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Microsoft-Funded Startup Aims To Kill BitTorrent Traffic
TheGift73 writes "The Russian based 'Pirate Pay' startup is promising the entertainment industry a pirate-free future. With help from Microsoft, the developers have built a system that claims to track and shut down the distribution of copyrighted works on BitTorrent. Their first project, carried out in collaboration with Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures, successfully stopped tens of thousands of downloads. Hollywood, software giants and the major music labels see BitTorrent as one of the largest threats to their business. Billions in revenue are lost each year, they claim. But not for long if the Russian based startup 'Pirate Pay' has its way. The company has developed a technology which allows them to attack existing BitTorrent swarms, making it impossible for people to share files."
casual piracy really is hurting the industry.
Lots of "people" say this, but the evidence is lacking.
Actually, this is good. Bittorrent is a great protocol, but it can be improved in many ways. Something like this is likely to fix that (legal attacks won't).
And what about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol_encryption ? It is turnrd on by default in most bt clients and I seriously doubt they can detect what content is distributed over encrypted bt connection ...
In the end it won't matter. Someone will figure out how they are doing there and modify the swarms so it becomes ineffective. The true way to combat piracy is to look at why people are pirating and modify your business strategy so that pirates become paying customers by their own choice. Yes, there are "die hard" pirates who will pirate regardless, but there a lot that wouldn't if they could get it legitimately.
"The company doesnâ(TM)t reveal how it works, but they appear to be flooding clients with fake information, masquerading as legitimate peers."
All it would take is for a client to verify to data in the chunk (probably by it's MD5 or SHA), and if it's busted then try and download it again from the same peer. If it fails the second time then just ban the peer.
But I imagine they already do this, don't they?
Summation 2
Which will result in increased private trackers, whichever flavor of megaupload is coming down the pipe, expanded usenet, encrypted file contents, etc etc. I have yet to see any attempt by content holders cause any more than a minor hiccup in the download stream. Oh, wait, I have seen one - I haven't downloaded a song since iTunes began allowing me to get DRM free songs through their service.
Downloaded the blocklists for Pirate Pay as well as the antip2p blocklists.
I tested on a poisoned swarm that had listed 5000 seeders (which were mostly mediadefender and pirate pay poisoners)
Peerblock dumped over 4500 of the poisoned seeds from the torrent by blocking them and my torrent speed went from 20K/s download to 2500-3000K/s download
So for companies like this I highly recommend picking up Peerblock and getting some blocklists, especially the antip2p blocklists.
http://www.peerblock.com/
Never ever again have problem with companies like Mediadefender or PiratePay and their ilk.
They can spend lots and lots of $$$, effort, and time trying to make it harder to get access to content that people want... ... or, they could just make the content available for a reasonable price in a timely manner. But I guess that takes too many brain cells.
And why is MSFT so interested in making their platforms less useful for consumers? As a stockholder, I'd like to see them quietly funding 'legitimate' sharing sites to make the Windows OS the preferred content consumption platform, rather than keeping me from getting what I want.
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
The seatrade industry. Just look outside the coast of Somalia...
They could start by pricing DVDs and Blu-rays reasonably. Next step would be to remove all the crap that goes on between "insert disc" and "watching movie," which often cannot be skipped without violating the DMCA (I'd like to violate the DMCA, actually, with the business end of a shovel).
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
I personally think that is a very ignorant thing to say. First off, I think the evidence that piracy "hurts" these industries is sketchy at best. Sure... *IF* the person pirating said copyrighted material would have bought it legitimately otherwise, then I could buy that argument, but I'm not convinced that's the case. I think it's more likely that most of the pirated material simply would not have been purchased at all. If someone wanted it bad enough, and they couldn't obtain it any other way, of course they'd pay for it.
For me though the real issue is how anyone thinks they could make such a bold claim to stop piracy all together. If it just so happens that torrents no longer function because of their software, or some other means, people who want to pirate copyrighted material will just come up with another way. This is a never-ending competition and the RIAA, the MPAA, or any other organization for that matter, will *NEVER* win it as long as there is some method to digitize the material and there is someone out there with the intelligence and the desire to put forth the effort to get around whatever copy-protection mechonism is in place at the time.
They could start by selling them. Like you know, in the rest of the world.
It's all great the US has all these services and that the DVDs and Blu-rays are available there in the first tier (which is still too late). But most of them never even get to Central/Eastern Europe. People pirate here not out of choice but because of lack of options. Also, in a country where a new game costs about the fourth of minimum wage (which is not enough to live on anyway), people are not going to simply become paying customers. Economy of most slavic countries lies in ruins, and that is it.
Source: I live there and have lived all my life.
