14 DAY TRIAL // The phenomenon of illegal downloads carried out through peer-to-peer networks has received a severe blow this week through the United States Supreme Court's decision in the "MGM vs. Grokster" case. And the American companies involved in the distribution of copyrighted content have wasted no time in taking advantage of this situation, by launching a full fledged offensive against these "content-bootlegging" networks.
After Grokster, Limewire and Kazaa, it's now BitTorrent's turn to be targeted. The software created by programmer Barm Cohen facilitates the distribution of files by breaking them into many pieces, sharing the pieces among a large number of users, and reassembling them upon delivery.
However, there are some major differences between the Grokster case and a possible anti-BitTorrent lawsuit. Thus, even if the program is used especially for sharing illegal materials, its developer has always stated its disagreement towards this kind of practices and has advised its users to transfer only non-infringing files.
Nevertheless, the American music and film companies have decided to take the necessary steps in order to stop or at least cut short this phenomenon. And it looks like they've decided to make use of some less orthodox methods in order to achieve this purpose beside filing lawsuits against the sites posting "tracker" files that enable BitTorrent downloads.
Thus, according to some reports, unknown third parties are sabotaging downloads of copyrighted material, flooding the network with fake data and gathering information that could be used in future lawsuits against individual users.
However, it's pretty clear that these attempts will be short-lived, and that's because, as Andrew Parker, chief executive of CacheLogic, a UK firm that measures BitTorrent usage, says, "It's a bit of an arms race. You have a bunch of smart people looking to get access to content, then a much smaller number of smart people working for content owners to block this stuff".