RIAA Anti-Piracy Partner Clueless About BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on October 28, 2009The piracy tracking company DtecNet has made quite a name for itself in the past few months after partnering with the RIAA and several local governments to assist in the ‘war on piracy’. One would think that these projects would require at least some basic knowledge of BitTorrent, but a recently published paper by DtecNet’s business intelligence unit proves the opposite.
In January we introduced DtecNet as the RIAA’s new evidence collecting outfit, replacing MediaSentry whose evidence gathering techniques have been highly criticized by experts.
The Danish company is not limiting its services to the RIAA though. It is also working with an Irish ISP to support their “3 strikes” regime, and in Australia the company also conducted investigations against alleged pirates.
Apart from their pirate tracking activities, DtecNet also has a business intelligence unit to help their entertainment industry clients “Understand what’s happening and where, and to develop smarter strategies to guide their development, marketing, retailing, distribution and investment initiatives.” The intelligence unit utilizes its insights into the file-sharing community to help out, but unfortunately the unit is not that knowledgeable.
In fact, the whitepaper (pdf) that was published by the DtecNet unit and mirrored all around the web during the last 24 hours, clearly shows that they have no clue about BitTorrent.
In the paper that deals with the recent downtime of the Pirate Bay tracker and how this affects BitTorrent usage, they make several false claims, draw bogus conclusions and report inaccurate statistics. Bogus reports from anti-piracy companies are nothing new, but this is definitely one of the worst we’ve ever seen thus far, and it is already being cited by several respected news outlets.
Let’s take a look at some of the things DtecNet claims and why these claims are bogus, inaccurate or just plain stupid.
Claim: — “After Swedish authorities forced the Internet disconnection of The Pirate Bay, online piracy worldwide dropped substantially on BitTorrent networks as file traders scrambled to find replacement trackers.”
This claim is based on a graph presented by DtecNet (see below) which shows that the number of infringements recorded by the company dropped significantly. This is of course a direct effect of the Pirate Bay tracker downtime. Companies like DtecNet use the tracker to find and report pirates and if it goes down there are less recorded infringements. However, there is no evidence that piracy went down. Most BitTorrent transfers were working fine due to the wonders of DHT (trackerless torrents), including the ones that were using only the Pirate Bay tracker.
Claim: — “The impact of the shutdown is strongly obvious, [...] file trading on BitTorrent, easily the world’s most popular peer-to-peer protocol, dropped virtually overnight by nearly 80 percent.”
This second claim is even more absurd because it suggests that BitTorrent usage dropped by 80 percent based on a graph of recorded infringements. Remember, DtecNet doesn’t track any BitTorrent traffic data. The only thing that their data proves is that, because of the tracker downtime, DtecNet was unable to connect to some of the trackers listed in their database of torrents. Again, the torrents might have worked just fine for users because of DHT.
Recorded infringements per P2P network
Claim: — “Over time, infringements through that network [BitTorrent] began to rise again as new trackers became available.”
This seems to suggest that after the Pirate Bay trackers went down several new trackers have appeared, which is simply not true. In fact, DtecNet uses OpenBitTorrent and the Denis Stalker tracker as an example in their paper, two trackers that are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay tracker. The only reason the number of recorded infringements began to rise is that these trackers also suffered downtime from which they recovered. DtecNet however seems to be unaware of the relation between the three trackers.
Claim: — DtecNet has created a nice graph (below) that “illustrates the chaos the shutdown caused among various BitTorrent tracker networks, and how more recently the situation appears to be clarifying itself as users find new favorite sites.”
The only confusion we see here is at the DtecNet offices. The company apparently fails to understand that a tracker is something different than a site. There is absolutely no indication that BitTorrent users were looking for new sites (note that The Pirate Bay site was still up), but even if they were this does not mean that there will be any changes in the usage of the various trackers.
Relative recorded infringements per BitTorrent tracker
Claim: — “About two weeks after the Pirate Bay shutdown, two of the successor trackers – OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker – temporarily shut down, possibly because they could not handle rising demand.”
