and Europe monitoring file sharing, but those tended to look at particular files or subjects rather than perform mass monitoring.
"So, if it's information about who's downloading what files where in the world, it's actually quite valuable, because it shows how popular various copyrighted material, various music and films are in different territories."Ĭhothia and his study co-authors also identified a few small-scale hosting and computer security companies in the U.S. "It could just be collecting marketing information," said Chothia. (Julia Cheng/Associated Press)Īnother possibility is that they are companies that want the data for commercial purposes.
Jammie Thomas, a Minnesota woman who was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America and found guilty of copyright infringement for sharing music files online. One possibility is that the third parties are copyright enforcement agencies or companies that plan to use the information as evidence of illegal file sharing in court cases. Who exactly the monitoring companies are working for and what their clients plan to do with the information collected is uncertain. "The jobs of those hosting companies are to run these kind of computations for other people." "These are all businesses who rent out computing space and internet space," Chothia said. The companies identified in the study are running file-sharing programs on behalf of third-party customers who want to detect file sharers. The type of monitoring these companies are doing is not the same as ISPs like Rogers or Bell monitoring bandwidth use of their own customers, which they can do on their own internal networks, or turning over the names of clients whose IP addresses have been found to be involved in file sharing. The six largest monitors identified in the paper are: "We speculate that copyright enforcement companies are using these hosting companies as a front to disguise their identities," the researchers write in a paper presented at the SecureComm computer security conference in Padua, Italy, this week.įour of the six largest monitors the study identified were based in the U.S., one was in Brazil and another in Ireland, but the parties actually collecting the data - and the people being monitored - could be anywhere in the world. Over the two years between 20 when they conducted their research, they found that those doing the heaviest monitoring of file sharing activity were large internet service providers that rent out server space, host websites and offer other computer services for big clients. Monitoring of file-sharing sites has been documented in the past, but Chothia and his colleagues wanted to get a better sense of the extent and type of monitoring going on. "We wondered what kind of evidence people would actually need to take action against someone." Monitoring being done on behalf of others "The work we did partly resulted out of these court cases where people have been threatened with legal action," Chothia said. The most high-profile court cases against file sharing have generally been those targeting the administrators of large file-sharing sites like The Pirate Bay, isoHunt and Megaupload, but there have also been numerous attempts to sue individual users for illegal downloading activity. The Pirate Bay is one of the file-sharing sites that has been most actively pursued by authorities and made headlines again this week after one of its co-founders was arrested in Cambodia and threatened with deportation to Sweden, where he has been convicted of copyright violations and faces a one-year prison sentence. There could well have been a lot of monitoring which we didn't see, as well." "What we've shown is that there is very large–scale monitoring going on.
Svartholm Warg was arrested this week in Cambodia and will be deported to Sweden. All three were convicted of assisting copyright infringement and face prison sentences of four months to a year. Pirate Bay co-founders Fredrik Neij, far left, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde leave a court in Stockholm in March 2009.
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