If you want to stop piracy, there’s a good chance that the answer doesn’t involve changing laws or setting up trackers to catch offenders. The change has to go deeper into the system. At least this is what researchers at Delft University of Technology are trying to prove by creating a sharing program that will be impossible to shut down.

A short chronology of the fight against piracy

The first sites to be targeted for piracy were those to distribute directly pirated content, those sites never lasted long because the guilty side was easily identifiable.

The first site to actually suffer a lawsuit was Napster, a site that used a centralized structure where indexing and searching is performed on Napster servers while individual files remained on the hosts' computers and were transferred directly from peer to peer.

This wasn't the first site to go down (or change completely), and other sites like Audiogalaxy (another file sharing system that indexed MP3 files), had to take steps to block illegal files due to pending RIAA lawsuits.

Because sites were growing more numerous every year, and the actual guilt for downloading/uploading pirated content was less clear, the RIAA began filing lawsuits against individuals allegedly sharing files on Kazaa. In 2004 the RIAA had opened over 750 lawsuits aimed at alleged copyright violations from file sharing.

In 2007 the first lawsuit by major record labels against an alleged file sharer, concluded with a verdict that forced the defendant to pay $222,000 for 24 songs.

In 2006 the servers of the Swedish website The Pirate Bay were raided by 50 Swedish police officers, causing it to go offline for three days. The torrent site didn't host any information but the data that the torrent holds is information about the location of different pieces of the target file. Even with the site closed down, the peer-to-peer connections kept going. But, there were problems to find and index new ones.

Is piracy unstoppable?

With all the lawsuits filed by the RIAA, and other similar institutions in different countries, they have tried (and in some cases) managed to attack the sites that host pirated content.

With each year, their work is becoming increasingly more difficult because number of new sites that appear constantly, but also because of the changing technology.

One of the last attempts to stop this issue was the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill that intended to stop search engines from linking to these sites or information (among other things). But even if sites like The Pirate Bay could be closed, the essence of how the web is built is intrinsically related by sharing links, and sites like Google and Bing could be accused of linking illegal content.

In spite of that, sites are being attacked and closed in a run against the odds.

The Tribler effect

To show that something else has to change, the Delft University of Technology has developed an open source torrent client that doesn’t require torrent sites to find or download content, as it is based on pure peer-to-peer communication.

The goal of the project is to come up with robust implementation. BitTorrent doesn’t rely on central servers. Instead, Tribler is designed to keep BitTorrent alive, even when all torrent search engines, indexes and trackers are pulled offline.

According to the researchers: “The only way to take it down is to take the Internet down,”

The new client has a search box, but the results don't come from a central index. Instead, they come directly from other peers.

According to Dr. Pouwelse, Tribler is fully capable of resisting any pressure from outside, and it will still work when all torrent sites and trackers are gone. It simply can’t be shutdown, blocked or censored, whatever laws politicians may come up with.

The only thing that can cause issues, is the capability for starting users to find new peers, but even that is being addressed.

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