If you pirate music, you're downloading fascism!

[Paul Mather]

On 2 Apr 2009, at 4:45 PM, Tim Hall wrote:

> http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2009/apr/02/pirate-bay-music-piracy

When I first read about The Pirate Bay's IPREDator service[*] on The  
Register my first thought was "why would anyone pay 5 euros a month to  
subscribe to this?"  I mean, it doesn't appear to offer anything new;  
just an attempt to piggyback on The Pirate Bay brand name.  There are  
plenty of existing VPN anonymity subscription services.  Secondly, it  
appears to turn the P2P approach entirely on its head by forcing all  
traffic through the VPN instead of... peer to peer.  That's kind of  
dumb for a P2P application, or at the very least, not very scalable.   
(Unless they've done something clever in the way of being able to  
distribute the VPN on a massive scale, avoiding all the problems of  
trust a la rogue Tor nodes, etc.)  Even assuming they did get it to  
scale, what is to stop the RIAA/MPAA/etc. simply having their Internet  
watchers subscribe themselves to continue monitoring inside?  (The  
success of P2P systems hinges on the easy ability to locate peers with  
which to swap data, after all.)  That's assuming, of course, ISPs  
don't just block access to the IPREDator VPN gateways...

Cheers,

Paul.

[*] Is it just me, or does this appear to be a rather unfortunately- 
named service?  It's easy to read it as iPredator: the online service  
for Internet stalkers, predators, child molesters, et al... :-)

e-mail: paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu

"Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production
  deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid."
         --- Frank Vincent Zappa