This claim is almost hilarious. As pointed out earlier, OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay. It takes no genius to figure this out, and this should be especially obvious for an outfit that deals with BitTorrent trackers on a daily basis, trying to catch pirates. So, the two successor trackers did not collapse under the increased load at all, they went down together with The Pirate Bay.
We could go on for hours refuting pretty much every sentence in the report and we are not the only ones who dispute the know-how of DtecNet’s self-proclaimed business intelligence unit. P2P expert Dr. Pouwelse of the Tribler team at Delft University of Technology looked into the report as well and told TorrentFreak: “They are completely technically incompetent, they are just trying to get sensational press coverage, or both.”
“Mixing up terms like trackers versus website and failure to do basic homework like DNS lookups means they would fail our master course in P2P. Their work suffers from a fundamental methodological error: what our company can’t see does not exist, thus we can make wild absolute claims on a complex global phenomena,” Pouwelse said.
Companies such as DtecNet are earning millions of dollars from the entertainment industry thanks to their piracy tracking activities and the business intelligence they claim to offer. Considering this position it is striking to see how little they actually know about what’s going on, and we fear that this amateurish white paper might actually lose @DtecNetBI some customers, instead of adding new clients to their portfolio.
Chances are, DtecNet will be responsible for gathering evidence against British file-sharers so that Peter Mandelson can have them kicked off the Internet in 2011. Nice to know that important job will be in safe hands.
Previously: Fresh Pirate Bay Purchase Attempt By Four Potential Buyers
Next: ISP Threatens Legal Action Against UK Over Anti-Piracy Plans
76 Responses
Actually I hope we see more companies like DtecNet–soaking the big companies for millions on dollars with nonsense like this.
Viva la ignorancia!
and here i thought eircom wouldn’t do a good job at stopping torrents
i assume from the sound of this a simple ip block list will suffice in dealing with these people
xD
I sure hope people don’t use this report in a court of law as a reference. That would be so ridiculous. I’m laughing just reading the claims. Just another way of showing the RIAA has no fuckin’ clue what Bittorrent is, hell they probably will NEVER get it, at least until the next generation takes over.
DtecNet = scumbag rat fuckers
go ahead mindless scum and give the big companies your dis-information
boycott hollywood and riaa
stop buying any new products…buy only used and keep the money out of their hands
So the RIAA is paying lots and lots of money to a completely incompetent organization?
Somehow I fail to see the problem.
Shhhh… According to this, piracy isn’t a big deal… Maybe people will listen to nonsense and go, Oh… Guess we killed all the pirates then? Aight, guess we need to make our crap better now.
i lol’d. this white paper is ridiculous. no wonder the RIAA/MPAA are saying that theyre losing tons of money because of piracy… its because they keep wasting it all away on retards like DtecNet in the name of piracy
#4, lol’d. :P
Those guy’s are hilarious, sometimes I think they are the guys behind IT Guy LoL
The leaked internal emails of MediaDefender proved that they not only reported bogus statistics, they KNEW they were reporting bogus statistics.
After their lies were exposed, the firm’s business soon collapsed.
As with MediaDefender, there’d be nothing better than having a hacker dig up the private conversations of DtecNet bosses, which would likely prove that the company leaders are just as incompetant as the idiots who ran MediaDefender.
It’s really funny that RIAA reads this site and they also know this is bullshit. So why do they still pay these faggots? Because they are faggots too.
They are simply con artist, they
produce lots of hot air but no real
substance, the only goal is to make
money, in this case from the
content-mafia, after them immediately
crawling the lawer parasites out of
the sewer, another type of con artist,
also driven by greed and looking for
another type of prey…Us
Considering this position it is striking to see how little they actually know about what’s going on…..
SHHHHH! Please, if you want to kill a dog, kill one that is feral, not one that is deliriously waltzing away from the home he is supposed to protect.
In other words, let these people do their jobs. They apparently suck so much at it they don’t pose a threat to anyone but themselves anyway. Though I wonder what they would report if the trackers blocked their IP’s. Wonder if they would head to hollywood claiming all piracy has ended… ^^
Lets make sure these guys are on all the ipfilter blocklists \ peerblock blocklists..
