14 DAY TRIAL // As long as there have been pirates, there have been people trying to stop them. Most of the time that's via lawsuits, draconian legislation, all sorts of blocks, limits and artificial hurdles for legitimate buyers, and generally spoiling everyone's fun, artist, pirate, or buyer alike.
But from time to time, copyright-dependent companies take the fighting to the pirates' home court, by trying to disrupt the technology used by said pirates which most recently means BitTorrent.
Now, a Russian company Pirate Pay is promising that it can "stop" pirated files from ever reaching greedy pirates via BitTorrent.
The company won't say much about how exactly it does it, but it claims it can prevent pirates from grabbing files even if they are available online.
What's most likely happening is that the company is interfering with the peer-to-peer communications by posing as a peer and flooding the clients with fake or useless data.
The goal is to prevent the client from connecting to legitimate peers, therefore making it unable to grab the files from the ones sharing them.
The technology's already put to the test, Walt Disney Studios and Sony Pictures were the first to use it, successfully apparently.
The company says it blocked 44,845 people from downloading just one movie. Of course, there's no way to know whether these were all the people trying to get the movie and whether others managed to download it despite the blockade.
The technology is so promising that even Microsoft invested in the company. There seems to be an issue with all of this. Interfering with other people's communications, of any kind, is illegal, at least in the civilized parts of the world. Kids are being hauled off to jail for doing mostly harmless DDoS attacks, yet this is positioned as a legitimate and legal service.