Related
Stories
- Dutch court bans Pirate Bay links
- UK ISPs must block The Pirate Bay
- Virgin Media suffers hack attack
 |
| Blocking tool Pirate Pay draws its name from controversial piracy site The Pirate Bay |
A Russian
company has developed software it says can disrupt and prevent people from
downloading pirated content.
Pirate Pay
has been backed by Microsoft and has so far worked with Walt Disney Studios and
Sony Pictures to stop "thousands" of downloads.
The tool
poses as real bit torrent users but then "confuses" peer-to-peer
networks, causing disconnections.
Critics
argue that the method will be ineffective in the long term.
The
entertainment industry claims that the downloading of pirated material costs
copyright holders billions of pounds in lost revenue every year.
Last month,
the British Phonographic Industry won a court battle to force UK internet
service providers to block its customers from accessing high-profile piracy
site The Pirate Bay.
However,
the true extent of the financial impact is strongly questioned by internet
rights campaigners.
Swamping
Bit torrent blog Torrent Freak reported that Pirate Pay began life as traffic management
software for internet service providers.
From here
they discovered it could be used to swamp peer-to-peer networks - which are
used to share the files - with false information.
"After
creating the prototype, we realised we could more generally prevent files from
being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating
the spread of pirated content," said Andrei Klimenko, the company's chief
executive, in an interview with Russia Beyond the Headlines.
The
technology has received high-profile praise from the president of Microsoft
Russia - Pirate Pay was awarded one million rubles (£62,000, $100,000) from a
seed investment fund set up by the company behind Windows.
A recent
campaign saw Pirate Pay "protect" recent Russian film Vysotsky.
Thanks to God, I am Alive, made by Walt Disney Studios.
Pirate Pay
said it blocked 44,845 attempted illegal downloads of the film.
However, as
the Torrent Freak blog pointed out, the blocked downloaders might have simply
just tried again later.
'Social
issues'
Although
exact details on how the system operates are not known outside of the company,
security researcher Richard Clayton from the University of Cambridge told the
BBC it was a process that could work, if only in the short term.
"If
you flood the network with lots of lies, then you will be short of real things.
"[But]
the networks are robust about this in the long term because you will say to
your peer 'please give me this data', and when it gives you the data it will
say 'this doesn't match' and throw it away."
Mr Clayton,
who blogs about such issues, said peer-to-peer networks would eventually adapt,
sharing information about "bogus" peers such as those reportedly
utilised by companies like Pirate Pay.
Mr Clayton
added: "You don't solve social issues with technical fixes.
"The
social issue here is that a lot of people think that the legal offerings are
too expensive and don't provide what they want.
"Once
you solve that, nobody's going to want to mess around with complicated bits of
software to get what they need."
Related Articles:
Internet providers ordered to block Pirate Bay
Hollywood studios lose landmark download case
Internet providers ordered to block Pirate Bay
Hollywood studios lose landmark download case
No comments:
Post a Comment