However, instead of fighting a futile battle to eradicate all unauthorized downloads, BitTorrent can also offer a unique insight into the viewing habits of millions of people.

Fairfax, one of Australia’s largest media outlets, appears to realize this.

At a government broadband conference in Sydney, Fairfax’s head of video Ricky Sutton admitted that in a country with one of the highest percentage of BitTorrent users worldwide, his company determines what shows to buy based on the popularity of pirated videos online.

“One of our major ways to get content is going to BitTorrent, and other BitTorrent sites, and find what people are illegally downloading to then go to the content owner and say, ‘hey, I watched this last night it’s going awesome on BitTorrent’ and then say ‘how about giving it to us?”‘

In other words, BitTorrent serves as one of the main market research strategies for the Aussie media outlet. And it doesn’t stop there as The Australian reports.

Fairfax says it also advertises to BitTorrent users, sharing the revenue they generate from converted pirates with the BitTorrent platforms.

“We then bring [the video content] over here and we advertise on BitTorrent that it’s legally available on our platform, and then pay some revenue share based on it. That’s worked quite effectively,” Sutton says.

Sutton didn’t name any of the platforms where they advertise their content, but we assume that he’s talking about BitTorrent sites since BitTorrent Inc., the San Francisco parent company of the popular uTorrent software, informs TorrentFreak they are not working with Fairfax.

It’s refreshing to see a high media executive admitting that BitTorrent trends offer useful insights, although it’s certainly not a new approach. P2P-intelligence has been used for more than half a decade in the entertainment industry.

Leaked emails from the piracy “intelligence” company MediaDefender previously showed that record label Interscope used piracy data to determine what single to release next.

Fairfax’s decision to share revenue with BitTorrent platforms, however, is more controversial and will certainly raise some eyebrows at other media outlets.

As can be seen from their video programming, Fairfax mostly buys independent content that’s doing well on BitTorrent, not any of the major U.S. TV-shows.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

For years companies such as BayTSP and Peer Media have been hired by movie studios and record labels to track the IP-addresses of file-sharers so these can be reported to their Internet providers.

In the U.S. this process is about to change as it will soon be formalized with the upcoming “six-strikes” anti-piracy scheme. Under this mechanism customers of five large ISPs will receive so-called copyright alerts.

Besides being warned, repeat infringers face a variety of punishments under the new regime including temporary Internet disconnections. Worse still, the MPAA and RIAA may eventually use the collected data to sue those file-sharers who refuse to kick their habit.

While the Center for Copyright Information has yet to announce the names of the companies that will do the “spying” for the six-strikes system, TorrentFreak recently learned that both BayTSP (recently acquired by Irdeto) and Peer Media will be involved. In this light, we thought it would be interesting to see what these companies have been up to recently.

With help from ScanEye we obtained the lists of torrent files that these companies were connecting to over the past month. In addition, we looked at changes in tracking patterns to see whether their activity increased or not.

As can be seen on the right, the monitoring activity (hits on torrents) of BayTSP spiked around July 12, the initial launch date of the six-strikes scheme. For Peer Media this spike wasn’t as pronounced, but monitoring activity clearly increased over time as well.

While there’s no hard proof that the increased activity is part of the six-strikes scheme, it wouldn’t be a surprise.

As for the number of torrents that are being watched, over a period of a month BayTSP connected to 3,657 torrent files and Peer Media to 3,752 torrents. Although ScanEye tracks hundreds of thousands of torrents, these lists are not extensive.

Another thing that catches the eye when going through the list of torrents is that it mostly consists of movies and TV-shows. In part this can be explained by the fact that most content on BitTorrent is video related. Alternatively, if this is part of the six-strikes scheme, the music labels might just be slow on submitting titles.

To put the spying activity in perspective, the BitTorrent activity of these two anti-piracy companies is three times greater than that generated by all customers of a smaller ISP such as Sonic.net. It is comparable to the BitTorrent activity of all Comcast Business clients combined.

However, the numbers pale in comparison to the larger Internet Providers. In the U.S. Comcast generates by far the most activity on BitTorrent, followed by Road Runner and AT&T.

