21st Centuary Cold War: Illegal File Sharing

tribler

The following article is from the New Zealand Herald and details how little difference the court case against Pirate Bay is going to make in what is starting to feel like the Cold War of the 21st Century – The War Against Illegal Filesharing.

It explains how torrent trackers are set to be replaced by decentralised applications.

Politics aside, future victories for copyright holders are looking increasingly shaky as Bitorrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay are about to be replaced by applications such as the Tribler.

Where the current crop of bittorrent filesharing applications need to be pointed at torrent tracking sites such as The Pirate Bay to find files, Tribler’s searches are done over the networks of fellow bittorrent users, sidestepping centralised torrent tracking sites altogether.

With iPredator about to launch, downloaders will be easily able to anonymously continue their activities whilst Tribler will leave no centralised point of vulnerability for the prosecution and policing of copyright infringers.

Both Tribler and the iPredator service are merely the opening salvos fired in a technological arms race. The ball is now firmly in the court of slow moving regulators who will need to step up the development of countermeasures if they intend to make in-roads into enforcing copyright infringement.

Posted on April 20, 2009 | Filed Under Tech