In the whitepaper DHT is not even mentioned. There can be 2 reasons why not:
1. They don’t about it’s existance.
2. They know it exists but are afraid of it because they can’t do a thing about it.
Both of them can be true. However, if I count their other statements, like:”Torrent sites now point to multiple trackers…” (Translated: Torrent files now point to multiple trackers)then most likely the 1st option is the right.
ROFL. Wow… I haven’t felt the downtime… Except for the red arrows indicating the trackers were down, DHT and Peer Exchange were working wonders.
Nowadays you only need the hash to get the content…
UK users can rest assured, the evidence DtectNet will gather will probably be so flawed that any defense will be able to shot it down.
Amusing. This one was truly amusing.
another news item straight from bizarro world…where ignorant incompetants run businesses and publish retarded papers full of significant errors that other fools take at face value.
our leaders are brein dead.
Omg… I Can’t believe.. No, wait, i’m mistaken.. I do.
Well… just wonder how much are they paying? Would be good enough to make the pirates run a company like that.. Throw some pirates (real ones).. Give some “fake” statistics.. use the money they pay us to financiate the guy that’s on court.. and put the rest on our pockets =)
Are these guys hiring? I need a job and this one looks like you don’t need to know much to work there.
Shhhh, don’t tell them. In this case ignorance is a good thing.
Good point seeker, I’d apply to @DtecNetBI for a vacancy as you obviously know more about stealing than these guys
Fellas, don’t underestimate them. It’s just spin-doctoring once more.
No one will pay to the “anti-pirate” company that will honestly say “we cannot do shit to stop pirates”. So reports like these are born – to look good in front of RIAA and get munny.
At the very top of corporate food chain are CEO, board of directors and corporate investors. Reports like these are designed with only one purpose – to show to top execs.
It’s fun to mock them for lame reports – but fact is they don’t give a crap as long as RIAAs pay them to present reports about heroic struggle with P2P.
They have competent people and they definitely know about DHT/peer exchange.
You friends at http://bitsnoop.com/
Infact I’m sure they’ll read this, vain creatures that they are, by Googling their company name.
I’d post your email contact on here so they can headhunt you.
They need good quality cyber crims to improve their business model
@15: The problem there is that there is no provision for presenting a defense, no matter how ironclad, in the impending UK system. People will be disconnected ultimately on nothing but the word of these clowns, while they leech $ from the RIAA et al., who in turn leech $ from their content creators.
They will always pay for bullshit
They are so stupid, almost as stupid as the “Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal”:
The beast is so stupid, that if you wrap a towel around your head, it will assume that since you can’t see it, it can’t see you.
Just the same way these hilarious folks draw conclusions from their “statistics”.
I love how this official report was made straight up using MS Word’s default “Theme”. It makes this company’s claim of professionalism laughable.
So basicly now if i just remove tpb’s tracker from my hot torrents i have 80% less chance of getting a frivilous law suite? sounds good to me, thanks RIAA
Did anyone consider that this is exactly what they want us to believe ?
That they don’t know shit !!
Then everyone will feel secure and start to relax and then … wham bam thank you mam … your caught.
Well, maybe the don’t know shit.
Cool!
I am going to start my own BS company too!
ROFL great reading! thanks
It’s too ridiculous to believe..Dont trust it people… DHT isnt new, they know what it is….
Perhaps they are simply trying to BS their way tto the bank, or they are trying to BS their way to easy “busts”
In any case, dont believe they are that ignorant..
In a related story, I just shit in my pants.
Their website is gay
Hey guys, do you like dating with a cougar? Or are you a cougar yourself? Okay, no matter you are looking for a NSA, FWB or serious relationship. You’ll want to check this out:
**== Matchcougar.C-o-m ==**
If I pull some wacky BS out of my butt, can I have some big RIAA bucks too?
“Oops I Crapped My Pants” sure holds a lot of dung! (There’s one for you old-timers out there.)
25 Oct 29, 2009 at 01:49 by brizzl
Wow…HHG2TG…reference…amazing that someone could put it in context here…
Douglas you will be missed.
wow everyone is laughing at them. what idiots.
lol damn to hell, you would figure being torrents one of the main things people like RIAA want to shut down that they would at least know whats happening or have some sort of knowledge of how it works, pfft pfft typical people with money wanting to ruin everything.
