File Sharers Adapt. How?

A recent report (PDF) by DtecNet, a firm that recommends itself as “ a market leader in supplying our customers with specialized software solutions to track and prevent piracy on their digital content and online business,” says that transfers through the Bit Torrent protocol dropped almost 80% after TPB's Swedish ISP cut off its bandwidth forced by legal orders.

According to the same study the solution by most adopted by users was finding other BitTorrent "tracker" sites to provide for their p2p needs. The leading names appear as follows – OpenBitTorrent, Denis Stalker, tracker.publicbt.com and pow7.com – which the report says, "now comprise nearly 70 percent of all BitTorrent traffic." It seems that the Pirate Bay played an important role in promoting this solution – it brought changes to its software so it would be able to track files via OpenBitTorrent.

From the report:

“Note that after the shutdown, users did not migrate to other peer-to-peer protocols such as Ares, Gnutella and eDonkey, whose traffic remained relatively unchanged. Instead, file traders remained on BitTorrent, and over time, infringements through that network began to rise again as new trackers became available. As those shifts continue, BitTorrent traffic is expected to soon return to levels seen before the Pirate Bay shutdown.”

I guess this report is not exactly to the liking of the entertainment industry but, on another side, if you think about it for a second, it serves the interests of such anti-piracy company for which fear of the overwhelming illegal file sharing from the movie and record companies is, ultimately, good for business.

“Though such concentration of traffic would appear to present yet another enforcement opportunity, similar to the Pirate Bay shutdown, it will be more difficult as BitTorrent technologists continue to adapt. Torrent sites now point to multiple trackers, so if one is disconnected or overwhelmed by traffic, pirates can still find the files they seek without stopping to find another tracker,” the report states.