Finally, the lists of torrent files that BayTSP and Peer Media connect to also include a lot of fake torrents. These could be purposefully shared by these companies, or they may be uploaded by scammers which is much more common according to recent research.

Whatever the case, BitTorrent users who are considering downloading the latest Hollywood blockbusters have a good chance of being watched.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

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.

The idea started three years ago when the developers were building a traffic management solution for Internet providers. The technology worked well. It was able to stop BitTorrent traffic if needed, which made the developers realize that they might have built the holy anti-piracy grail.

“After creating the prototype, we realized we could more generally prevent files from being downloaded, which meant that the program had great promise in combating the spread of pirated content,” Pirate Pay CEO Andrei Klimenko says.

With this new business model in mind the company continued to develop their product, and it didn’t take long before an investor was willing to support it. Last year Pirate Pay received a $100,000 investment from the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund.

Microsoft Russia’s president praised the innovative idea, which his company would also be able to use in the future.

With the cash injection the company continued working on their anti-piracy solution and December last Direktcya Kino was the first to hire Pirate Pay’s services. For a month Pirate Pay’s technology protected the film “Vysotsky. Thanks to God, I’m alive,” (distributed by The Walt Disney Studios Sony Pictures Releasing company) with moderate success.

The company doesn’t reveal how it works, but they appear to be flooding clients with fake information, masquerading as legitimate peers.

“We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other,” Andrei Klimenko says.

The end result was that 44,845 transfers were successfully stopped. How many downloads slipped through, and whether the downloaders didn’t simply try again later is unknown. Pirate Pay don’t disclose their exact rates but say they charge between $12,000 and $50,000 depending on the scope of the project.

While Pirate Pay claim their technology is truly unique, it is not the first company to tackle BitTorrent piracy. The now defunct MediaDefender charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack BitTorrent trackers and upload fake torrent files.

MediaDefender was rebranded to Peer Media, and under this brand they continue to offer these and other anti-piracy services.

Whether Pirate Pay is truly different and more effective than any of the other solutions remains to be seen. Even if it’s hugely effective, the scattered nature of BitTorrent makes it practically impossible to stop all infringing downloads of a movie, while the costs may outweigh the “losses” that are prevented.

Companies that really want to make Pirates Pay are probably better off investing in improvements to their legal offers.

Article updated to emphasize that Direktcya Kino was the first client.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There are editorials in mainstream newspapers that say “Such theft costs the copyright- or trademark-holders billions of dollars each year.”

Even Vice President Biden said last year that “Piracy is theft, clean and simple, it’s smash and grab.” But you’d think a long-time lawyer and member of the Senate Judiciary would know to read the law.

The fact is that if copyright infringement was theft, then it would be treated as theft, dealt with as theft, and ‘copyright infringement’ wouldn’t exist at all. Nevertheless, the claims are often made. We’ve dealt with this topic before three years ago, focusing on UK law. So let’s take an example of a US case and see what would happen if it were tried as theft, instead of copyright infringement. The most obvious case is that of the RIAA against Jammie Thomas.

Civil trial

We all know the process. A John Doe suit is filed (over 200,000 of them in the US so far), usually amalgamated into a group for easy processing (although it is legality questionable). This then goes to discovery, where the identity is uncovered. At this point the suit is dropped and a direct appeal for ‘settlement‘ is made. If no settlement is reached then the civil lawsuit process can be started.

In the Thomas case the civil lawsuit was filed April 2006, and has now gone on for several years; the latest activity just this last week. Civil law (17 U.S.C. § 504) provides for both actual damages AND statutory damages from $200 to $30,000 for non-willful infringement and $750-$150,000 for wilful infringement – per infringement. In three trials, juries have set the per-track damages figure for Thomas-Rasset at $9,250, $80,000 and $62,500 while the courts have twice reduced it to $2,250 per track, which the RIAA is appealing, AGAIN.

The case has now been ongoing for over 5 years, not counting the original John Doe complaint, and it has occupied hundreds if not thousands of man-hours defending it. These hours cost money, and in a civil case that means finding a lawyer willing to take it on pro bono.

At first, Thomas-Rasset retained Brian Toder as her attorney, and later switched to Kiwi Camara. The much shorter Capitol v Foster case had attorney costs of over $68,000 awarded after the RIAA dropped the case, while Atlantic v Anderson (dropped by the RIAA after 3 years) ended up with over $100,000 in costs awarded by the court.

