“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.” Each of which, naturally, ran out to buy the film in question right away, recouping the costs for hiring the firm. None of these people, naturally, simply tried again a few hours later. Primo plan, guys.
But but Microsoft, this is how I’ve got your greatest operating system…
Well I gotta give them points for the name, I lol:ed.
However this whole ‘poisoning the swarm’ idea has been done before and has failed and will again. If it would actually turn into a real problem for piracy via bittorrent (and let’s face it, they would need a shitload of ip’s and bandwidth to make that happen) then the bt protocol would simple be modified/rewritten to make these types of attacks toothless.
Microsoft, Disney and Sony can throw money at these russians all day long and that won’t change anything (except for the russians of course, well played comrade!).
I bet they just posted on vkontakte.ru a request for people to attend a “beta test” to show that they stopped downloads
A genius plan from these guys… ripping-off the studios and corporations is always a win in my books.
So they and Microsoft can look at http://www.kubuntu.org/getkubuntu/download as they are distributing copyrighted (under the GPL license, for example) works on BitTorrent! Criminals!
Now that we’ve tracked them, that “startup” only has to shut down kubuntu.org. How nice it would be for Microsoft, one competitor less.
I would have thought that Sony might have learned from it’s root kit debacle. This must be close to illegal like DOS attacks are and as soon as they accidentally block legitimate files such as the latest Kubuntu download it will be. Who can possibly imagine if run by the likes of Sony they wont start randomly blocking file downloads in error.
I see illegal activity massive fines from the EU and a lots of egg on faces.
There’s also copyrighted music, free for all, distributed using BitTorrent. And movies, like Big Buck Bunny
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1254207/
copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Is this new “startup company” going to sabotage their online BitTorrent distribution, too?
Good point, sir. Some people really want to convince us we are pirate unless we PAY for our stuff, or but it from those people …
If selling download interruption doesn’t work out or doesn’t bring enough revenue they can easily expand in selling “protection” against such things “incidentally” happening with a company’s bittorrent based update services.
“We learned that you are planning to roll out an update to your cash cow game next week, requiring all users to install it before they can continue playing. Would be really unfortunate if their downloads would be continuously interrupted for days on, wouldn’t it?”
It’s only a matter of time until someone will write anti “Pirate Pay” tool as well
Edited 2012-05-13 16:35 UTC
It’s already part of most bt clients – they have the ability to automatically kick out anyone that contributes bad blocks. Every block is checksummed, and not too big, so you won’t even waste much bandwidth before the one fly in the ointment is detected and ejected from the swarm.
Let them die with their “premium content” crap, I would say.
Actually, people are the greatest problem. They refuse to pay, but they still consume this crap. If you like it and it costs – pay. It says a lot about your taste at the same time, really. Holywood action movies/emo crap/fantasy movies/animated crap … Well, well, nice sort of taste you got there, do you?
So, to be more precise: rethink your taste and BOYCOTT USA! [as a main “premium-content” provider].
You did understand that honest people buy things they want. Well, you don’t. You keep on this it is legal to download but never say that it is still illegal to possess unauthorized works. Why don’t you admit that you are breaking copyright laws? Why be a crooked person and steal movies and music? Can’t your promote a civilized world?
I’m bored as fcuk, so I’ll feed the troll.
I buy things.
You know me?
I’m Dutch. In The Netherlands, it is entirely legal to download and posses whatever you want, even if the source is illegal. It’s the law dude, I can’t help it.
Because I have never broken a copyright law in my life.
I’ve never stolen a single object in my entire life. Accusing me of such an act is pretty serious. Any evidence to back it up? I’m quite curious.
Unless I move to Scandinavia, I don’t think my world can get much more civilised. Thanks for caring though!
your problem is you believe random things you’re told. you don’t possess the ability to reason
Lets assume you are right (not sure, but whatever), then the question is, “is this really how things should be”? Why should all the Artistic wealth be in the hands of so few? There are a handful of companies that make all the money (but pretend they don’t). Why do these companies get to use the governments around the world to protect this wealth stream? My taxes are paying to help these companies maintain their strangle hold on the artistic community.
I’m going to go ahead and answer “no”, status quo is not right. I disagree with it. I vote with my $ and my actions. I support the music industry now via buying through iTunes and similar services. It is a pretty slick service. TV, Movies, Books, all need to catch up. Make it easy, make it reasonable, and stop assuming the worst about me.
The solution to the ‘bit torrent problem’ is so easy, already invented, up and running, and doesn’t involve end consumers needing to worry about ‘copyrights’, government, courts, or people like you on high horses.
You mean you support the service that the book industry colluded with to fix prices?
Why not just do everyone a favour and just put tldr; next time. That, or just don’t reply to a comment you didn’t read.
