14 DAY TRIAL // An Indian company paid by the film industry to get copyrighted works removed from the Internet openly admits to launching Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against torrent sites that refuse to comply with takedown notices.
The firm, called Aiplex Software works with numerous Bollywood movie production houses, but also some major film studios like 20th Century Fox.
"We are tied up with Fox STAR Studios - Star TV and 20th Century Fox - who are a joint venture company in India," Girish Kumar, Aiplex Software managing director, told The Sydney Morning Herald.
Aiplex uses specialized software to crawl the Internet for signs of copyright infringement. Whenever links to copyrighted works are found on a website, Aiplex contacts the owner and asks for their removal.
However, some of them don't comply with the company's requests despite repeated notifications. Kumar says that in such cases his team is prepared to "go the extra mile."
"[…] We flood the website with lakhs [hundred of thousands] of requests, which results in database error, causing denial of service as each server has a fixed bandwidth capacity," he explained for Daily News & Analysis.
This happens in about 5% of cases, which almost exclusively involve torrent sites. "It's only the torrent sites - 20 to 25 per cent of the torrent sites - that do not have respect for any of the copyright notices," Kumar said.
According to him, the majority of websites do take DMCA copyright infringement notifications seriously, with YouTube and Daily Motion being amongst the most responsive ones.
Denial of Service attacks, or intentionally impairing the functionality of a computer system, is illegal in most countries and is punished with years of imprisonment.
Nevertheless, Kumar is willing to offer his company's services to the film industries in other countries, like Australia.