As with all such cases the verdict is based on ‘balance of the probabilities’ or ‘preponderance of the evidence’. Quite a contrast to a criminal case.

Criminal Trial

Were copyright infringement is ‘stealing’, this would be the process Thomas-Rasset would undergo.

An investigation would be made by the police (rather than a private company, hired by the complainant). As infringement is ‘theft’ she would be dealt with under Minnesota state law, specifically Minnesota Statute §609.52. She would be arrested, charged, and taken to court. If she could not afford a lawyer, one would be provided for her. Odds are, she would be dealt with in a matter of weeks, if not days.

The theft statute values goods at the cost to buy, so the 24 tracks would each be valued at $0.99 – the cost on iTunes – for a total of $23.76. If we take the worst case scenario though, and assume a whole CD per track at $20 per CD, that still brings the total value of the theft to $480. As the value is below $500, the maximum penalty available is stipulated as follows:

In all other cases where the value of the property or services stolen is $500 or less, to imprisonment for not more than 90 days or to payment of a fine of not more than $1,000, or both.

The trial would be judged, not on ‘balance of the probabilities’ as with a civil trial, but ‘beyond reasonable doubt’. Based on the evidence submitted in the trials so far, such a case would fail, as Ms Thomas-Rassett has never been proved to be personally responsible, only her connection and computer.

That means?

Of course, if it were just a choice of a civil suit or a criminal theft trial, then it’s clear why a civil trial is prefered, even if it is a money sink. Yet, there’s one last obstacle: The Supreme Court of the US.

In 1985, the Court ruled in Dowling v United States that copyright infringement is not theft, even when dealing with physical objects, such as vinyl records.

While industry bodies might still want to claim it’s still theft there is one simple fact that’s clear. In treating it as theft the benefit would be to the alleged infringer. A higher evidence standard, an independent investigation, legal counsel provided free for the alleged infringer, and vastly smaller penalties.

The infringement=theft argument has only one thing going for it, and that’s its emotional impact. In reality, it’s the very LAST thing they want, which is why new laws, like Protect IP and others have been pushed for many years. And again, we reiterate that we’ve dealt with the US here, laws for other countries are different, as we’ve seen twice in the past week  in Sweden, yet it’s still copyright infringement there, not theft.

If you’re confused about it still, maybe this song will help you tell the difference.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Rather than hang lowly bloggers by the neck until dead for sharing the latest pre-release warblings from Beyonce or GaGa, the company prefers the gentle touch and the art of persuasion, often delivered with a sharpness of wit rarely seen in swashbuckling circles.

With most of the company’s targets the approach seems to work quite well. Unless you’re The Pirate Bay or RLSLOG that is, then you just ignore them.

Nevertheless, while anti-piracy companies such as MediaDefender have in their time been both loathed and despised, head sheriff and company founder John Giacobbi is secretly loved by all of his enemies.

His friendly tone, multitude of media appearances and comedic manner never fail to impress pirates. One only has to look at the company’s immaculately edited Wikipedia page (and the almost completely positive tone throughout) to realize this is a very well-loved and respected outfit.

It will come as no surprise, then, that others should want to emulate the Sheriff.

“A digital Cold War has manifested itself as Web Sheriff, www.websheriff.com, the world’s leading anti-piracy protection agency, fires the first shots in an international legal battle against an alleged Russian imposter,” said the Sheriff yesterday.

“The rogue website, operating under the WebSheriff.ru banner, has not only copied Web Sheriff’s trademark, but also poses to offer similar services.”

A quick surf over to the page in question reveals a shiny robotic cyber-sheriff, touting services which do indeed seem similar to that of the carbon-based humanoid Sheriff we all know and love. Name aside, we saw no other graphical or trademark similarities apart from a star they used in the middle of a sheriffs badge back in February 2008.

If it came to an age-related revolver shootout, Web Sheriff UK would be quicker on the draw. Giacobbi founded that company in 2000, Web Sheriff Russia came along 2 years later. Why it’s taken 9 years to spot these Moscow-based pirate-hunters is anyone’s guess.

