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."