Most Torrent Downloaders Are Monitored, Study Finds

derekmead writes "A new study from Birmingham University in the U.K. found that people will likely be monitored within hours of downloading popular torrents by at least one of ten or more major monitoring firms. The team, led by security researcher Tom Chothia, ran software that acted like a BitTorrent client for three years and recorded all of the connections made to it. At SecureComm conference in Padua, Italy this week, the team announced that they found huge monitoring operations tracking downloaders that have been up and running for at least the entirety of their research. According to the team's presentation (PDF), monitors were only regularly detected in Top 100 torrents, while monitoring of more obscure material was more spotty. What's really mysterious is who all of the firms are. Chothia's crew found around 10 different monitoring entities, of which a few were identifiable as security companies, copyright firms, or other torrent researchers. But six entities could not be identified because they were masked through third party hosting. Now, despite firms focusing mostly on just the top few searches out there at any given time, that's still a massive amount of user data to collect and store. Why? Well, if a reverse class-action lawsuit were feasible, those treasure troves of stored data would be extremely valuable."

Comments

Re:This just in....

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

WTF is stopping them ???????????

I make open source software. I have a donation link on my site and in my app. I have thousands of people using my app every day.

In an average month, I receive $3 in donations*.

That's what's stopping them - people love to talk about how they don't really want this stuff for free - they only want to be able to pay a reasonable amount of money to the people who create it. But the majority of these people rarely put their money where their mouth is when actually given the opportunity to do so.

I realize I'm comparing software and entertainment, but I haven't yet seen anything that tells me people would behave differently. If they're not voluntarily paying for software that helps them do their jobs every day, I don't see the likelihood of paying for a couple hours of one-time entertainment as being very high.

* Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to profit off of this version of my software and I appreciate even the $1.00 donations. But the data here illustrates my point nicely.

Re:Incorrect title

[Black Parrot]

"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.

So only people downloading the latest movies/music are monitored.

FWIW, Pogue's column in the latest Scientific American claims that of the 10 most pirated movies over the internet, none are out there for legal rent or purchase.