The results, while not entirely surprising, should raise some alarm bells about the digital OPSEC of your average USyd attendee. Of course, the first thing I did when discovering this resource was to log on to campus WiFi and snoop into what USyd students (and potentially staff) were torrenting in the background while sitting in classes or studying at the library. All you’d need to do is to look up an IP Address to find the full history of their torrent activity. To demonstrate how simple this detective work can be, the website ‘I Know What You Download’ actively tracks the peers to a list of 1.5 million torrents and makes their records publicly available online. Even if these corporations don’t resort to baiting pirates themselves, it’s easy enough to scrape a list of IP addresses from existing torrents by monitoring the ‘peers’ to a file at any given point. Within a couple of weeks, a cease-and-desist letter shows up at your home, or in the worst-case scenario, an originating process for legal proceedings. It’s not uncommon these days to hear of film and video game publishers who upload a marked copy of their own media onto public trackers, like ThePirateBay, and gather the IP addresses of those who download it.
Unlike centralised sources hosting such files on their own servers, peer-to-peer file-sharing networks are inherently difficult to shut down, despite being in the crosshairs of large media conglomerates seeking to enforce their intellectual property rights for decades.Ī particularly insidious tactic employed by ‘copyright trolls’ in the modern day is to pressure the middlemen in any network, like internet service providers, to police the activity of users on their behalf.
Having heard of ThePirateBay through hushed whispers in the schoolyard, they quickly install a sketchy torrent application (now with bonus crypto-miners) and immediately get to downloading the latest of Spider-Man 3. Disclaimer: The author of this article does not advocate for the infringement of copyright, though he does believe its abolition would result in a creative and artistic utopia.įor many, their first torrenting experience is a kind of revelation about the power of the internet.
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