For the last three years copyright regulators have been logging IP addresses of users who would download infringing material via BitTorrent. According to a report by Tom Chothia and scientists from Birmingham University regulators are capable of harvesting IPs by joining the torrents. Detailed report will be presented this week during SecureComm conference in Itally.
In order to conduct the study researchers launched a fake pirate server and for 2 years they were spying on the most popular torrent downloads. Scientists managed to gather info on 1 033 downloads in 421 tracker. Each download was being monitored for 36 days.
The research group managed to identify regulator’s activity by comparison of the download process of different peers. A regular peer downloads files in a stable progression, while a regulator’s peer activates the download once in a while, just to cover it’s true activity. Chothia discovered that IP lists of copyright infringers are usually updated once in three hours.
PDF file of Chothia’s report is accessible here.
