If you’re fond of downloading material online, you might have a Microsoft-funded enemy on the horizon which is aiming to stop piracy by blocking torrents.
In a hat-tip to the world’s most notorious file-sharing site, Pirate Pay is a Russian creation that tracks and shuts down copyright material on BitTorrent.
According to Torrent Freak (TF), the Pirate Pay startup has created a way to attack BitTorrent swarms in order to make it impossible to share files. The report says “The idea started three years ago when the developers were building a traffic management solution for Internet providers. The technology worked well. It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail.”
Naturally this system would have great appeal to Hollywood and the global music industry which has been chasing its tail to try and put a stop to the distribution of pirated material. More recently, the latest move to block Pirate Bay in the UK made a statement but is turning out to be less than practical as mirror sites are springing up at a rate that makes the mythical Hydra look like a slacker.
If this is indeed the solution to slowing down the spread of pirated material, then initial backers are going to see a good return. The Microsoft Seed fund [RU] has already invested $100k into the company and last year Walt Disney Studios Sony Pictures Releasing (WDSSPR) [RU] tested Pirate Pay’s services.
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To put the process through its paces, Pirate Pay scaled to protect the film “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I am Alive” and successfully blocked 45,000 attempts to download it. TF rightly points out though, that Pirate Pay’s release about this success does not take into account downloads that may have slipped through its net.
Blocking torrents is no mean feat given the distributed nature of seeding and users around the world. If Pirate Pay have managed to create a system that can aid the crack-down on pirated material, then it can expect a fat pay package from the world’s largest publishers of film and music.
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