If they spent that money helping aids for disadvantage families or children instead of bitching about torrent, they could at least change lives!! lol
@torrentbeakz aka neostyles aka reasoned mind
if you have the technology to chase filesharers who have done nothing wrong then why dont you use it to catch pedophiles?
hi torrentfreak stop censoring my comments there is nothing wrong with them k thanks.
Strange. I’ve never had any issues downloading torrents.
Anyways, back to my downloading.
Someone here said the RIAA reads this site, well if so listen up RIAA.
I like to “try before I buy”, which your archaic current business model doesn’t support, plus your product is DRM’d and because of this it doesn’t play back across multiple hardware platforms.
Your current extortion of money from innocent internet users is despicable.
You would be quite happy to send me to jail with falsified evidence which you present to a biased court due to your “bought” judges.
You tried desperately to squash independent artists by attempting to get p2p software banned. (you failed because you messed with Librarians, don’t you know anything ?, NEVER mess with a Librarians pet project).
My hard earned cash goes to a fair, just, non DRM’d music business models.
I hope more people boycott your products RIAA.
Only diffirence I have noticed before and after piratebay disconnection chaos, is that new torrents have alot more trackers and older torrents take little longer to get in cloud. So nothing mutch seem to be changed, except money burned for nothing.
Not my money so I don’t care :]
Good article, Ernesto.
Frankly – isn’t it better that they stay ignorant? That makes it easier to fool them.
Muppets.
If they were serious and honest people and/or if the weren’t clueless about networking and P2P they’d never endeavor to stop “piracy” because they’d know how useless such attempts are.
One Word: DtecFAIL
Shutting down The Pirate Bay and claiming Bittorrent traffic has ended is like shutting down Google and claiming web traffic has ended.
Clearly there is a ton of money just waiting to be fleeced from wishful thinkers. Perhaps I should start up my own anti-piracy company. Good make-believe skills seem to be all that is required for success.
Not really surprising, is it? People that are awful at their jobs paying other people that are awful at their jobs to be awful at their jobs.
Is it any wonder that the RIAA is losing money?
I hope they will be gathering evidence against british sharers-
I can just whip this paper up in court and claim BS.
Lol @ their SOLOUTIONS link:
http://www.dtecnet.com/EN/Our%20Soloutions/Business%20Intelligence.aspx
Pure idiotism.
“make several false claims, draw bogus conclusions and report inaccurate statistics.”
While no wonder they get allong so well wigh the riaa!
Sorry for my stupid question, but what is “Ares”? Never heard of it…
@DtecWTF: ROFLOLMAO. So much nonsense in so few pages…
just shows how brain dead thay are and the goverments that beleave there stats are just as bad
Dear No @42 ETF are you talking about. I am not associated with those other posters or organisations of any kind. I just have a different point of view to you as I do not support stealing property be it intellectual or physical. Having run out of facile arguments you resort to personal attacks – pathetic
@30 You have it spot on.
You can call them stupid but it’s my bet they are not. But on this board if you oppose theft you are stupid. Well when you get fined or banged up, let’s see who’s in a job and who’s stupid?
@TorrentzBeak
Intellectual property cannot be stolen because ideas cannot be property. If you want strong arguments, please read this article:
http://www.louigiverona.ru/?page=projects&s=writings&t=authorship&a=authorship_property
Fact:
Sony would kill your pregnant wife if they could make any money from that.
let them believe what they want to believe
http://piratesagainstpedos.co.cc/
Great to see the riaa/mpaa wasting its money :0)
As far as the w@r on piracy goes, us file sharers here at torrent freak are the w@r against the pirates who in fact are riaa/mpaa!
riaa/mpaa = pirates
I’m sorry readers of torrent freak, its just that i dont like the truth & when its so obvious i will reply with mindless posts to troll.
Again my deepest apologies to you all for my brainwashed mind :0)
Well lucky fer us, all the idiots at RIAA and their flunkie sidekicks are dumb as the day is long!
Timmah
http://www.total-anonymity.pro.tc
stop it………………………..
stop it………………………..
Cargo cult security!