Your comment was an endorsement for iTunes store. As bad as piracy is, getting behind a seller that plans to jack up prices on consumers, and illegally collude with IP holders to take down the industry leader is just as bad if not worse.
Incredible that they dont have better things to do, than add more drm and bullshit to this world.
I really hope win8 will be the beginning of the end of MS stupid defacto monopoly on desktop side of things..
Shutting down piracy would ironically hurt them a lot, because more people would realize how wonderful things are on the FOSS side of things.
Thanks to open source, I have a excellent, featureful, stable, and nobullshit system, not asking for registrating, validations, and licensekeys.
eat shit microsoft
Doesn’t shutting down piracy seem counterproductive for Microsoft? Really, if they make piracy impossible, they pretty much lose every Windows user in China (I say China because it’s widely publicised the amount of pirated Windows installs there) and possibly many other countries. Not every country in the world is like America and Australia, where Microsoft can rely on every new computer shipping with a copy of Windows, and every consumer marching to the beat of planned obsolescence. I’m not going to trot out the phrase “year of the Linux Desktop”, but I have to ask, does Microsoft really want to go down this path? Really? Granted, a pirate customer isn’t a paying customer, but a pirate customer perpetuates the ecosystem.
No. Microsoft doesn’t want the self assembled systems to ship with anything other than Windows. They just can’t say it out loud.
I don’t know about China – but, in some other similar in this aspect places (where a typical PC tended to be some whitebox custom build from a small shop, with unlicensed copy of Windows), the situation is changing with the adoption of laptops – which, in turn, typically come with licensed Windows now…
…and even with laptops, that wasn’t always the case: over half a decade ago, you could find laptops – even of top tier manufacturers – shipping with ~”DOS 2000″ or some random liveDVD Linux distro without full support for hardware, or even some Linux installed on the HDD …again without drivers, not even starting X; but hey, they could say “we don’t promote piracy, all our machines ship with OS” – while of course virtually all of them ended with pirated XP.
But something changed, I haven’t seen such machines for a long time. Perhaps falling cost of hardware made more room for hiding license cost, in the final price -while still keeping it nicely low, and people happy (especially since now they’re getting “free” Windows).
BTW not many fall into any sort of planned obsolescence – machines are typically used until they die.
Maybe all this is more about Office… (not like it also isn’t risky, with Open and Libre Office around – my place having quite respectable adoption)
Edited 2012-05-21 00:18 UTC
On which level does this operate? Is it that this piece of software can join a swarm and then let’s say disable that particular torrent? Or does it operate on tracker level and will it bring the entire tracker down (effectively DOS’ing it)?
So whomever buys their movies well done, if you steal then boo, but I watch movies at the cinema, I’ll watch dvd’s friends have bought legit. I will admit that this year I’ve only had to buy two dvd’s. Is it price? No, they’re pretty cheap, or they are in the UK anyways, but do I watch pirated stuff? No, why should i need to see some dodgy cam recorded rubbish, when I can go see the movie and have a great night out as well? Perhaps if you’re stuck in your mom’s basement you need to do things the dodgy way, but then again you’re probably getting wrist strain from all that porn you’re stupid enough to watch.
BUT, what I do find disturbing is the fact that someone has effectively created a “Legal” worm that will seek you out and close your port or whatever. It’s like a virus that may be passed on to those who are legitimately using torrents to download stuff such as Linux ISO’s etc. It only takes some troll etc to alter something on the torrent to mark it as copyrighted and the worm will mess things up really badly.
As long as they don’t block the whole train because of one, rotten car I’m happy with that.
I don’t care for Holywood crap [I refuse to watch non-brainers], but I do care for regular stuff like opensource OSs and other freely available content.
Well, I don’t see these efforts as targeting every single download. Even statistically curbing, say, 70% of torrents floating around would be a huge win for the industry. Sure, some heavy and experienced users would still got their way through but, a heavy user is still just still a single lost customer, something that they can easily compensate with thousands of one-timers put off by few unsuccessful attempts on most popular sites. Just pushing most common media consumers through the “imagined” inconvenience barrier is the wholly grail of the content industry.
Of course the easiest way for them is to completely kill bit torrent operation. That technology gives them the same advantage that seeders used for their immunity: not being under the same jurisdiction as interested parties. Even if their DDOS like practices turn out to be illegal, when majority of them can be performed from other country, not much can be done. There’s a reason the selected company is seated in Russia (of course besides it being home to lots of bright IT minds).
Edited 2012-05-14 16:00 UTC
If there was a way to stop all piracy without causing problems for legitimate uses I would support it completely. It just doesn’t seem moral to me to download music or movies. I admit that I do it, and that it makes me a hypocrite in a way, but really it’s not like you are being denied food or water.