The Torrentfreak website reports today that the new owners will introduce paid subscriptions to The Piratebay to pay the rights-owners with the money. There is no word yet on the exact amounts of money that users will have to pay to be able to share and download files at the website. The new owners seem to have a system in mind that rewards uploaders so that they have to pay less (up to nothing) depending on the files and bandwidth that they share.

The Piratebay has roughly 3.5 million registered users and many more who do not have an account but use the website to download torrents. It will be interesting to see how this new model will impact the userbase of the service. It is however very likely that a majority will leave the website to use free alternatives instead. Traffic levels are surely going to drop as soon as the new owners introduce the new subscription based scheme.

What’s your take on the issue?

The court basically told Rapidshare to make a distinction between copyrighted and free files on their servers. This would mean that Rapidhshare has to have a master list of all copyrighted files, be it music, film, documents and even dlls to be able to make a decision. Documents, films and music have to be played to be sure that it is indeed copyrighted material because a name could imply that it is but nothings for sure until you checked the file manually.

A simple name comparison is not enough to determine if a file is infringing copyright. Not all files are named properly as well, some are zipped and contain many files, some are secured with a password. How is Rapidshare going to check on all of these files ? They can’t. It is simply impossible to follow the courts order and the judges seem to have taken this into account by saying that Rapidshare would have to follow this order even if it would mean that they had to cease offering it at all.

The order will most likely be appealed and we have seen other outcomes from regional courts that basically said that Rapidshare did not have to take preemptive measures.

Rapidshare will continue operating for now and it could very well take a few years until a final decision has been made by the Federal Court. The solution if the court would rule in favor of the copyright holders would be to either stop the service or move to another country like those DVD copy producers did when German courts hit hard on them.

Peter Anaman, a senior internet investigator for legal firm Covington and Burling has admitted that his organisation has infiltrated unnamed private BitTorrent tracker sites and shares their method of gaining access; Anaman added, “Once you’re in, you never take action. You just listen?

I think the last quote is probably the only clue that private site owners could get to identify the moles in the system.Why would they keep users in the system who never share files ? Who seem to click on many files but never download them or stop downloads shortly after starting them ?

The piracy investigators could adopt new tactics of course which leads to the conclusion that private trackers have and will never be safe. Don’t rely on them as your only source of security. If you want security stop using p2p networks.. What’s your stance in the matter ?

Update: With private trackers opening registration ever now and then to the public, it is safe to say that the majority are tracked by companies specialized in tracking these kinds of things. The data gathered this way is then used when companies decided to take the tracker operators to court.

“We developed a BitTorrent client that free rides on BitTorrent, that is, it downloads from BitTorrent swarms without contributing any resources itself which illustrated that the BitTorrent protocol currently fails to prevent uncooperative behavior as it does not provide any countermeasures against free riding clients.”

It seems that Bitthief does not only prevent fair sharing but also spies on the users that use the client. Torrentfreak that Bitthief is currently collecting “the torrent hash, total size of the download, the current version of the client, total number of pieces available, and the size of these pieces” which can be clearly linked to the users IP address making it very easy to idenfity all activity of a certain user.

Everyone who is thinking about using Bitthief should be really cautious and consider this before using it. No one knows at this time why the developers are collecting the data which should make everyone at least suspicious.