Remember Big Business and government deals with spin doctoring than the actual truth. Truth is the last thing they want the general public to know. If they can spin their so-called truth (re: lies) to the public, who for the most part don’t know the workings of P2P, will take in spoon-fed media reports as legitimate fact.
How do I open a company like this lol
What’s interesting to me, after reading the report, is just how sloppy it is. Now I don’t know what purpose they intended to serve by producing this paper, but the claims they make seem utterly insubstantiated by their presented data and reasoning. They simply present a colorful graph and make claims. They don’t even label the y axis. The claims seem to be that the y axis is some mysterious measurement of *something* on “select” (not defined, no idea what that means) networks.
They fail to provide even the most basic information to allow the reader to draw conclusions from their data, even if its taken for true. If this were a highschool science report, it would have failed. I understand most people don’t have a scientific background, but it isn’t a secret that when basing your claims off of measurements, that you need to a) say what the measurements are, and b) show how your conclusions are a function of your measurements.
They fail to do this, completely. I honestly have no idea what they measured and would have no confidence in their conclusions, nor in their company if this paper was supposed to be an analysis or summary of findings. The explanations offered by torrent freak appear quite possible, but its impossible to say from this report, as their conclusions are just naked claims with pretty graphs (of unknown meaning). To sum it up: this report is worthless, and while its impossible to say whether their conclusions are valid (certainly not supported by this paper), the manner in which they present them (naked claims and vague metrics) gives no confidence that they were.
Knowing how UK works, these guys probably have a degree in history or foreign languages, and a rich dad. So they are expert at everything from cooking to IT.
I still have that davenport/lyon pencil. Any taker.
shhhhhhhh, don’t say anything.
Let them think they won so they leave us alone!!!
@1 The problem with encouraging Big Media to spend money on these useless studies by incompetent firms like DtecNet is that to them, it’s just part of the cost of fighting piracy. So while these nincompoops who tell them what they sorta want to hear are laughing all the way to the bank, Big Media just twists it to say the money they’re throwing away on these studies is part of their “losses” that could’ve been avoided if only the marketplace were fair and law-abiding. It’s so technically flawed as to render the data useless, and is arguably not a good use of their wealth in dealing with the realities of BitTorrent and the rest of the file sharing market, but I doubt it’s going to bankrupt them. The money they drop on it is a straight expense, not something they think will pay for itself. So they’ll only spend what they can afford.
The other problem is what they use these reports for. They lobby government beurocrats/legislators who have no idea how science is done (which is exactly what this paper purported to be doing, whatever their purpose was, they measured data and discussed hypothesises tested by that data). They look at conclusions and don’t bother with looking to see if the conclusions are supported, or if there even is any disclosure of how they were arrived at (negative in both cases here).
Then when they get the three strikes laws proposed, the legislators/regulators support them because of the problems the reports detail and the solutions the reports promise. No thought at all is given to whether these papers are credible, nor even whether they’ve supported their claims or at the very least shown how they were arrived at (again, negative in this case).
The other issue is in court cases. In both trial and appeals cases these reports and the experts that parrot them help get bad law made. Especially when the opposing side can’t afford to get their own expert to explain why these reports are worthless, the suit who cited them for the plaintiff as evidence of various things will win.
Nothing much can be done, but they’re far from harmless. If people would learn to look at these things scientifically, we’d see the impact of them disappear. Unfortunatly, politicians don’t really care, and know nothing of logic or evidence-based decision making.
It’s strange. Perhaps every older generation tries to control the technology of the younger generation. More than ever before, I think, the older generation has zero clue what they are dealing with. I also think it is likely that it is too late for them. They can never understand. Thus, their efforts will always be laughable and ineffective.
Art no longer belongs to the rich. It belongs to the masses…rightly.
Hey RIAA, IFPI etc, My company can catch all the pirates in the world for you in 5 seconds using my super secret mixed-hash-double-fallback-vga-tcpip-pacman-ghost pirate tracker. Act now and I’ll throw in a nice powerpoint and graph for free!!
Just deposit $10.000.000 on my swiss account and dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT
PS: We’ve tracked the biggest scumbags on the internet for you for free. Go sue 127.0.0.1 !
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