If you’ve ever downloaded a hit movie, song, e-book, video game, or television show from The Pirate Bay, your activity was more than likely monitored and recorded within three hours of hitting “download” — even if you only did so once.

This frightening — if not entirely predictable — revelation comes from a newly published study (pdf), conducted over the past three years, by computer science researchers at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. Dr. Tom Chothia, the study’s lead researcher, unveiled the study’s findings at the SecureComm conference, which is taking place this week in Padua, Italy.

The study found that the IP addresses of peer-to-peer network users were being recorded on a “massive” scale by “copyright enforcement organisations, security companies, and even government research labs.” Fortunately for you pirates out there, the study also found that the tracking techniques used by these companies were often unreliable, which likely reduces their usefulness in lawsuits or other court proceedings.

To conduct the study, the team created their own software that mimicked a BitTorrent client and logged any “newly-published” torrent files to the Top 100 of each category on The Pirate Bay. They then monitored any connection made to their software. Within three hours, 40 percent of the trackers had connected to their client. The longest connection took 33 hours.

Dr. Chothia’s team found that trackers used two techniques to gather information about users of The Pirate Bay. The first is “indirect” monitoring, which uses “indirect clues that a peer is uploading or downloading some content,” according to the study. While use of “indirect” tracking is said to be “extensive,” previous research has found that this technique generates a “high rate of false positives,” going so far as to implicate “innocent devices such as printers and wireless access points as ﬁle-sharers, which later received cease-and-desist letters.” (Ha!)

The second technique is “direct” tracking, which allows trackers to collect “first-hand evidence” of illegal downloads.

“Direct monitoring can be active if the monitor establishes connections with peers to conﬁrm that they are sharing a ﬁle, or passive if the monitor advertises its IP address to a tracker and waits for peers to connect to it,” reads the study. (Emphasis theirs.) While this method is far more effective, it is also much more expensive due to a need for more bandwidth and servers. The team says that it is currently unclear how prevalent direct tracking is.

Due to the inaccuracies of indirect tracking, Dr. Chothia says that it is unlikely that copyright owners could use the evidence gathered through such methods in court.

“All the monitors observed during the study would connect to file sharers believed to be sharing illegal content and verify that they were running the BitTorrent software, however they would not actually collect any of the files being shared,” said Chothia in a statement. “Therefore, it is questionable whether the monitors observed would actually have evidence of file sharing that would stand up in court.”

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