Backed by Microsoft, Pirate Pay Wants to Make Pirates Pay

Anyone that’s spent time on the internet is fairly aware that piracy is a big deal to folks in places like, oh, Hollywood and anywhere else involved in the creation of media. In fact, anyone that’s watched a movie at home has almost certainly noticed the disclaimers about potential fines and legal maneuvers related to the piracy of that material. Never fear, however, as Pirate Pay, backed by Microsoft, is looking to scramble pirates before they can get their sticky fingers on the goods.

BitTorrents, a method to share files peer-to-peer, are the current hot button issue with The Pirate Bay now being blocked in the United Kingdom. Their ease of use contributes to piracy by allowing nearly anyone to download whatever they please. Companies being paid to scramble trackers — the way users connect and find each other for specific data to download — aren’t anything new. But Russian-based Pirate Pay insists it is different.

They claim to have developed a technology which allows them to target existing BitTorrent swarms. By accident. The group was working on a traffic management solution and stumbled upon the fact that they could also stop BitTorrent traffic with it. After some development, they earned a $100,000 investment from the Microsoft Seed Financing Fund last year.

But what is it, exactly, that they’re doing? TorrentFreak reports that CEO Andrei Klimenko had this to say:

We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other[.]

If it works as advertised, chances are that we’ll run into an arms race scenario. Anti-piracy measures improve so then must piracy measures improve.

(TorrentFreak via Techmeme, image credit via Tobias Vemmenby)

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