Everyone with some reasonable computer knowledge has downloaded torrent files before. Rocket science it ain’t! One thing that was noticed when trying to download films was that when a user activated the .avi file a message came up saying that this movie clip had to be viewed by a certain program. “Download program here” the page announced! Now the lure of seeing the latest movie isn’t that strong with me and it certainly isn’t strong enough for me to trust some weird HTML page telling me to download a dodgy viewer program I have never heard of. But unfortunately it is for some, in fact, 530,000 computers according McAfee, the security company which says that the number of computers infected with Trojan viruses. These viruses are not malicious as in stealing data. They simply serve advertising. Could there be more than meets the eye here?

According to the Guardian, last year Media Defender was exposed as deliberately placing thousands of dummy media files into the path unsuspecting downloaders. They did this on the instruction of the big media corporations. This of course, simply changed the way Torrent sites operated with many now putting a ratings system on files so users can give the thumbs up or down (also can be manipulated though it’s something of a fight back). Hmm, dummy files and now possibly virus hit files?

Big Companies can take even more drastic measures. The MPAA(Motion Picture Association of America) recently successfully sued TorrentSpy for $110m on grounds of Copyright infringement. They are now actively targeting Pirate Bay now for $15m of lost revenue. The Torrent Spy case has effectively opened the door for companies to go after Torrent portals. I predict that a few of these sites will eventually disappear but the internet is a big place and there’s always somewhere to hide in most cases.

Now, lets look at this in a different way. Despite, companies crying foul of Peer-to-Peer torrent wares destroying their businesses, we still have of plenty of success stories. The latest Grand Theft Auto game generated a staggering £255 million sales worldwide and the latest Iron man movie took $98m worth of ticket sales over three days. This isn’t pocket money for the big companies. At the end of the day, if the product is good, we’ll want to see it, play it, listen to it. However, the torrent sites are only the tip of a big iceberg. The big corporates will always have tricks up their sleeves but Torrents are here to stay.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 9th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under My Web World, SEO Blog News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.