I was under the impression that courts are ruled by fact and reason but it becomes apparent that some judges are not able to cope with technology and the fast changing online world. A court order issued on January 23th by the District court of Dusseldorf, Germany ordered Rapidshare to take preemptive measures against copyright infringement. This does look nicely on paper but once you take a look at the practical implementation it is a (nearly) impossible task.

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I read an rather obvious article over at the TorrentFreak blog that was entitled “Piracy Investigators Infiltrate Private Torrent Sites” which confirmed that piracy investigators have been getting access to private torrent sites by either joining them when they were still open for registration or being invited from a man in the inside. It was always pretty obvious to me that private could not really mean private if the site owners did not know each of the users personally. This system was bound to fail right from the beginning and the article on TorrentFreak only confirms this.

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Bitthief, as the name already implies, is a bittorrent client that leeches from the community without giving something back to it. It basically reminds me of those leecher mods for emule that have been popular a few years ago. Bitthief accomplishes this by reducing the upload speed to 0. The developer of Bitthief, the Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zurich puts it this way:

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