Internet Pirates Find Safe Haven Through New Technology

Back in the days of Napster, pirates had free reign. They could download music without reprisal from the record industry or anyone else. Those days are since gone and music pirates now have to fear potential lawsuits from the RIAA, the MPAA, and a number of independent companies who actually want consumers to pay for their products! Industry knows it cannot stop piracy technologically, so instead they use a few select lawsuits to scare people into not pirating their material. These lawsuits usually settle for $3000 to $10,000 a pop, so it makes sense that pirates are going to try to do something to some things to avoid being identified as someone downloading and sharing pirated software, music, movies and television shows.

As soon as the lawsuits begin to fly, pirates quickly began to figure out which computers were being used by the recording industry to sniff out pirates. If a pirate was able to block any data going to the computers which do the scanning for piracy, than they would be able to operate out in the open.

In order to make it very easy to block the computers from the various industries which are trying to sniff out pirates, a group of open source developers came up with a tool called Peer Guardian. The tool maintains a list of suspected IP addresses from companies trying to track down pirates and blocks any traffic coming from them. The list is updated on a regular basis and has seemingly successfully stopped most pirates from being identified as pirates.

A company called SecureIX has also jumped into the ring offering a service which allows you to hide your IP address from others in a peer to peer network. It uses virtual private network technology and encrypts the data in the process. It makes it extremely difficult for your ISP to figure out what the pirates are doing, and it also makes it very difficult for internet service providers to hinder the pirates nefarious activities. Pirates will find this service particularly attractive because it's free.