In keeping with his usual style, we presume that Giacobbi initially sent over a cheerful email to his Russian counterparts in the hope that their dispute could be settled amicably and at minimal cost. If he did, however, it didn’t work.

“These Russian imposters have picked the wrong company to try and rip-off. They’ll be cracking rocks in Siberia by the time we’ve finished with them,” he declared yesterday with menacing tone and a glint in his eye.

Without a hint of drama Giacobbi adds that he’s hired lawyers in both the US and USSR Russia to launch an “intercontinental legal attack” on his .RU namesakes.

“Even though we have become established as the world’s Web Sheriff, ironically we’re now fighting the same battle as we fight on behalf of our clients – who said the Cold War was over?!”

In the meantime, users requiring the services of the UK-based pirate pin-up should Google “Web Sheriff”. Those looking for services thousands of miles away in Russia, in Russian, against Russian file-sharing sites, should search for this term instead.

“This town ain’t big enough for the both of us,” Giacobbi concludes.

Time will tell what XMediaDigital, the company behind the Russian WebSheriff, has to say about that.

Here at TorrentFreak we love the Web Sheriff but we can’t help but notice that a golden opportunity for getting some free exposure was missed here.

Note for next publicity stunt press release: Don’t release it on a Friday/Saturday. Most of the tech press have the weekend off, getting coverage during the week is much easier.

Fortunately TorrentFreak never rests, especially if there’s an intercontinental anti-piracy bloodbath looming.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

“After conclusion of due diligence by the parties we were unable to reach agreement on a definitive contract,” said Dimitri Villard, Chief Executive Officer of Peer Media. “We are now focused on pursuing our own future strategic direction.”

Peer Media Technologies was the result of the joining together of two other anti-piracy companies that readers will be more familiar with – Media Sentry (which worked extensively with the RIAA for many years) and BitTorrent-poisoning company MediaDefender.

Read More

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

The movie rental association claimed that The Pirate Bay is directly responsible for about 15 million illegal downloads in Portugal every year. By installing a Pirate Bay block at all ISPs, ACAPOR hopes to decrease the financial damage they claim it causes.

Aside from the complaint against The Pirate Bay, ACAPOR had also announced a separate case against Piratatuga.net, a site that links to various movie, game and music titles hosted on third party sites. With approximately 50,000 Portugese visitors a day this site is as popular in Portugal as The Pirate Bay, ACAPOR claimed.

In recent weeks dozens of outfits involved in anti-piracy efforts have been targeted by Anonymous, especially those who have targeted The Pirate Bay. Most victims suffer a few days of downtime because of a DDoS attack, but for ACAPOR the damage is much worse.

Just a few hours ago the outfit’s website was defaced, presenting the following message from Operation Payback. To make things even worse the website then redirects to The Pirate Bay after a few seconds.

And the trouble for ACAPOR doesn’t stop there.

In addition to defacing the website, the ‘hackers’ also managed to grab a copy of the email database of ACAPOR. Little is known about the content of the emails at the moment, but previous leaks from MediaDefender and ACS:Law have shone an interesting light on their operations.

Portuguese speaking TorrentFreak readers who have more information on the contents of the leaked email database are encouraged to get in touch. To be continued.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Anti-piracy lawyers ACS:Law, who send out tens of thousands of letters demanding cash-settlements from often innocent Internet subscribers, became the new target. The company, which is headed up by lone principal Andrew Crossley, is widely hated among file-sharers and innocents alike and with 4chan’s Operation Payback now in full swing, payback is the operative word.

After prank telephone calling Crossley in the middle of the night during the week, it now seems that 4chan are aiming to tear his professional life apart, as they have obtained and are distributing a 350mb file of the company’s website which includes countless company emails.

So how were they obtained?

“Their site came back online [after the DDoS attack] – and on their frontpage was accidentally a backup file of the whole website (default directory listing, their site was empty), including emails and passwords,” a leader of the attacking group told TorrentFreak. “The email contains billing passwords and some information that ACS:Law is having financial problems.”

Financial problems? Interesting. Many tens of thousands of people who received letters from ACS:Law are also experiencing the same problem, having already paid up several hundred pounds each to make non-existent lawsuits go away.

