they have to pay.
Luckily I don’t use torrents. Stream/download the particular episode/film for entertainment purposes via file sharing websites is more popular now. Most sites have back-ups for back-ups and there seems to always be an abundance of them. Restrictions and the FBI’s involvement of MegaUpload’s shutdown has made it harder for filesharing websites, which weren’t used to limiting downloads to users, to distribute the wanted copies. But there are ways to get around it.
anyone torrenting without BTGuard (or other IP masker) is just crazy these days. I’m paranoid even with running as much interference as possible. And I wouldn’t torrent if they just freaking had next day airing of the US shows.
for instance, I used to illegal stream my college football games. Then I found ESPN pass.. and now I just bought that and stream legally..LIVE!
Correct me if I’m wrong but preventing IPs from establishing a connection to your computer doesn’t prevent the computer behind that request from seeing that you should be a valid target IP in the swarm. They just download any data from you.
edit: They just CAN’T download any data from you
I wouldn’t say they were crazy it just depends on how much you torrent and what you do torrent. For me I don’t really torrent things that often so the cost isn’t really worth it for me at the moment. Although I don’t really like the idea of being traceable. I’d also say that there will probably be a lot of people that don’t know about btguard and the like.
I like free stuff, compete with that!