We don't DoS torrents: anti-piracy vendor
The director of an Indian anti-piracy group has now flatly denied reports that say the film industry had contracted it to attack and cripple BitTorrent sites hosting copyrighted material.
Girish Kumar, managing director of AiPlex Software, told ZDNet Australia that the company had never engaged in denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and claimed that media reports suggesting otherwise were "inaccurate".
"[The publications] have misinterpreted what I have said. It is not accurate. We never did DoS [attacks]," Kumar said.
"We do not engage in illegal activity. We are working toward curbing piracy in India."
Reports that the company had engaged DoS attacks against infringing torrent sites were published on India-based e-zine Daily News and Analysis, TorrentFreak and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Kumar said that people have plotted to attack the company after it took action against torrent websites following the leak of high-profile Bollywood films.
According to Kumar, AiPlex Software only issues infringement notices to torrent sites that host copyright-protected movies. It also supplies information pertaining to the illegal downloads, such as IP addresses of infringing users, to its customers, which include major Bollywood film studios and Indian government agencies.
Contrary to media reports, Kumar said that American studio houses are not part of the company's clientele.
"Bollywood producers send take-down notices to torrent sites and we follow this on," Kumar said. "If producers and [the] governments ask us to give over information for the websites, we do."
He said it is up to the customers to take remedial action.
AiPlex Software noted on its website that its anti-pirate service, dubbed Net Vigilance, uses torrent clients such as uTorrent, Fast Torrent and LimeWire to crawl for infringing material. It also searches torrent meta sites for both infringing video and music content, and monitors some 159 "leading" video-sharing websites for new uploads of infringing media.
"We can prevent piracy by issuing stringent warning notice/legal notice [sic] to certain service providers who invite their clients to upload videos and movies for the benefit of having more traffic to their sites," the website noted.
Anti-pirate companies have come under fire from national courts for breaches of privacy and have been attacked by angry users in online communities.
The Swiss Supreme Court ordered Logistep AG to cease the collection of user IP addresses from peer-to-peer networks and subsequent selling of the information to media companies. The court ruled the act breached privacy laws.
Former US anti-pirate organisation MediaDefender was investigated by the FBI after it launched a DoS attack against legitimate television site Revision3 in 2008, and suffered embarrassing email leaks after an employee's email account was hacked. The company was declared defunct last year.
AiPlex Software has been in operation for one year, and also offers medical software.