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.

“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.

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

These notices usually list details about the infringing file, the person’s IP-address and the time the infringement was recorded. In addition, BayTSP includes a link to a response form where you can indicate whether or not you will comply and remove the file from your computer.

The problem with these response forms is that they are not very secure. If you get a notice from BayTSP, someone else can easily find it through Google for example, and fake a response in your place. There is no way for them to tell who responded to the complaint unless the response originates from the IP-address linked to the infringement.

Perhaps even worse, anyone can send out a fake e-mail to someone claiming to be BayTSP. XSS vulnerabilities on the site make it pretty easy to fabricate fake complaints and convince innocent people that to avoid court they have to download trojans, or perhaps even enter credit card details to pay a small fine.

BayTSP told TorrentFreak that they are looking into the XSS issues, hopefully to solve the problem. They also admitted that their response forms are flawed, that everyone can indeed fill out the response form, and that they can’t be sure that the person who responded to it actually received the notice.

We concluded from this that the response form (and thus the warnings) are completely useless, but BayTSP disagreed with this assessment. “We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one,” was their final response after having exchanged some arguments back and forth.

For those people in receipt of an infringement notice it might be good to know that their case becomes closed as soon as they indicate that they have removed the infringing file from their computer. Easy as that. Those who do not comply will receive additional notices until they do so.

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

BayTSP has used the data it collected on behalf of its clients to produce its just released Online Trends & Insights 2008 report and there are some quite interesting findings. The report notes that BitTorrent has further strengthened its dominant position as the protocol used to infringe the most copyrights, with eDonkey (eD2k) in second place. It has to be noted that BitTorrent may be more actively and easily monitored than Usenet and other file-sharing platforms, and that this resulted in more recorded infringements.

“BitTorrent and eDonkey are optimized for large file distribution and despite the growing popularity of streaming video, are still where the majority of copyright infringement takes place,” said BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa in a comment on the report.

In terms of P2P infringement location, BayTSP also claims that despite topping the list of most-infringing countries in 2007, the United States has seen the number of infringements fall ever since, pushing it down into 4th position.

Copyright infringement on file-sharing networks has surged in Europe, helping France move up to 3rd place in the piracy league. A single ISP, France Telecom, clocked up more than 2 million logged infringements. Second place went to Italy and one of its ISPs, Telecom Italia, also reached over 2 million infringements.

The title of most-infringing country goes to Spain, with ISP Telefonica De Espana playing host to more than 2 million infringements. The report also reveals that BayTSP sent more than a million infringement notices each to Comcast, AT&T and Road Runner in 2008. Comcast had the most copyright infringements of all ISPs in the US, 1,668,738 in total during 2008.

Finally, the report discovered another interesting trend. The median download time for a TV-show is much shorter on BitTorrent than on eDonkey. With BitTorrent it takes roughly 10 hours while eDonkey users may have to wait a full 4 days before their download is complete.

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

BayTSP told TorrentFreak that it will mainly target rebroadcasts of live TV-signals on popular streaming sites. Those who use their mobile phone to stream their favorite football game when they’re at the stadium are safe, at least for now. BayTSP is already offering a similar service to the movie and music industries for ‘non-live’ clips uploaded to sites like YouTube and Dailymotion.

Illegal broadcasts of live sporting events are nothing new though. The P2P based TVU Networks has been around for years, and allows users to watch and broadcast live TV signals all over the world. With the increase in popularity of services such as Ustream and Stickam the number of illegal streams is growing.

“Since 2006 we’ve seen a steady increase in piracy of sports broadcasts and pay-per-view events, primarily as a result of video streaming technology becoming easier to use,” says BayTSP CEO Mark Ishikawa. “Since broadcasters make the majority of their money from the initial broadcast, they understand the impact that signal theft can have on the bottom line.”

The name BayTSP might sound familiar to BitTorrent users, as they are also sending takedown requests on behalf of the movie and music industries. The company does so by joining BitTorrent swarms to record the alleged infringer’s IP-address and other relevant information. This information is then forwarded to the user’s ISP.

With web based streams, however, it is often impossible to identify the source directly, as their IPs are not broadcasted on the web. “In most cases, take down notices are sent to the site hosting the stream. On some occasions, notices are also sent to the ISP of the hosting site,” BayTSP told TorrentFreak.

Whether the money that the sports broadcasters pay BayTSP will make up for the lost revenue though piracy is a question that remains unanswered.

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

Sometimes anti-piracy outfits use their own trackers to gather evidence. Last week we reported that The Pirate Bay started to actively remove these suspicious trackers from their torrents, with some help from torrenteditor.com. Running a tracker is not required though, to collect information from BitTorrent users. In fact, many attempt to use publicly available trackers such as The Pirate Bay to do so. However, the tracker owners are aware of this, and trick these tracking companies by polluting the list of IP-addresses the tracker returns. That is one of the techniques The Pirate Bay uses, just to show how flawed the evidence gathering is.

Polluting the evidence works like this. When a client asks for a list of peers who are downloading the same torrent, the tracker software automatically inserts several “random IP addresses” that are not in the swarm. They are based on existing sub-nets, but might be from people who may not even be aware that BitTorrent exists. This means that the evidence that’s being gathered by anti-piracy companies includes IPs that belong to people that were not downloading the movie or album they are accused of. Perfect deniability, as the people who coded the tracker software explain.

Of course, this doesn’t work when the pirate-tracking company requires itself to connect to the peer, before the IP-address is collected, since it is impossible to connect to a non-existing peer. A representative from BayTSP told TorrentFreak that they have such a requirement, but several others are less thorough, which makes their claims useless, and impossible to defend in court.

The best solution is of course to ban these anti-piracy companies from using the tracker in the first place. This is something The Pirate Bay is working on as well, and they have blocked many IP-ranges already, but it’s impossible to ban them all. Unlike most of the suits in Hollywood, the companies that go after illicit file-sharers are experts in their field, and know more about BitTorrent than many users. They try to circumvent blocklists such as PeerGuardian whenever possible, and change IPs when they are marked.

Pirate Bay co-founder TiAMO told TorrentFreak that he has several criteria on which he can pick out the suspicious users that might be collecting IP-addresses. He also said that he’s working on a automated warning system which will operate as a sniffer on a monitor port. That project is far from complete, but has the potential to detect suspicious behavior more easily.

Nevertheless, it is impossible (as the name might give away) to keep the prying eyes of Hollywood off public trackers. Even private trackers are far from secure, as most anti-piracy companies have accounts at the larger communities. The private in “private tracker” merely refers to the fact that you have to login, and has nothing to do with “security”. The Pirate Bay (and other tracker owners) take several measures to prevent their users from being tracked by anti-piracy outfits, but there’s only so much they can do.

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