In less than two years the music industry group had sent out copyright infringement notices to 1.8 million Internet subscribers and a further 269,609 to colleges and universities. This kind of tracking and monitoring is a substantial task, so the RIAA along with its partners at IFPI and BPI, use companies who specialize in the work.

While BayTSP is a company many readers will be most familiar with, Denmark’s DtecNet has been increasing its profile substantially in recent years. During the AFACT v iiNet trial in Australia it became clear that much of the evidence had been collected by DtecNet and the company has worked with IRMA, the Irish Recorded Music Association, in connection with its 3 strikes agreement with ISP Eircom.

DtecNet, which is active in over two dozen countries, originally stemmed from anti-piracy lobby group Antipiratgruppen (APG), who along with IFPI represent the music and movie industry in Denmark. DtecNet was owned by the Johan Schlüter Law Firm, which itself has close ties to APG and IFPI.

However, according to a report from Denmark, the company has now been sold to US-based company, MarkMonitor.

With its headquarters in San Francisco and offices in London, Boise, Washington, D.C., and New York, MarkMonitor describes itself as “the global leader in enterprise brand protection” and claim that “more than half the Fortune 100 depend on MarkMonitor to help safeguard their brands online.”

MarkMonitor has listed DtecNet as one of its partners for some time now and together they have offered a one-stop-shop solution to tackle piracy online in both its physical and digital form. While DtecNet monitored P2P networks, blogs, Usenet and streaming services, MarkMonitor dealt with listings for counterfeit products on sites such as eBay and various social networking platforms.

Together they collected evidence of alleged infringements and sent DMCA takedown notices, requested items or posts to be delisted and issued cease and desist notices. MarkMonitor also worked to steer Internet users away from sites offering counterfeit material and towards those offering official products.

The sale will undoubtedly net Thomas Sehested, co-founder and CEO of DtecNet, a sizeable amount, although at this stage the amount MarkMonitor paid for his company is not available. Indeed, there is currently no mention of the deal anywhere on either company’s website.

TorrentFreak contacted both Thomas Sehested and Te Smith, Vice President, Communications at MarkMonitor for comment. Neither were prepared to confirm or deny the news.

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

“It requires very strong and concrete evidence to have these people convicted. We simply could not lift the burden of proof,” said Antipiratgruppen lawyer Mary Fredenslund when explaining the decision to Politiken.

In just a year, four cases against alleged pirates have come before the High Court in Denmark and the overall result for the copyright holders has been negative. Three of the defendants were acquitted due to insufficient evidence, and in the one case where a file-sharer was convicted, the defendant had confessed.

Defense attorney Per Overbeck says that in addition to these outcomes, cases against two of his clients have been dropped in recent years. “Antipiratgruppen has acknowledged that they can not get people convicted without either catching them in the act or threatening them to confess,” Overbeck said. “In practice, this means that without a confession there is no case,” he added.

Per Overbeck and Antipiratgruppen’s assessment that recent High Court rulings make it virtually impossible to get individuals convicted for illegal file sharing are supported by a recent Government report from the Ministry of Culture.

According to the report, IP-addresses can only be used to identify the person paying for the Internet subscription, not the person who actually downloaded the files. The courts have ruled several times that in terms of evidence, an IP-address alone is insufficient to prove guilt.

In one case a defendant walked free after arguing that that someone else must have accessed his wireless router to download copyright infringing material.

Despite these legal setbacks for copyright holders in Denmark, it is worth noting that Danish anti-piracy tracking company DtecNet remains the main partner of the RIAA and other music groups in countries where governments are looking to implement three-strikes policies to get alleged file-sharers disconnected from the Internet.

The evidence DtecNet gathers also consists of just an IP-address. Indeed, there is no known anti-piracy method to discover who is sitting at a particular keyboard, on any particular computer, at any given time.

In the on-going trial of AFACT v iiNet, DtecNet gathered the evidence used in the case. Under cross-examination a computer forensics investigator – who was previously a key witness in the 2004 KaZaA trial – admitted that any ISP account could have multiple users in the same household, and could have other unauthorized 3rd-party users if a wireless router was compromised.

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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.

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.

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.

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The RIAA will now be working with DtecNet, a Danish anti-piracy tracking company which employs largely the same techniques as MediaSentry, but the aims will be slightly different in the majority of cases. The new tactic for the IFPI-headed music industry is to target ISPs instead, lobbying governments to implement the dreaded “3 strikes” or “graduated response” scheme reported so often in recent months.

Interestingly, DtecNet is far from an objective investigating firm. In fact, it originally stems from the anti-piracy lobby group Antipiratgruppen, which represents the music and movie industry in Denmark. There are more direct ties to the music industry though. Kristian Lakkegaard, one of DtecNet’s employees, used to work for the RIAA’s global partner, IFPI. Unsurprisingly, the RIAA has now chosen DtecNet to gather the evidence that will cost alleged filesharers their Internet connection.

One country in the thick of the “3 strikes” proposals is the UK. Led up by the BPI, the British music industry signed a MoU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the country’s six largest ISPs. They agreed to send out letters to alleged pirates on behalf of the music industry, warning them that their illicit sharing habits had been monitored and they should discontinue their actions.

Of course, even without individual prosecutions, an anti-piracy company still has to do the tracking, but despite our requests the BPI refused to tell TorrentFreak how they were achieving this. Some months ago we put it to Matt Philips of the BPI that if their system was robust, there should be no problem in revealing it to us. Unfortunately he wouldn’t tell us who they were using or how they carried out their tracking. But of course, we found out in the end.

It turns out that in common with the RIAA and IFPI, the BPI are also using DtecNet. However, there appears to be no particular magic behind this company’s techniques. Just like most (if not all) anti-piracy outfits, they simply work from a list of titles their client wishes to protect and then hunts through known file-sharing networks to find them, in order to track the IP addresses of alleged infringers.

Their software appears as a normal client in, for example, BitTorrent swarms, while collecting IP addresses, file names and the unique hash values associated with the files. All this information is filtered in order to present the allegations to the appropriate ISP, in order that they can send off a letter admonishing their own customer, in line with their commitments under the MoU.

DtecNet is also active in Australia. Hired by Hollywood studios, DtecNet helped to build the case against ISP iiNet, by gathering evidence which they say proves that iiNet authorized the copyright-infringing activities of its own subscribers.

It is unclear why the RIAA finally dumped MediaSentry, but the fact that its techniques were heavily criticized in court couldn’t have helped. Renowned P2P expert Prof. Johan Pouwelse labeled RIAA expert Doug Jacobson’s reporting as “borderline incompetent”.

The switch to DtecNet is unlikely to prove any more fruitful, since no anti-piracy company is capable of identifying uploads to anyone but itself, which makes mass-infringement almost impossible to prove. It might be some time before DtecNet’s evidence is scrutinized in court but when it is, it will be a big surprise if it’s of a greater ‘quality’ than the data provided by MediaSentry.

Meet the new boss…..

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