[Infowarrior] - RIAA Anti-Piracy Partner Clueless About BitTorrent

[Richard Forno]

RIAA Anti-Piracy Partner Clueless About BitTorrent
Written by Ernesto on October 28, 2009
http://torrentfreak.com/riaa-anti-piracy-partner-clueless-about-bittorrent-091028/

The piracy tracking company DtecNet has made quite a name for itself  
in the past few months after partnering with the RIAA and several  
local governments to assist in the ‘war on piracy’. One would think  
that these projects would require at least some basic knowledge of  
BitTorrent, but a recently published paper by DtecNet’s business  
intelligence unit proves the opposite.

In January we introduced DtecNet as the RIAA’s new evidence collecting  
outfit, replacing MediaSentry whose evidence gathering techniques have  
been highly criticized by experts.

The Danish company is not limiting its services to the RIAA though. It  
is also working with an Irish ISP to support their “3 strikes” regime,  
and in Australia the company also conducted investigations against  
alleged pirates.

Apart from their pirate tracking activities, DtecNet also has a  
business intelligence unit to help their entertainment industry  
clients “Understand what’s happening and where, and to develop smarter  
strategies to guide their development, marketing, retailing,  
distribution and investment initiatives.” The intelligence unit  
utilizes its insights into the file-sharing community to help out, but  
unfortunately the unit is not that knowledgeable.

In fact, the whitepaper (pdf) that was published by the DtecNet unit  
and mirrored all around the web during the last 24 hours, clearly  
shows that they have no clue about BitTorrent.

In the paper that deals with the recent downtime of the Pirate Bay  
tracker and how this affects BitTorrent usage, they make several false  
claims, draw bogus conclusions and report inaccurate statistics. Bogus  
reports from anti-piracy companies are nothing new, but this is  
definitely one of the worst we’ve ever seen thus far, and it is  
already being cited by several respected news outlets.

Let’s take a look at some of the things DtecNet claims and why these  
claims are bogus, inaccurate or just plain stupid.

Claim: — “After Swedish authorities forced the Internet disconnection  
of The Pirate Bay, online piracy worldwide dropped substantially on  
BitTorrent networks as file traders scrambled to find replacement  
trackers.”

This claim is based on a graph presented by DtecNet (see below) which  
shows that the number of infringements recorded by the company dropped  
significantly. This is of course a direct effect of the Pirate Bay  
tracker downtime. Companies like DtecNet use the tracker to find and  
report pirates and if it goes down there are less recorded  
infringements. However, there is no evidence that piracy went down.  
Most BitTorrent transfers were working fine due to the wonders of DHT  
(trackerless torrents), including the ones that were using only the  
Pirate Bay tracker.

Claim: — “The impact of the shutdown is strongly obvious, [...] file  
trading on BitTorrent, easily the world’s most popular peer-to-peer  
protocol, dropped virtually overnight by nearly 80 percent.”

This second claim is even more absurd because it suggests that  
BitTorrent usage dropped by 80 percent based on a graph of recorded  
infringements. Remember, DtecNet doesn’t track any BitTorrent traffic  
data. The only thing that their data proves is that, because of the  
tracker downtime, DtecNet was unable to connect to some of the  
trackers listed in their database of torrents. Again, the torrents  
might have worked just fine for users because of DHT.

Recorded infringements per P2P network


Claim: — “Over time, infringements through that network [BitTorrent]  
began to rise again as new trackers became available.”

This seems to suggest that after the Pirate Bay trackers went down  
several new trackers have appeared, which is simply not true. In fact,  
DtecNet uses OpenBitTorrent and the Denis Stalker tracker as an  
example in their paper, two trackers that are hosted on the same  
network as The Pirate Bay tracker. The only reason the number of  
recorded infringements began to rise is that these trackers also  
suffered downtime from which they recovered. DtecNet however seems to  
be unaware of the relation between the three trackers.

Claim: — DtecNet has created a nice graph (below) that “illustrates  
the chaos the shutdown caused among various BitTorrent tracker  
networks, and how more recently the situation appears to be clarifying  
itself as users find new favorite sites.”

The only confusion we see here is at the DtecNet offices. The company  
apparently fails to understand that a tracker is something different  
than a site. There is absolutely no indication that BitTorrent users  
were looking for new sites (note that The Pirate Bay site was still  
up), but even if they were this does not mean that there will be any  
changes in the usage of the various trackers.

Relative recorded infringements per BitTorrent tracker


Claim: — “About two weeks after the Pirate Bay shutdown, two of the  
successor trackers – OpenBitTorrent and DenisStalker – temporarily  
shut down, possibly because they could not handle rising demand.”

This claim is almost hilarious. As pointed out earlier, OpenBitTorrent  
and DenisStalker are hosted on the same network as The Pirate Bay. It  
takes no genius to figure this out, and this should be especially  
obvious for an outfit that deals with BitTorrent trackers on a daily  
basis, trying to catch pirates. So, the two successor trackers did not  
collapse under the increased load at all, they went down together with  
The Pirate Bay.

We could go on for hours refuting pretty much every sentence in the  
report and we are not the only ones who dispute the know-how of  
DtecNet’s self-proclaimed business intelligence unit. P2P expert Dr.  
Pouwelse of the Tribler team at Delft University of Technology looked  
into the report as well and told TorrentFreak: “They are completely  
technically incompetent, they are just trying to get sensational press  
coverage, or both.”

“Mixing up terms like trackers versus website and failure to do basic  
homework like DNS lookups means they would fail our master course in  
P2P. Their work suffers from a fundamental methodological error: what  
our company can’t see does not exist, thus we can make wild absolute  
claims on a complex global phenomena,” Pouwelse said.

Companies such as DtecNet are earning millions of dollars from the  
entertainment industry thanks to their piracy tracking activities and  
the business intelligence they claim to offer. Considering this  
position it is striking to see how little they actually know about  
what’s going on, and we fear that this amateurish white paper might  
actually lose @DtecNetBI some customers, instead of adding new clients  
to their portfolio.

Chances are, DtecNet will be responsible for gathering evidence  
against British file-sharers so that Peter Mandelson can have them  
kicked off the Internet in 2011. Nice to know that important job will  
be in safe hands.