“We’re still sorting through it. There’s a lot of stuff here to go through. But, basically, we were told we were less important than a 10 minute late train, or a queue for coffee by Andrew,” the attackers’ spokesman told us, adding:

“Payback is a bitch, isn’t it Andrew?”

The file is currently seeding on The Pirate Bay but most leechers are stuck with less than 60%. It is, however, available publicly on the web already. We have managed to secure one of those copies and are examining it now.

A little taster from emails read so far:

- ACS:Law and USCG (of Hurt Locker fame) appear to be cooperating
- Crossley boasts that his retained lawyer “literally wrote the SRA rules!”
- Crossley accuses Which? of ‘defamation’ and articles designed to “demean” and “denigrate”
- Crossley gives veiled warnings to Which? that he could sue them for libel
- Internal documents reveal intentions to take down Slyck.com
- Email from ACS:Law client which states the following:

Andrew,

Thank you for your email.

Our client remains concerned over the accuracy of the data that you provide and the methods used to obtain such data. It has been closely monitoring the recent press that your Firm has attracted regarding complaints to Which, in relation to demand letters that have incorrectly been sent to innocent internet subscribers, accused of copyright infringement. Your letter of 30 October 2009 was not satisfactory, in that it did not fully deal with the concerns raised in our letter of 21 July 2009, save as to state that you and your client disagree. Clearly there are flaws in your data gathering process. These are important and valid concerns that need to be satisfactorily addressed, so as to protect the rights of our client and innocent customers.

- Crossley brags about his financial status:

Spent much of the weekend looking for a new car. Finances are much better so can put £20-30k down. May go for a Lambo or Ferrari. I am so predictable!

(later emails reveal he bought a Jeep Compass 2.4CVT)

- Email evidence that ACS:Law deliberately does not target two UK ISPs, TalkTalk and Virgin Media
- Crossley writes to monitoring company NG3Sys and says the following:

You are going to receive on average about £1,000.00 per 150 letters sent. This can be seen from the first tiny batch. Because we have good quality product being monitored and captures are high on the data we have, when the letters get sent out the figures therefore equate as follows:-

Phase 1: 2,500 letters, estimated revenue to you: £16,666.00
Phase 2: est. 4,000 letters, estimated revenue to: £26,666.00
Phase 3: est. 18,000 letters, estimated revenue to you: £120,000.00
That is data collated to date! I have more titles to give you, more data will be captured.

Please stay with this.

After falling out with NG3Sys, ACS:Law sent this out to other potential monitoring companies:

Dear Sirs,

I own and operate the most prominent law firm in the UK that carries out file sharing litigation. We are one of only two law firms in the UK currently carrying out this work.

We have a number of copyright clients and we have one client in particular,with a large number of copyright titles that have been collecting good numbrs of IP addresses. We have two phases run through and the latest phase has been collecting circa 20,000 IP addresses a month for UK alone. Germany also is gathering good figures.

Our current UK-based data monitoring company has let us down and we need to find another monitoring company to supply our IP data from now. There are currently 300 titles (all adult film titles – all legal and UK certificated) that were being actively monitored.

If you are interested in monitoring for us and to do so quickly, please let us know and we can talk further. We will be able to supply much more data if this works and would like to push the data into Germany also.

We are proposing to pay 10% of net revenues (after ISP costs and postage costs of letter=) to the data monitoring company. On current figures that equates to circa £8,800.00 (€9,750.00) to the monitoring company per 1,000 letters sent. Our next phase we anticipate 10,000 letters to be sent in the UK alone. These are estimates only, but based on current collections are accurate.

I look forward to hearing from you.

- Series of highly abusive emails from Crossley to his ex-wife, where in part he tells her to “Fuck off and keep out of my life” and accuses her of being with a “drug addled hermit”.

- Crossley tells his assistant Terence Tsang to “be more discreet with this stuff” when referring to our article where we revealed ACS:Law looked to buy anti-piracy tracking software on the cheap.

Of course, as with our coverage of the MediaDefender leaked emails back in 2007, TorrentFreak’s coverage of this debacle will be extensive.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Founded by Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson of Digg fame along with David Prager of TechTV, Revision3 serves up around 6 million downloads per month. However, their whole operation was turned upside down two years ago when the now-defunct MediaDefender abused Revision3′s tracker for their own ends and when denied access “threw an epic tantrum” which took down the whole site.

