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03.04.09 Pirate Bay Final Trial Day: Will Torrent Trackers Win?  By Dan Morrill This was it; everyone made their closing arguments on the relative merits of the evidence in the Pirate Bay Trial. The question on everyone's mind now is what the actual verdict will be, with no idea when that will come through the system. There are going to be many opinions here no matter what the final verdict is going to be, what should be worrisome to people though are the ramification if the Pirate Bay wins, or if the Pirate Bay loses, either way there will be a fundamental shift in the way that we view bittorrent trackers and who will step into the breach if the Pirate Bay is shut down. If the Pirate Bay wins, there is going to be an appeal meaning that the Pirate Bay will remain open for business while the courts work through the appeal process. If they close there is going to be more pressure on Mininova and other tracker systems out there to support a worldwide base of users. Bittorrent will not go away, piracy will not stop, and the world will not stop spinning if the Pirate Bay is shut down. There will be no dip in hard goods piracy like illegally copied DVD's and CD's. The golden road of piracy via physical goods will not be impacted here, the only thing that the shutdown of the pirate bay will do is shift the burden over to other sites, or inspire the creation of hundreds of smaller sites that can distribute digital media. They might not even use bittorrent and go to protected environments like Rapid share or others.
What should worry people is that the entire "scene" as we know it will go deeply underground. This is what I have primarily seen over the last few years is that sharing is moving past the Bittorrent stage and into trusted groups of people. The only way to break into a trusted group is know someone who is willing to talk, or figure out how to break into those trusted groups. The other thing to realize is that there is an arms race here with clients and trackers developing better and harder to track counter measures against being tagged and tracked for what they are downloading. It will be harder to monitor, it will be harder to get statistics, and more people will be expose to rogue systems that appear for a small amount of time, release information then shut down. By using a viral approach anyone planning on tracking and tagging users of bittorrent for market research is going to have a much harder part of finding out what is going on. It was more fun when all this was in the open, and from a track and trace viewpoint I do not want the Pirate Bay shutdown, nor do I want any of the other trackers shut down. Few security folks are going to want to have to work their way into trusted groups or try to work out the exact routing through multiple proxy systems. The theory here is that Bittorrent and P2P will not go away; they will be harder to tap for information. The Pirate Bay makes life easy, maybe too easy for information security folks and others to find out what is happening and what is being shared on the Bittorrent Networks. Maybe that is the real lesson we will get here. I think it is likely that the Pirate Bay will lose and be shut down, I also think that is it likely that if this happens companies will lose one of the best sources of information on the planet on what is being shared and how popular it is. You can catch the final comments on the case from the prosecution and defense on TorrentFreak and on P2Pnet. Comments About the Author: Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management. Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through his blog, Managing Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the ITtoolbox blogging community. |
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