Remind me again when performing DoS attacks against 3rd party servers became legal?
The assorted ISP-based 'filtering' stuff is obnoxious; but quite possibly legal under the 'we do whatever we want, cry about it' clause under which consumer ISPs customarily operate.
However, if the (rather vague) description provided by this startup outfit is to be believed they are spoofing bittorrent peers and sending some sort of specially crafted misinformation in order to bring communication between multiple 3rd-party systems to a halt. That certainly looks like a DoS attack, if probably a smarter-than-brute-force one. Even if there were actually some standard of proof being applied to determine that the target swarms are in fact 'infringing', vigilante justice is generally not all that legal. Without any such standard, this is a case of a couple of studios hiring some skeezy Russian outfit to perform denial of service attacks against who knows who in support of their bottom line.
I understand that the law isn't really supposed to apply to people who matter; but surely a felonies-for-hire business model presents some degree of risk to those who go shopping for their services, no?
Maybe the people who wrote LOIC for Anonymous should've set up a front organization to sell a rebranded version of the same thing to the RIAA.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
First, I rarely bittorent anything, but I recently tried to find an audiobook for my son that is old and no longer being sold anywhere. My experience was somewhat similar to the oatmeal trying to watch game of thrones online: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones. Audible? No. Amazon? No. Barnes & Noble? No.
The only places I could find the audiobook were used and costs 40.00 or more for cassette tapes...which I would then have had to convert to MP3s myself. Long story short, thanks to bittorent, my son is now halfway through the book and loves it.
If someone would have bothered to actually sell the audiobook, I would have forked over money for it.
This is a prime example of why copyright law should be relaxed on abandoned copyrighted material. They like to bitch about piracy, but they sure don't go out of their way to offer the public what they really want.
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
"now everyone is pirating."
When everyone breaks a law, it's fair to assume society has decided it is invalid. People might say otherwise ("oh, but artists will STARVE without copyright!"), but actions prove that copyright is not truly accepted by any country in the modern world. Why does it exist? Money.
Great Intellect...
doesn't mean it's right to illegally download a copy of him -- does it?!
I wouldn't worry too much. Like most other silver bullets against piracy, this "technology" isn't meant to stop piracy at all, it's designed to suck money from the idiots in the media industries who can't get it into their thick heads that their business model has been obsoleted.
Time flies when you don't know what you're doing
1: use encrypted peers
2: use a block list to avoid contacting known tainted peers.
3: if the torrents go down, resume downloading via usenet binary forums
4: continual attacks on the open Internet will just drive it into a new darknet.
The signal wants to be free 8)
And I 100% agree with the oatmeal. If they would sell it to me DRM free, I'd buy it.
This. A billion times this.
Basically, stop devaluating your product. The "honestly" bought copy is worth less to the customer than the P2P one. I get more value out of an illegal copy than I get from a legally bought one. This is afaik the ONLY product where you get actually MORE value out of an illegally acquired item than of a legally acquired one.
If I buy a TV that "fell off a truck", I have no warranty, I have no mail-in rebates, I have no discounts for add-ons, I get nothing extra. If I buy that TV legally, I get more than just a TV, I get a lot of services on top of it. So yes, the TV costs more, "legally", but I also get better value for it.
With content, it's reverse. If I download it, I can time and medium shift it, I get no ridiculous warnings and unskipable trailers, I can easily cut scenes out of it, collect a few movies on a media server if I please. All that and more is what I do NOT get when I buy it legally.
How backwards is that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So, how much money does Hollywood make from 20+ year old movies? And what stops them from remaking the movie and getting another 20 years off the remake?
Basically, I call BS, changing copyright back to 20 years will have NO affect at all on Hollywoods Blockbusters.
However, they won't be able to sue the shit out of some small production company that wants to make a side-story off the original 20 year old movie like they can now... I think this is the real fear, some small productions have been HUGE hits and as technology gets better and better the "cost" to create movies will drop significantly; in other words, they are milking every penny they can now since they know their model is doomed in the long run.
We are at the point now where actors/actresses are not needed; they can be computer generated and used for the whole production; whole movies can be created by a small team of people -- now jump ahead 10 to 20 years, think what will be possible then. The only thing that can't be easily created is the "story" itself; but if thousands of old stories become "public domain" then interesting small-production remakes, additions, remixes, cross-overs, and restructuring will dominate YouTube and other near/or free services :)
We are already seeing some of this now (even with the draconian laws) so you know the networks must be shitting themselves....
Sure they do.
Private swarms originate from private trackers. Private trackers regulate uploads and only allow vetted content for the group. It solves the issue of trust on a large scale quite nicely.