Since the demise of MediaDefender, anti-piracy companies certainly haven’t gone away and some have still resorted to DoS-style attacks. Trident Media Guard, the French anti-piracy outfit selected by the music and movie industry to track down French pirates under the new ‘Hadopi’ law, was recently spotted trying to pointlessly smother a user sharing via BitTorrent.

Most groups working in this field keep their techniques private but as we shall see, that’s not true for all of them. According to an India-based company working on behalf of Bollywood studios, there are a number of techniques they can use to deal with movie piracy, from the gentle to the particularly aggressive.

According to Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex Software – a company recently hired to combat piracy on the movie My Name is Khan (which trended at #1 on KickAssTorrents earlier this year) – they begin with a simple notice and takedown.

“When we detect a website offering a link or a download, we contact the server hosts and intimate them about the illegal activity. They issue a notice to the site owner,” Kumar explains. “If the site owner does not comply, the site is either suspended or dismissed,” he adds optimistically.

When a copy of the movie Peepli Live appeared on the private Desi tracker ICTorrent on August 13th 2010, AiPlex promptly ordered it to take down the torrent.

Although it’s reported that the site complied, TorrentFreak checked and the file is still there along with several others added in the past few weeks.

“The problem is with torrent sites, which usually do not oblige,” acknowledges Kumar. But AiPlex, which charges between $4,290 and $8,580 to ‘protect’ movies for a four-week period, have other tricks up their sleeve.

“In such cases, we flood the website with requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity,” Kumar reveals. And it doesn’t stop there.

“At times, we have to go an extra mile and attack the site and destroy the data to stop the movie from circulating further,” he adds.

Given the nature of these pretty outlandish admissions, TorrentFreak contacted AiPlex (who confusingly list ‘Bram Cohen’ as a type of torrent client on their site) for comment but at time of publication we had received no response. We also contacted the administrators at ICTorrent but they were equally silent.

Although it’s long been suspected that ‘dirty tricks’ have been employed by anti-piracy groups in the past, it is very unusual for a company to openly admit using these type of techniques against torrent sites. Should AiPlex offer us a statement, we will update this post accordingly.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

There’s a lot of misinformation about which companies and agencies can do what, and how they do it. People claim industry groups or random companies can search and send out letters at random, whereas the reality is the investigator must be authorized or they could be deemed guilty of copyright infringement themselves.

There’s also a lot of confusion about exactly how evidence is collected, with people sometimes believing that it can only be collected from corporate networks, or that private trackers are safe because investigators can’t share and so would be banned for their ratio. Much of this is untrue and these beliefs can make it easier to collect evidence.

The easiest way of all is to simply collect information from trackers. It’s an easy and quick way to do it, although as was revealed 2 years ago, it’s often quite inaccurate.

The next simplest way, which provides lots of data, is just to join a swarm and monitor. Some people believe that clients doing this will stand out, as modified clients will behave differently. The reality is that clients don’t have to be monitored at all.

Researcher Andrew Norton produced this video explaining how a vanilla µTorrent client can be used to identify and log peers without any modification or abnormal behavior.

The raw data shown in the video – all that’s needed for a lawsuit or allegation under most 3-strikes laws – is nothing more than basic communication data. However, it’s critical to note that this data, while it is evidence of activity, is NOT evidence of infringement in many cases.

We can’t testify that this is the method used by any company – they’re notoriously tight-lipped about their methods – but it’s quite possible that it’s being used and sold on as a very high priced service to customers. Selling simple and not always accurate or effective methods for thousands of dollars a week was revealed to be a key method of MediaDefender. Anyone reading this and intending to hire such companies would be advised to ask for a demonstration of their detection system first-hand.

It should, however, come as yet another wakeup call to those using blocklist-based software. Without any way to identify a client using this method, there’s no way to add its IP to the list. In fact, the public availability of block-list contents means it’s extremely easy to avoid being on them.

On the other hand VPNs, proxies and seedboxes will provide some protection, but the only real solution is to press for the peer-review of anti-P2P companies and their methods, but that doesn’t look like it will come any time soon.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.