IP Democracy: HBO Poisons Torrents for New Series

In an effort to stop peer-to-peer sharing, HBO is “poisoning” BitTorrent downloads of its new show Rome, according to O’Reilly Radar. In addition to the standard practice of offering bogus downloads, HBO is using a tracker that tries to fool people into thinking they’ve downloaded all the necessary chunks, when in fact they haven’t. The downloading client detects the bogus chunks and keeps looking, but the process takes a lot longer than usual.

As Nat at O’Reilly Radar points out, there are systems that detect bogus peers (he even lists a bunch of the bogus peers to help readers avoid the “poisoning” because “If you send me a bogus fragment, you’re obviously evil”) making HBO’s tactic, well, ineffective. Techdirt has a similar take on this effort:

The strategy appears to be ineffective as well as stupid, as most newer BitTorrent clients have features to defeat this type of attack. The demand for downloads of the show indicates there’s a demand for it that’s not being met by HBO’s traditional distribution, but like other companies before, HBO doesn’t appear to realize it. Other TV networks are beginning to experiment with making shows available online, illustrating that the right reponse is figuring out a way to monetize downloading, not trying to stop it.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on October 7, 2005 9:09 AM to IP Democracy